Green sentimentalists forget something: nature is utterly brutal

Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war and it doesn’t pull its punches: mothers are slaughtered with their babies; brothers and sisters are eaten alive; callous parents look on indifferently as their sick children die slowly beneath them; the few survivors almost invariably succumb to disease, cold or starvation. Every child should read it, for it tells you how the world really is.

The natural world, I mean. It was written by one of the last century’s great amateur naturalists, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, under his nom-de-plume ‘BB’ and it purports to be the biography of a ‘Pytchley fox’ called Rufus.

Rufus is simultaneously the book’s hero and villain. Because it’s written mostly from the fox’s perspective you root for him all the way — even in the dismal scene when (based on a true story, this) he manages to drown five couples of foxhounds by luring them onto the thin ice on Fawsley lake.