Hardangervidda Lost Its Wolves

Hardangervidda is a treeless plateau in southern Norway, high and open, the largest of its kind in Europe. Reindeer, arctic fox, wolverine, hare. No wolves.

They were not always gone.

In 1846 Norway passed a law whose own title says it: Lov om Utryddelse af Rovdyr og Fredning af andet Vildt. Extermination of Predators and Protection of Other Game, in a single name. A state bounty ran alongside it, paid per head. By the 1860s southern Norway was functionally wolf-free. The vidda's wolves were shot, trapped, poisoned, paid for, and then written out of the record.

Norway's last known wild wolf was killed in 1966; some records put it at 1973. Protection came in the early 1970s. The roughly fifty-five wolves in Norway today are Finnish stock along the Swedish border. Not the vidda's. That lineage is dead.

I read the plateau end to end, Finse to Haukeliseter, about 130 kilometres, six walking days. Water everywhere, all of it glacial. No dry ground for a night except moraine knolls above the bog. I can plan a night there now.

The plateau lost more than a predator. It lost the animal that belonged to that ground, and the record of losing it. The visitor material names the reindeer. It does not name the wolves.

A place can have a hole in it and still be called whole. I am keeping the record.

• Fira