What is it we imagine when we imagine a wolf – Jack London's peerless hunter of the frozen North or Rudyard Kipling's sober and responsible upholder of jungle law? Stalking the border between romantic savagery and natural order, the kind of wolf that lives in our imagination is a sign of how we imagine our relationship to the land itself – historically, ecologically, even spiritually. But the question isn't just ideological. It can also be deeply personal.

My first encounter with a literary wolf arrived with the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The granny-gobbling wolf was certainly scary, but something about the forest, that mysterious otherworld that lay just beyond the path, drew me in and held me. I yearned to walk where wolves walked – somewhere where a breeze among trees replaced the drone of traffic, where mistshrouded hills rose on the horizon, not just more streets, more houses and factories. Countless poems, novels and films later, I learned that this otherworld has a name: wilderness. Nor was I alone in being captured by the glamour of the wild. When, at the start of the 20th century, John Muir, the great evangelist of wilderness, claimed, ‘In God's wildness lies the hope of the world’ (Muir 1938, 317), he struck a chord that has echoed down the years.

For me, this echo resonated louder and louder until, at the age of 40, I found myself embarking on a PhD on ‘The Wolf and Literature’ at the University of Stirling in Scotland. But what I knew – or rather what I thought I knew – about wolves and wilderness would turn out be a lot stranger, and a lot more complicated, than I’d realised.

Louis Owens's 1991 novel Wolfsong is just such a mind-shifting story. It certainly has its finger on the pulse of the historical moment when it comes to a burgeoning sense of ecological crisis. In Wolfsong, it is the absence of wolves that underlies the drama. Set in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, the novel opens with a fading echo of native resistance to the colonial decimation of the land.