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 couple of foxhounds by luring them onto the thin ice on Fawsley lake.
But you can never love him, because he’s such a ruthless bastard. Night in, night out, he kills relentlessly and indiscriminately: hens in their coops, nesting partridge, duck, moorhens, Old Zank the heron, hedgehogs, a grass snake (only once because the taste is awful), lambs, rabbits, mice, tree pipits, a kingfisher…
Now let’s fast-forward 75 years and meet one of BB’s modern-day counterparts. The naturalist Chris Packham is standing in a wood very much like the ones described— with considerably more eloquence — by BB. He is hymning the glories of what he’d probably call its ‘biodiversity’: ‘every bug, every butterfly, every bird, every mammal that comes together to make this … our greatest natural treasure.’
Warming to his cod-Churchillian theme, Packham tells us: ‘We want this place to prosper, complete, rich and wonderful for the next 500 years.’
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