Wolves or not

A friend and I were laughing recently about our mutual friend, Hannah, who always denied that wolves could be in the Czech Republic. But then she always denied that anything bad could be from the country. Even if she had a flu it was because you had brought it from England.

Wolves had been hunted to extinction here in the 19^th century, indeed there is a memorial in the Sumava to the last one. The big bad wolf of the fairytales was banished to the forests of other countries. And yet, the memory of wolves lived on in folk memory. I felt it distinctly in the darkness of the forest I viewed from the window of that night-bound train in Easter 1990. I felt it as I lay in a bed piled high with duvets on those freezing nights of my first stay in the house. As I heard the pad of snow dropping from the broken roof I thought of wolf padding through the drifts at the rear of the house, the following day my imaginings were reinforced by fox prints enlarged by the melting of snow. Maybe that is why the first book I wrote here was called Mother of Wolves.

The big bad wolf is now officially back. He was first seen, caught on a trip-camera near Vyssi Brod barely twenty miles from here. Wild creatures do not respect lines on maps and once the physical barrier of the Iron Curtain had been removed it was only a matter of time before the wolves' wanderings brought them into the Sumava Forest and beyond. It seems only right that EU freedom of movement should extend to this beautiful animal, if not in future to Brits.

Beginnings - fairies

So why am I sitting outside a cafe in Cesky Krumlov? What was it that brought me to this place? Well, I suppose there were lots of points at which this journey started. It was like a river - a multitude of sources all coming together. I don't suppose I can identify all of them. But over the next few posts, I' ll explore some of them.

Here is the first - when I was a child I loved fairytales (podhadky in the Czech). I devoured every fairytale book in the library - the Green Fairy Book, the Blue, the Yellow. And I watched the wonderful dramatisations of fairytales that were so much part of British children's 60s tv. Well looking back they were probably pretty rubbish, but I loved them. They were usually badly dubbed and produced in what was then refered to as the Eastern Bloc, including Czechoslovakia. I have seen some more recently, here in the Czech Republic where I am told they are rerun regularly. The Czechs love fairytales, it is part of their pysche. Grown adults will talk with seriousness about fairies and other little folk in the forest. When a house was being done up for a friend and a series of unexplained mishaps took place, the answer proffered was to put a small bowl of milk under the threshold for the fairies. And when I am here, I too find myself refering to the fairies. So when I come here, I am going back to my childhood perhaps.