When we insert ourselves into the lives of animals, we become complicit in their fates.

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Before I went to Hungary, I met a man who told me about the wolf. 

“It migrated all the way from Switzerland to Hungary,” he said. “And last week it was shot by a hunter. People want him to go to prison.”

As I prepared for the trip I learnt more about M237, the wolf who’d travelled a record-breaking 2,000 km before being felled by a bullet near the small town of Hidasnémeti. But my real focus was on another mammal: my diabetic cat, Jager. At 17, her life was constrained to an armchair with a heating pad she reached with the assistance of pet steps. As my departure loomed, so did Jager’s. I rang a vet who offered a home euthanasia service and sought her advice. 

“When it’s time for her to go, you’ll know,” she said. 

But I didn’t know. I didn’t know if Jager would make it through the next four weeks without me. Our younger cat, Bruce, would be fine at home. I wrote instructions for his pet sitter and stockpiled his favourite treats. And then I took Jager to the best cattery in Dunedin, boarded a plane, and crossed my fingers. 

Jager and M237 both began their lives wild, but while Jager assumed the role of house cat, M237 became an explorer. One of six cubs, he was born in 2021 as tulips bloomed and boats cruised the Swiss Riviera. At around two weeks of age, his blue eyes opened and he gave his first high-pitched howl. Soon afterwards, he ventured from his den on stubby legs, round-eyed and fluffy as a Pomeranian. 

By March the following year, his legs were long, his eyes pale gold – and he was about to have his first encounter with humans. While skiers slid down the Swiss Alps, M237 was trapped and sedated by members of a Swiss wolf protection group. His blood was drawn, his teeth examined, and his body measured. And then he was fitted with the yellow GPS collar that helped make him a star. 

No wolves wander New Zealand: our native mammals are bats, seals, sea lions, dolphins and whales. We no longer have wolves in our zoos, but they still filled my suburban Christchurch childhood. They were there in the stories of Peter and the Wolf, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and Little Red Riding Hood. They roamed my imagination as metaphors for fear. Fear of being harmed. Fear of losing what’s precious. 

Leaving New Zealand, my fears were personal, cat-sized. Arriving in Hungary in June 2023, my fears grew. Russian forces had taken control of the adjacent Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant and 8.2 million Ukrainians had fled their country. I didn’t want to be on the continent if fighting escalated. But Europe’s a big place, I told myself. And if the worst happened, my husband Tim and I could flee to the safety of our island at the bottom of the South Pacific. 

My worries vaporised when we arrived in stinking hot, beautiful Budapest. We visited galleries, saw a ballet, and sampled raspberry ganache beneath gilded frescoes. 

We caught a train south to the city of Pécs, far from the Ukrainian border, where I was being hosted for a writing residency. Coloured tiles sparkled on rooftops, live music tinkled down laneways, and pigeons cooed outside our windows as we tossed and turned beneath our individual duvets, struggling to adjust to the heat. But my social media feeds were filled with images of snow. I sent an email to Jager’s cattery. 

“Is her heating pad on?” I asked. “Did you get a chance to move her into the room with the sun?”

Reassured she’d settled in and was receiving her medication, I turned my attention back to M237. I started to wonder if I should visit northern Hungary after all; if I should visit Hidasnémeti. And I wasn’t the only person who wanted to acknowledge M237: there were 53,099 signatures on a petition calling for the hunter to be punished. 

“Let us not be a country without consequences,” it read. “A man who knowingly kills a great animal should not get away with impunity. Feel the weight of what you do.”

I met Károly Méhes, the coordinator of the residency programme. We sipped coffee on an ancient street in 35-degree heat, and I told him about my plans to go north. Then he surprised me by telling me Pécs has its own history with wolves. 

“Like in the fairy tale, a wolf tore apart a grandmother and a grandchild,” he said. 

The attack happened in December 1995, just after Christmas, while children were sledding on the Mecsek Mountains by the Pécs Zoo. At that time, the zoo was poorly run and prone to scandal. There was a period when a lion drowned, a tiger disappeared from the inventory, and the zoo’s director let hunters shoot a bear. In these chaotic conditions, it’s suspected the wolf was accidentally released. A passing driver saw a boy bleeding as he fled through the snow, and drove him to the TV tower to get help. The grandmother died on her way to hospital. The wolf was shot. 

I decided to follow in the footsteps of the wolf, the grandmother and the boy, hiking up to the zoo and the tower. Noting that without his navigational services I’d still be lost in Singapore Airport, Tim came along too. 

The Hungarian forest was different to the bush back home. The trees were thinner and further apart, and didn’t have the damp, fresh scent I’m used to. Sunlight streamed through the canopy, and we passed a cottage in a clearing bordered by a low stone fence. These were the woods I’d read about in fairy tales. 

“If one of us – perhaps you – could get bitten by a wolf, it would be great for my story,” I said, as we trudged through the trees. Something rustled in the undergrowth and Tim sprang back. 

We reached the top of a track and found ourselves at the zoo. From the outside, we could see zebras, bison, and hordes of small children – but no wolves. There are no longer wolves at Pécs Zoo. They were shipped off after the second wolf escaped. 

By 2015, Pécs Zoo had a new director. Three wolves were acquired from Italy, but spooked by the move, one of them jumped the fence. People were advised to avoid the forest – but instead, they flocked to it. 

“I think we all knew the nature of the animal, that it does not attack people, in fact it avoids it,” one wolf-watcher wrote. “He looked kindly at us and we looked at him.”

This wolf may have been harmless to humans, but he too was shot – by the zoo’s new director. 

Today the zoo has yet another director, and the fencing still looks a little flimsy. We hiked past and dipped back into the woods as we continued to the tower. We spotted black and yellow moths, emerald green beetles and orange-stemmed mushrooms with puffy white hats. We didn’t see the badgers, foxes or dormice we knew lived in the forest. And with no wolves in Pécs, our biggest fear was getting lost. But when we returned to our apartment, there was a message from one of my brothers. 

“It could be worth keeping an eye on the Zaporizhzhia power plant the Russians are said to have mined,” it read. “I’d advise you to have some sort of contingency plan and to act upon it promptly if something blows up.”

We’d already planned our trip to Hidasnémeti. I wanted to visit the river where M237 was shot. Making the most of travelling to the Zemplén region, Tim eschewed Hidasnémeti’s sole accommodation option – the former Border Guard Barracks – and booked us into the Palace Hotel in Lillafüred, a nearby resort town. 

I spent the night before we left measuring Lillafüred’s distance from the fighting in Ukraine. We’d be staying an hour’s drive from the border – close enough to have me searching for tips on surviving a nuclear blast. What I read wasn’t reassuring. In the event of a power plant explosion, an invisible radioactive cloud could drift anywhere on the continent.

Like radioactive clouds, wolves aren’t concerned with the demarcation of human territory. The previous summer, M237 left his family and the canton of Graubünden in search of a mate. He reached an altitude of 3,500m as he travelled the Alps, his collar pinging his location to the enthusiasts tracking his path. 

He crossed the Italian border, wandering beneath limestone summits before entering Austria. In February 2023, he slipped into Hungary. He passed just west of Budapest, and swam across the Danube before continuing towards the Zemplén Mountains. 

The Swiss wolf protection group posted a Facebook update, tagging themselves as “feeling awesome”. Having M237 join Hungary’s small wolf population was a rare environmental success story. And there was something else about his journey that touched our hearts. Don’t we all feel we’ve been on epic quests in search of love?

M237 was right to head to Zemplén for romance. Nestled in lush forest, the Palace Hotel felt enchanted. Swallows circled the spires, poetry was inscribed on stone tablets, and hanging gardens followed the path of a waterfall. In the Romanesque castle at the meeting of three valleys, I felt more relaxed than I’d been in years. 

Not far from Lillafüred was the zoo where the Pécs wolves now lived. But though I longed to set eyes on a wolf, I didn’t want to visit a zoo – my entry fee endorsing the keeping of animals in captivity. Putting myself in a wolf’s paws, I would rather roam free. Instead, I visited the zoo’s website, my fingers hovering over the button that would enable me to “adopt” a wolf for a fee. But when we insert ourselves into the lives of animals, we become complicit in their fates. I shut the window. 

The next morning, we caught a tram through the city of Miskolc and a train to Hidasnémeti’s small, Soviet-era station. From there we headed to the river, where I imagined M237 padding through the undergrowth to drink the cool water. 

We passed a headstone maker’s workshop and saw bright cottage gardens alive with cats. Having learnt that wolves avoid people, I didn’t think I’d feel nervous for my safety if there was a wolf in my neighbourhood. But I would feel nervous for my pets. 

Along with tracking M237, I’d been tracking Dávid Sütő, Large Carnivore Programme Leader at the World Wildlife Foundation. I wanted to ask him about wolves – in particular, M237, who Dávid called “the Swiss wolf”. 

“I mainly deal with human-wildlife conflicts,” Dávid said, when we connected over Zoom. “Surrounding large carnivores there can be challenges, because they were missing from almost the whole continent for at least 50 years. We have to relearn how to live with them.”

Humans almost drove large predators to extinction a century ago, but the presence of wolves helps balance the ecosystem. 

“We call them the guards of the forest. You need apex predators to keep invasive species like racoons at bay.”

Because wolves tend to prey on sick animals, they can also reduce the spread of disease. But not everyone’s happy that the wolves are returning to the forests. 

“Knowing that wolves are present can cause fear in people, but wolves are not as dangerous as we think. In Northern Hungary, you’re much more likely to get hurt driving a car than you are to be mauled by a wolf.”

“What about the Pécs attack?” I asked. 

“That was the only wolf attack in the country in the last hundred years, and it wasn’t a wild wolf,” Dávid said. “The wild specimens that have lived in nature have not attacked anyone, and it is crucial to try to keep it this way.”

Before we ended the call, I asked Dávid what had drawn him to his role. 

“I’ve always dealt with mammals,” he said. “Because we are mammals too, we have some kind of kinship with them. It’s easier to get in their understanding.”

On our last morning in The Palace Hotel, I woke with the sun. I stretched lazily on white sheets, wondering how on earth I’d got so lucky. And then I checked my phone. There was an email from the cattery. 

“I have some sad news,” the message read. “Your lovely Jager passed away.”

My fears of radioactive clouds suddenly seemed ludicrous. The worst had happened, and it was the lonely death of someone who’d trusted me. I regretted not organising that visit from the vet. I regretted going on the trip at all. 

We began our comically awful trip back to Pécs. As we were pelted with rain, thrown off a tram, issued with a fine, and confined to a stifling train carriage with drunken revellers, I thought about what we owe to animals. What I owed Jager, and what we all owed M237. 

Like cats, wolves can get diabetes, but a sick animal won’t last long in the wild. Jager had been on insulin for the final two years of her life. Bruce, who I found on the side of the road as a kitten, had already had several hair-raising trips to the vet. 

Cats aren’t considered domesticated: they have a symbiotic relationship with us. When I’d invited the cats into my home, I’d made a contract with them. I’d give them food, shelter, medical care and love, and I’d also have to make decisions on their behalf – decisions they wouldn’t always understand, or enjoy. But my cats could also choose to leave at any time. 

What kind of contract had we made with the animals of Pécs Zoo? Could they have reasonably expected a standard of care they didn’t get? And what did we owe M237? Not medicine, or a heating pad, or a lap to die on. But not a bullet. 

“When The Swiss Wolf was shot, there was an outrage,” Dávid had said. “In Hungary, the carnivores are strictly protected. And where he was shot, we have had wolves since the 1990s. So, the hunter could have expected that they were aiming at a wolf.”

And of course, the wolf was wearing a big, yellow GPS collar. But Dávid said it can be hard to investigate these types of cases.

“In a forest there are no witnesses. It’s ‘shoot, shovel, and shut up.’”

Europe has a long cultural history of humans and other apex predators sharing a landscape, but the survival of wolves in Hungary now depends on our ability to let the animals be. Wolves face enough danger without us: injury, starvation, and the possibility of being killed by a car, train, or group of rival wolves. M237 was willing to risk it all to find a mate.

“If the Swiss wolf had met a pack with a young female, they might have formed their own pack,” Dávid said.

When he was shot, M237 was 5km from a national park and the wolves of Zemplén. Had he picked up the scent of a potential mate? And had she picked up his? 

Death followed us back to Pécs. Catching up on New Zealand news, I saw that a critically endangered matuku-hūrepo had to be euthanised after being illegally shot. And in Europe, Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina had died after being wounded in a Russian missile attack, just as she prepared to begin a residency in Paris. 

And I was increasingly worried about Bruce. I contacted our pet sitter, trying not to sound hysterical. 

“Is Bruce doing OK?”

“He seems to be all good and is eating,” came the reply. 

But two mornings later when I woke and checked my phone, the pet sitter had left several missed calls. I called back and over a bad line heard “euthanasia”. Tim and I scrambled to add credit to our phones. We rang the vet and learnt Bruce had been badly bitten. The wound was infected, his flesh was necrotic, and he had sepsis. If he made it through the night, he’d face an operation he might not survive. 

I felt sick. Being home wouldn’t have prevented the bite – but because I know Bruce, because I’m in his understanding, I would have realised something was wrong sooner. We were almost due to return home, and bringing our flights forward would cost $5,000. All I could do for Bruce was send positive thoughts from the other side of the world, hoping I was tuning into the right wavelength. 

At around 1am, we got an email.  

“We went ahead with tissue debridement this morning – cutting away the necrotic pieces of skin, of which there was a lot. There was a significant amount of dead tissue on both sides where he was bitten – most likely by a dog.”

You’re much more likely to be injured by a dog than a wolf, even in Northern Hungary. And in Dunedin, there’s a dog in our neighbourhood that often roams wild. I wanted its owners to see Bruce. Feel his pain. 

At last, we returned to Dunedin to face a reckoning of our own. We collected Jager’s body and dug her grave. We picked Bruce up from the vet, knowing he’d be forever changed. And I felt the weight of what I’d done.