Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 118

the shadow that fleets between systole and diastole, because they are
the necessary monsters of the mind, inhabitants of the more passionate
world against which we have locked our doors. The return of the wolf
also makes the introduction of other missing species - such as boar and
moose - more viable, as their populations will be checked without the
need for human intervention. But it should happen only if there is broad
public enthusiasm for the project.
A survey conducted in Scotland suggests that people are less hostile
to the reintroduction of the wolf than one might have imagined. The
idea meets with slightly more favour than disfavour among rural peo-
ple, and is welcomed a little more firmly by urban people. 67 Even
sheep farmers, surprisingly, were split: antagonistic on balance, but
not universally so. The researchers who conducted the survey suggest
that this could be because they make most of their money from subsid-
ies, rather than from selling lamb. Only the National Farmers' Union
of Scotland was fiercely opposed, suggesting that, as in many other
matters, it may not be representative of its members (farmers' unions
in Britain tend to be dominated by large landowners with strongly
conservative views). I wonder whether the Farmers' Union of Wales
might have misrepresented the attitude of Welsh farmers towards
beavers.
While the wolf is a hard sell, another large predator could be intro-
duced today, at no risk to people and little risk even to sheep. The
lynx, until recently, was assumed to have belonged only to prehistoric
Britain, unknown to the people even of the Neolithic. 68 But recent
finds have radically changed that assessment. First, lynx bones dis-
covered in a cave in northern Scotland and two sites in north Yorkshire
were dated at around 1,800 years old, dragging the species towards
the present by some 4,000 years. Another cave in Yorkshire then pro-
duced a bone around 1,500 years old. 69 That is now the most recent
fossil evidence, but the cultural evidence for their continued existence
in Britain extends a little further.
Cumbric is a Celtic language similar to Welsh that was spoken in
the north of England and southern Scotland - the territory, once much
larger than the current county, known as Cumbria. A seventh-century
Cumbric manuscript records the battles of Hen Ogledd , the Old
North. Among these gory sagas sits, incongruously, a sad and beauti-