Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 90

7
Bring Back the Wolf
The fells contract, regroup in starker forms;
Dusk tightens on them, as the wind gets up
And stretches hungrily: tensed at the nape,
The coarse heath bristles like a living pelt.
William Dunlop
Landscape as Werewolf
We associate elephants, rhinos, lions and hyenas with the tropics. But
until very recently (in geological terms) they lived in climates much
colder than north-western Europe is today. Until around 40,000 years
ago, the straight-tusked elephant ( Elephas antiquus ), closely related
to the Asian elephant, roamed across much of Europe. 1 The woolly
mammoth, which had an entirely different ecology, grazing on cold
steppes (rather than browsing, like the straight-tusked elephant, in
temperate forests) lasted longer: one relict population, isolated from
human hunters in the fastness of Wrangel Island off the north coast of
Siberia, survived until the Bronze Age. 2
Three species of rhinoceros - the woolly, the Merck's and the
narrow-nosed - lived in Europe at the same time as humans. Until
roughly 40,000 years ago, Russia was haunted by two monstrous
beasts, Elasmotherium sibiricum and Elasmotherium caucasicum .
They were humpbacked rhinos the size of elephants, eight feet to the
crest, weighing perhaps five tonnes. Elephants roamed across Europe,
Asia, Africa and the Americas; rhinos never populated the Americas,
but they lived throughout the Old World. Across the past 50,000 years
the range and variety of these species have shrunk as humans have
hunted them. They were exterminated first in Europe; then (in the