We are the people killers, the children killers. At a public meeting, enraged by people fretting about the safety of their sheep and children, Inti gets to her feet: “If you truly think wolves are the blood spillers, then you’re blind,” she says. (Sarah Hall’s 2015 “ The Wolf Border” had a similar premise, but was set in the Lake District.) Alas, the locals aren’t sold on the idea. Inti and her crack team of wolf biologists have traveled from Alaska to Scotland with 14 gray wolves, “apex predators” whose release, it is hoped, will restore an ancient balance to the ecosystem of the Highlands: Fewer deer will allow woodlands to spread, boosting carbon capture and biodiversity. Describing herself as a “bad-tempered Australian who finds it hard to hide contempt and sucks at public speaking,” Inti Flynn is perhaps not the ideal candidate to head up the Cairngorms Wolf Project. In “Once There Were Wolves,” the follow-up to her 2020 debut novel, “ Migrations,” the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy returns to familiar territory - environmental catastrophe, buried trauma, the wonder of the natural world - in the company of another bold and damaged protagonist. ONCE THERE WERE WOLVES By Charlotte McConaghy
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