I look away from my paintings, from my exhibition. My eyes roam the room and glance over the stuffed animals of the “Vår Natur” (“Our Nature”) exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Stavanger. Among them, a wolf. But unlike the other animals here, this one doesn’t stand proudly. The taxidermists have not rendered the natural attitude of this wolf, or its behaviour, no. The museum decided to immortalize his last breath. Enthroned in the middle of the exhibition, he has forever, just been killed.
Standing between a lynx and a wolverine, I paint, not out of artistic or scientific interest, but out of disappointment, sadness and a certain resignation. The visitors wander between me and the wolf. There are some who visibly share my feelings, others who are simply indifferent or full of incomprehension in the face of this staging. A few others are satisfied to look at a dead wolf. I can’t blame them. I come from a country where debates on wolves have long gone beyond rational exchanges. Facts are of little importance any more, opinions rule and each side is stuck into “us and them”. In the middle of it all, indifferent, wolves live their lives on the mountains, plains and forests until a bullet intercepts the unluckiest ones.
We can console ourselves by thinking of the immensities where they are still in peace, sharing the territory between packs and gracing the landscapes with their choirs. The vast depopulated plateaus of Scandinavia, the steep fjords, the remote forests in these countries still close to their nature.
These majestic landscapes do exist but it has been a long time since a wolf sang there.
As I write these lines, there are 43 wolves in Norway, divided into four packs and one pair. All in a restricted area north-west of Oslo, near the Swedish border, the only territory where the wolf is legally authorized to settle and have litters. Each individual is genetically identified and numbered. Each dropping, each hair is analysed to know each individual, its sex, its age, its pack, its movements, its territory. Photo traps record their movements. Each year we total the litters, no more than six authorized in the country in 2023, and we cull the excess individuals, couples or packs in a few months.
Nature has become an open-air prison for them.
” Ulvesonen “, the wolf zone in Norway, the only area were wolves are allowed to breed in the country.
Source : https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/ansvarsomrader/arter-naturtyper/vilt/rovvilt/ulv/
Some escape and unknowingly become fugitives. Like escapees, they must keep a low profile and not be spotted. Despite himself, our wolf had nevertheless left some first traces. Its DNA was first detected in droppings discovered in south-central Sweden on October 4, 2019. It seems that it spent the winter there because it was detected two more times in February 2020 in the same region. Then nothing for three months before one of his droppings revealed him three hundred kilometres to the west, on the outskirts of Oslo. He was then in the “Ulvesonen” (“wolf zone”) of Norway, the only one where he had a chance of settling. Is this what he tried to do? Possibly, because two months later, on August 20, he was still in the region, sixty kilometres south-west of the capital.
These were the last DNA traces we had of him.
On October 3, two hundred kilometres away, two lambs were killed in southern Norway, on the border of the regions of Agder and Rogaland. Examinations were carried out on the 7th, confirming that the attack was that of a wolf. We are in regions where no pack is allowed to settle because of high densities of sheep breeding. On October 8, the regional administration published the authorization to kill the wolf. The hunting team had until the 21st, noon.
After a week, nothing.
On the evening of the 16th, a farmer took his car to look for one of his sheep which was not grazing with the others. He then came across what he took to be a large dog. As he approached, he identified a wolf. At 9:30 p.m., the hunting team was notified. At 11:08 p.m., a wolf was shot.
Analyses revealed that it was this individual born in Sweden, killed almost a year, to the day, after the first traces we had of him. We learnt that he was a young male, around a year old, a fact that redraws his story. His first Swedish traces were those of a young wolf cub who spent the winter on the family territory before setting off in search of his own. He crossed Sweden, reached Oslo and ended up in southern Norway. Solitary, he travelled at least six hundred kilometres before making the mistake of killing two lambs, in these regions where 300,000 sheep and lambs are deliberately slaughtered each year.
The wolf’s journey from the time it was first detected in Sweden to its death in southwestern Norway.
Background map : Wikipedia.
He was the first wolf killed in the Rogaland region in seventeen years. The last one was in 2003 and was the first wolf killed since the 19th century. We are therefore at one aborted reconquest attempt per century in the region. The defences held. We still manage to repel wilderness. But after all, it is only thirty short years since a pack resettled within the Norwegian borders, thanks to a few Russian-Finnish wolves who came to try to reconquer the territories of their late Scandinavian cousins, now extinct.
Thirty short years which seem to have given way to a disturbing ambiguity.
43 wolves. Only 43 wolves, which we tolerate at the cost of so much effort, of so many restrictions, like a truth half-heartedly admitted: the reprieve of a barely tolerated species that a simple pretext could eradicate again, or the beginning of a new cohabitation to be defined, to be understood. Because let us not forget that there now exists a wolf, in a museum, who has forever, just been killed, and whose body, like a relic in its glass cage, preaches in the name of his species, of wolverines, bears, lynx and eagles of this country, for the return of a complete and wild nature.
Adrien
“Relic”
Watercolor from observation
31 x 41 cm
