KATRINE

Piazza San Marco in Venice is flooded again. The sea gurgles up through the stone sluices and the superintendent wearily orders the wooden duckboards to be unstacked and laid across the square. Nothing, not even the sea, must stop the tourists from filing through the Basilica and the Doge’s Palace. Venice is slowly sinking into the sea. Fifteen thousand years ago, when Katrine lived there, the sea was over a hundred miles away. The Adriatic is a very shallow sea, and the worldwide lowering of sea level towards the end of the last Ice Age shrunk it to half its present size. Katrine could have walked in a straight line from Split in Croatia to Ancona in Italy without getting her feet wet. She lived in the vast wooded plain that stretched from here to the Alps and took in the wide Po valley from Bologna to Milan and Turin. Had it been colder, this would have been an area of open tundra crowded with wild horse, bison, reindeer and mammoth. But the relative warmth of the southerly latitude meant the forest could survive. The woods themselves were much like Tara’s, a larder of wild food if you knew where to look and were prepared to put in the work to find it. However, they were much more extensive and the sparse human population was spread out over a much larger area. People still lived in bands, and these bands tended to stick together as they moved through the woods. Katrine’s band lived in the northern part of the forest, where it backed up against the steep ramparts of the Alps. Towering above the plain, their snow-capped peaks and vast glaciers, much more extensive than today, appeared to Katrine as a distant and forbidden world.

She had always been a beautiful child, with fair hair and greenish-brown eyes, and she was not far into her teens when she became pregnant by a friend of her older brother. In the summer before the birth the band moved up into the mountains to hunt ibex and chamois. Her mate was still inexperienced in the mountains and not used to the dangers of hunting at high altitude. He was stalking a group of chamois across a cliff, hoping to surprise them and drive them off the sheer face, when he lost his footing and fell four hundred feet to his death. He had always been an impetuous and boastful youth, and the group greeted his death with as much irritation as sadness. Just as he was going to be able to start repaying the group for its years of support by bringing in food, he had got himself killed.

Annoyance was also Katrine’s considered reaction. By his foolishness, he had left her with the prospect of bringing up a child alone. She was determined to find a replacement as soon as possible. The baby girl was born in late October, by which time they were down from the mountain and foraging in the woods again. She was a sweet enough child, with her father’s dark brown eyes, but Katrine never bonded with her from the start. Just looking at the baby suckling at her breast filled her with intense irritation. Why had she been left with this mewling infant by a feckless man who should have thought of her and the baby before he put himself in danger? But there was nothing to be done. She couldn’t palm it off on anyone else. No-one else was lactating and no-one had lost a child.

Her mother realized that there was something badly wrong between Katrine and her baby but couldn’t offer any real solution. Until it was fully weaned, which would not be for at least another three years, there was nothing to be done. As the child grew and began to crawl, then walk, matters did not improve. In every new development – the way she smiled, the way she waved her arms – Katrine saw nothing of herself but only reflections of the irresponsible and now loathed father. At long last, after four interminable years, the infant was fully weaned. Katrine had not entirely wasted her time during the long wait. At every opportunity she would leave the child with her mother and seek out the company of her brother’s older friends. Over the three years she slept with all of them at one time or another but, because she was still breast-feeding, she never got pregnant. Her mother had realized what was going on for some time and had warned her against such foolishness. Her father didn’t seem to care.

So, of course, the inevitable happened. She did get pregnant again, almost immediately after her baby was weaned. The father could have been any one of the three boys, and she had no idea which one. It was inconceivable that she could have another child without a proper mate, so her mother took her to one side and begged her to identify the father. She refused even to tell her mother who the three candidates were. Her brother was no more forthcoming. It was a desperate situation. Katrine’s father, who was not getting any younger, was already having to provide for two more people than he had bargained for; another one would bring yet more responsibility. Though he loved his daughter, he shook her hard to get her to reveal the father’s identity. Still she refused. And none of the three came forward when the news of Katrine’s pregnancy spread around the camp. No great surprise there.

When the baby was born, Katrine’s mother lifted it and gently gave it to Katrine. She looked at it, expecting to feel equally repulsed as she had been the first time. But she was not. As she took the tiny girl into her arms and held it to her breast she was overcome by a feeling of warmth and tenderness. She felt none of the exasperation and irritation that she experienced after the birth of her first child. Though her situation was arguably more desperate now than before, there was no resentment. None of the men had come forward to help her; but here was something utterly helpless, who needed more help than she did. Her attitude to her second daughter was completely different. There was no logical explanation for this transformation, but there was no doubt Katrine had undergone a fundamental change. She nursed the baby carefully and conscientiously. She left it with her mother only so that she could resume her work of collecting food in the forest. She even began to grow closer to her first daughter. Rather than seeing her as a millstone round her neck, a burden and a nuisance, she began to feel much more protective towards her as well. There was no obvious reason for this abrupt change in Katrine, but it had good results. Her father and her brother did not mind the added burden of the extra mouth to feed now that Katrine had resumed her work in the forests. When the next summer came and they once again climbed up into the mountains, Katrine even wished she could join them on the high slopes. This would have been inconceivable a year earlier, when she showed no interest at all in helping anyone but herself. But it was too soon for that. Her baby was still at the breast and needed to be fed every four hours.

While her father and brother were high in the mountains, a very strange thing happened at the base camp in the pine forest below the snow line. It was a dark, moonless night. Katrine and her mother were both sitting close to the fire. Both children were asleep, the elder daughter with her head on her mother’s lap, the baby resting beside her on the soft ground. Just as Katrine was about to settle down for the night herself, she thought she saw something move in the forest, about ten metres away on the other side of the fire. The woods were still a dangerous place, with lynx, wolves and bears all active at night. She looked deep into the forest but saw nothing and settled down to sleep.

The next night the same thing happened. She called her mother, but she couldn’t see anything either; her eyes were not as good as they used to be. It moved again. There was definitely something there. Katrine strained her eyes and shifted her position to see around the flames. Now she could get a better view if it moved again. But there was still nothing. She moved ten yards away from the fire so her eyes could get used to the dark. After a few minutes she thought she could make out a pale grey shape among the rocks. Then it moved again. Very slightly but definitely. She stared again. There, with its paws outstretched and lying quite still, was a fully grown wolf. She let out a piercing scream. In one swift movement the wolf was gone. Katrine ran back to the safety of the fire. By then everyone was awake, expecting an attack from the dark. Katrine calmed down and then told them what she had seen. It was very unusual to see a wolf so close to a human camp. There were plenty of them around; you could tell that from the howls that echoed through the dark valleys. Occasionally you would sense you were being followed, and turn round to see the long-legged shapes loitering in the distance. They did not retreat, but just stared back, as if to say ‘Be careful.’ But, in truth, they rarely attacked humans, certainly not humans together in a group, and never near a campfire. Everyone agreed that Katrine must have dozed off and been dreaming.

They changed their minds when next night the wolf was there again, sitting quite still on a patch of grass in front of the same large boulders. It was alone as far as anyone could tell. One of the men walked slowly towards it. It stayed where it was until he got to within twenty yards, then got up and trotted quite calmly further back into the dark. What did this creature want? It was obviously not about to attack them, but what reason could it have for just sitting there and looking at them? The same performance was repeated the following night.

By then Katrine’s father and brother had returned from their hunt with a chamois each slung across their shoulders. These were quickly butchered, and before long the spit above the fire held a dozen pieces of venison roasting in the flames. Nobody saw him arrive, but the wolf was back. Katrine’s father picked up a piece of raw meat in one hand and, with a spear in the other, he walked slowly towards the animal. It moved its head from side to side as if trying to decide whether or not to flee. Twenty yards from the animal, Katrine’s father laid down his spear and crouched on the ground. He moved slowly forward, talking softly as he went, until he was only a matter of twenty feet away. The wolf was getting more and more restless at every step. But still it didn’t flee. Gently, and without a sudden movement, Katrine’s father tossed the meat to one side of the wolf then, still facing it, moved slowly backwards. When he was almost back to the camp fire, the wolf got up, went over to the meat, sniffed it quickly, then took it in its jaws and trotted off.

They all looked at each other in silent amazement for a few seconds, then burst into spontaneous conversation. One of the men had heard of a similar happening many years ago at a camp in the mountains to the east, but he had never believed it. There seemed no explanation for the wolf’s behaviour. Over the next few nights, the animal returned to the same position and took the food that was thrown for it. It started to appear in the daytime too, and would walk behind the hunters as they went off into the hills. As the weeks passed it became more and more tame, coming much closer to the fire and eventually taking meat, gingerly at first, from the hand. Then one night it did not return. The band were disappointed. They had got used to their strange companion. But after a while they forgot about it and carried on with their normal routine.

About six weeks later Katrine’s father and brother were returning from another successful hunt when they sensed they were being followed. They turned around and there, standing quite still on the path, was the wolf. Beside it were two cubs. It was not a him after all. The she-wolf and her cubs followed them to the camp and settled down near her old spot. Was this the reason for her visits to the camp? Did she sense that she could be spared the rigours of hunting for her cubs? She certainly accepted food and, when they were old enough to take it, fed them directly from the scraps. Over the next few weeks the wolf was the band’s constant companion and her cubs played with the children on the floor of the forest. When the time came to move the camp down to lower ground she did not appear to want to follow them down to the plain, but seemed to want her cubs to go with the humans. She would turn them away and push them back to the camp as it was being dismantled. Katrine understood what she meant. She bent down and picked up the two cubs and carried them away.

During that winter on the plains, the wolf cubs grew fast on the scraps they were thrown. They followed the hunters everywhere and even joined in the chase, bringing down a roe deer or a wild boar that had been injured by a spear. They were certainly earning their keep. The other bands that they came across on the plains could not believe their eyes when they saw the wolves at the camp. So the old stories were true. The wolves stayed with the band that winter, helping to track game and forming an ever closer bond with Katrine and her family. The next summer, when the band went up once more into the mountains, the cubs, now fully grown, became more and more restless and would sometimes leave the camp after dark and not return until the next day. They were torn between their new life with the humans, a safe life that meant a steady supply of food, and the call of the pack whose haunting cries echoed around the valleys. One day they did not return.

Katrine and her band never forgot their encounter with the she-wolf and her cubs. The same strange meetings between wolf and human were replayed many times. Sometimes the cubs would stay with the bands from one year to the next. Little by little they came to depend on the humans and gradually lost their wild instincts as they became the first animals of many to accept a life of domestication. They became dogs. By eight thousand years ago, dogs had become the indispensable companions of the hunters who ranged over Europe after the last Ice Age. Some became so precious that they were given a ceremonial burial with their owners.

Katrine’s clan flourished in northern Italy and beyond. Ten thousand years after she lived, one of her many descendants died crossing the Alps. We know him as the Iceman. Today 6 per cent of native Europeans are in the clan of Katrine. As a clan it is still frequent around the Mediterranean but, like the others, draws its present-day members from all over Europe.