The danger with such narratives is that they all too easily become a structureless sequence of one escapade after another. The bulk of the book takes the form of a journey, as Feo and her pack find allies, narrowly escape from soldiers, and finally reach St Petersburg, where they hope to rescue Marina from Kresty prison. When Marina is imprisoned in the city, Feo sets out to rescue her, with three wolves and a pup, and a boy called Ilya, as companions. Not only is he intent on subduing the potentially revolutionary locals, he appears to have made it a personal goal to eradicate the wolves and those who aid them. Their world is turned upside down, however, by General Rakov, commander of the tsar’s armies. She is described in near-feral terms as a girl who relates to few humans other than her own mother. This happy arrangement informs most of Feo’s childhood. Set in Russia in the lead-up to revolution, her book tells of “a dark and stormy girl” called Feo and her mother, Marina, who are “wolf wilders” – they find wolves that were once the pets of the St Petersburg elite, and, in the snowy Russian forest, teach them how to be wolf again. Katherine Rundell gives us a version of the second type of wolf. These wolves are able to sense those humans that deserve not to be eaten, which usually means they are both good and somehow in tune with nature.

Then there are the wolves that form symbiotic relationships with varieties of feral children and are noble yet fierce companions. This is the animal the Chambers Edinburgh Journal described in 1832 as “hateful when living and useless when dead”. Through (almost all) fairytales we’re taught that wolves are the most ruthless, vicious and cold killers in the forest. There is the wolf Red Riding Hood encounters, the one who blows down little pigs’ houses. Anything else is sentimental drivel.” Atwood’s character was speaking metaphorically, but if this assertion is true, then is it also true that literally writing about wolves protects the story from falling into that category?īroadly speaking, there are two types of wolf in children’s literature. ‘All stories are about wolves,” wrote Margaret Atwood in The Blind Assassin.

The wolf wilder