Marche avec les Loups

I’ve just spent three years attempting to break the privacy of a pack of wild wolves in a remote valley in the Alps. The adventure took me much further than I imagined… After months of questions and doubts, the immersion in nature and a sort of communicative ritual allowed me to be tolerated by the pack. I was thus able to look the legendary predators in the eye and even watch their cubs growing up. But at the end of this magnificent adventure the question arose of the limits of such intimacy… The wolf has no friends, and I’m a human and the quarry can’t lower its guard.

The wolves helped me to grow and I realize today that my incredible adventure at their side is by no means an end but, quite the opposite, the beginning of a new experience, a form of questioning, a piece of naturalistic and philosophical research that will draw me even closer to the mysteries of the wild. I left the valley with the knowledge that a new journey was awaiting me, a journey in pursuit of answers to the numerous questions I continue to ask myself. The complex mechanisms that regulate the social life of wolves and the organization of the pack excite my curiosity and are sure to take me back to them, without knowing where and for how long. A new immersion, a new obsession, a new wave of liberty. In the years I spent in the valley in contact with the pack, I was able to how the observe with my own eyes how the great primordial equilibria to which wild animals and the top predators are subject actually work. There’s an urgent need to preserve this wild world in our increasingly urbanized societies. This is one of my obsessions. I noted that the number of wolves present in the territory stayed more or less the same year by year. It is, in fact, the quantity of prey available that regulates the number of predators present in the territory. The wolf is thus a territorial animal, which means that the pack defends its territory from intruders and that the youngest members have to leave to conquer any new spaces available. These are the so-called lone wolves, nomads that by leaving the valley find an opportunity to live a new adventure elsewhere.