The Wolf Border

The place did not exist when she was a child, is less than twenty years old, but in that time much has changed, the fabric of British politics, state definitions. It can be done, she thinks, if people want it badly enough, if they are tired, and hopeful. She stalls, wanders the hallway, reads a notice about the architect – a Catalan, controversiall

She does not take her mother’s hand. Instead she finds herself repeating a line she read once, in a poem, in a book on a shelf in a house where she spent no more than a few illicit hours. Everything tends towards iron.

They continue on, into the mountains, sedately, like some kind of royal procession, the diplomatic arrival of a crowned couple. And it is historic, she thinks. It’s five hundred years since their extermination on the island. They are a distant memory, a mythical thing. Britain has altered radically, as has her iconography of wilderness, her totems.

The worthy investment, the millions spent building a trophic Eden, it is simply another grand scheme that he can choose to dismantle again, if he so wishes. There is a bigger, more exciting game – testing beyond the cage, wolves in the real world. You godly fuck, she thinks, you absolute maniac, this is what you wanted all along.

They find them a few minutes later, passing over the intermediate lands, the debatable lands as they once were. They are running over open moorland, the surviving five, driven hard by the noise of the helicopter. Ra leads them. She watches them run. She is rusty at targeting on the move, but could almost certainly tranquillise the breeding pair, we

She can see, between hills, the glint of grey water – the west coast, where once rum-runners came ashore and where nuclear cargo now ghosts along railway lines at night.

She attempts a joke, about whose turn it is to refill the office coffee pot – who is the wife? He does not respond to the banter as he ordinarily would, but fixes her with a look, patient, undefended. And it is this that convinces her there is something more, something very real underneath the silence. The unspeakable is always louder than declarat

They pass a sign – 57 km to nearest gas. The snow is falling faster now. In December the centre can be cut off for days. They have to ski into town until the grit truck arrives. The back-up generator stinks the place out with diesel fumes and smoke, and they play cards while the big weather subsumes them, and the buried landscape seems like a trick

The font in Keld church is medieval – a splendid piece. And there’s a Viking hogback in the graveyard in excellent condition.