2023-04-12 02:00:22
It was when he was exploring the archives of Aveyron, central France, that the wolf appeared to him for the first time. In 2019, Julien Coquentin, a photographer, was conducting research prior to a visual work on wildlife on the confines of the Aubrac and Larzac plateaus in the Massif Central Highland region. In doing so, he got his hands on documents relating to “the destruction of wolves.”
Among them, a bundle, dated 1898, mentions a reward to whoever kills a “full” female wolf. Whoever kills it, the text continues, has to bring, as proof, a cut ear of the animal to the authorities. This was done shortly followingward, according to another document.
Struck by this practice, which goes back to a time when hunting was organized under the scrupulous control of the municipalities, Coquentin felt “inhabited” by the specter of this poor female animal. He also knew that wolves had just reappeared, four years earlier, in the Lot valley, a few hundred meters from the hamlet of Lassouts (Aveyron), where he lives.
Beast of Gevaudan
The French Biodiversity Agency (Office Français de la diversité, OFB) collected droppings, hair, urine and blood. The organization suggested that the tracks belonged to a solitary male, probably originating from a pack in the Alps, where the species re-emerged in 1992.
It also mentioned the presence of a female wolf in the Grands Causses, south of the Massif Central, where a number of cases of predation among the herds have been reported. But the trace of this female was quickly lost. And Coquentin started to dream.
“I imagine that the ghost of the wolf killed more than 120 years ago still wanders in the nearby forest until it ends up crossing paths with the living wolf of today,” Coquentin said. He added he had been lulled, like many surrounding residents, by the legend of the Beast of Gévaudan: A wolf, or rather wolves, which, in the 1760s, were said to have devoured more than a hundred people.
This story “still infuses the minds,” according to Coquentin, and the animal is still “totemic” today. He began a field investigation in the company of a dowser on the trail of wolf traps hidden in the undergrowth.
Coquentin says he wants to track down the idea we have of the wolf, “its trace in our heads, our meadows, our farms.”
This vast area, in the southwestern of the Massif Central, holds the distinction of having been classified, in 2019, as a zone that is difficult to protect, a unique case in France warranted by the presence of the largest sheep farms in the country. This status grants breeders, who are not obliged to fence off their pastures, the right to dispatch sworn individuals to shoot the wolf.
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