CHAPTER ONE
The Oldest War
When the gunshot rang out we were huddled together for warmth on a towering escarpment of Carboniferous limestone, in the hollow of a natural amphitheatre carved in geological thrusts and folds. The Cantabrian peaks rose around us in tiered walls of uplifted platform rock — a vast concave of mountains that caught the rifle-crack and hurled it back in long, rolling echoes.
Myself and Bernardo Canal, a local naturalist and guide, had been sitting for hours in what was first the gloaming and then the darkling cold.
We watched through his night-vision binoculars as a dozen wolves descended the slope in front of us, flashing lupine silhouettes of hot white in the thermally enhanced imaging array: the pack was descending on us just as another super-predator of our own species announced himself on the field.
The sound had had a strange but grand unfamiliarity to it, like a 12-gauge loaded for bear. But the initial crack is stretched by time-smear created when reflections return from multiple ridge-lines, giving the hollow rolling tail that makes even a small calibre shot sound large.
This was distinctively a hunting rifle, most likely a .30-06 soft-nosed bullet out of the muzzle of an Browning BAR Mk III semi-automatic. A dense half ounce slug of lead, gilded in copper and zinc and moving at twice the speed of sound — the armament of choice for hunters here who prey upon the wild boar just as the wolves do, and the weapon of choice when they turn poacher to punish the wolves for taking their prey or their farmer friends’ livestock.
Bernardo rose to his feet, scanning the darkness with his optic, before calling his brother, a member of the Guardia Forestal, the paramilitary conservation wing of the Spanish state, and to whom he was on the phone in a second when he caught the tell-tale panning beam of an imaging optic mounted on the rifle in question, scanning for wolves — for us.
We moved in the dark, feet unsure, through rocky crags which would challenge the most dexterous chamois or mountain goat, descending onto the grass finally, before barreling down the road in Bernardo’s 4×4 as he fielded phone calls with calm capability, taking the opposite turning to our usual route, for the Guardia Forestal and their more conventional paramilitary cousins, the Guardia Civil, had blocked the road at the other exit.
They would be stopping and holding up every car for hours, checking for gunshot residue, cordite, and signs of carcass handling — blood on hands, clothing, the back of a pickup…
The Children Of Wolves 