Wolves

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

Why have the Rolling Stones not been cancelled?

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was on my way to buy a bougainvillea from the plant shop with my middle son, Giovanni Maria, 14. We were in the Land Rover Defender, windows down with ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones on the stereo at very high ‘hey, hey, hey!’ volume. Each time the chorus arrived – ‘I can’t get no!/ Hey, hey, hey!/ That’s what I say!’ – we rapped our knuckles on the dashboard in time to the gunshot drumbeat of Charlie Watts. We drove past the parched fields by the sea that looked like they would catch fire if someone so much as uttered a word out of place. The Stones are one of my very few favourite bands although I don’t listen to anything they’ve done since 1974, as it lacks the raw beauty of their first decade.

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

The wolves are at my door

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was at the wheel of the Land Rover Defender on the mile-long dirt track that leads to the main road from our house and I was still feeling existentially disturbed by our defeat at the hands of the awful Argies. Dusk was falling and I just wanted to get into the village, buy a couple of litres of red and get back without running into a police roadblock. There are only four inhabited houses on our L-shaped dirt track, which at the other end peters out into the fields near the sea, and so there is rarely any traffic at all. But in front of me a small white car had stopped. A man’s naked arm protruding from the passenger window waved me to a halt.

Saturday

Neal Pollack

First came the dire wolf – the wooly mammoth is next

From our US edition

With all the insane news this week surrounding President Trump’s tariff and trade drama, only one non-political story was significant enough to break through the news cycle: a Texas-based company called Colossal Biosciences has bred three dire wolves and is currently keeping them in a secret 2,000-acre natural habitat somewhere in the United States. That’s right: dire wolves. An extinct species. A beast so mythical that we only really know of it from Game of Thrones. In fact, as we learned in an interview with a comic book magazine, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has even visited the dire wolf reserve. There is a non-AI-generated photo of him online cradling a dire wolf pup and weeping tears of joy.  Immediately, skepticism blew up online.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Are wolves stalking us on the school run?

Dante's Beach, Ravenna The other morning, my wife Carla was driving home after the school run in her battered old Renault Trafic people-carrier when through the fog she saw what looked like a wolf. It was ambling across the fields, which were covered in white ice. The wolf was only about 50 metres away, so she pulled over and took a picture, which she texted to the local dog rescue centre. She then followed the animal as it continued on its way, parallel to the road, in the direction of our house. Eventually it vanished in the fog about half a mile from our front door. ‘Yes, it’s a young wolf,’ said the man from the rescue centre when my wife spoke to him on the phone. ‘You can tell it’s a wolf from its tail,’ he explained.

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

A mighty river with many names: adventures on the Amur

The Amur is the eighth or tenth longest river in the world, depending on whom you believe. The veteran travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron reckons 2,826 miles the best estimate. In these pages he makes an arc-shaped journey from source to mouth: Mongolia to the Pacific via Russia and China. The author travels on horseback, buses, pontoon rafts, boats, trains and in taxis and the vehicles of strangers. Starting in late August, he breaks off in Khabarovsk, the largest city on the Amur (population 500,000), returning home to London when the river freezes. As book and journey progress, the Amur changes its name and gender.