It was while exploring the departmental archives of Aveyron that the wolf appeared to him for the first time, in 2019. While Julien Coquentin was carrying out research prior to photographic work on wildlife on the borders of the Aubrac plateaus and Larzac, he finds documents devoted to “the destruction of the wolves”.
Among them, a bundle, dated 1898, mentions a bounty for killing a wolf. ” full “, it is up to the person who kills it to bring to the authorities, as proof, an ear cut off from the animal. It will be done soon after, says another writing.
Struck by this practice dating back to a time when the hunts were organized under the scrupulous control of the municipalities, the 46-year-old photographer feels ” reside “ by the ghost of this poor female. He also knows that the wolf has just reappeared, four years earlier, in the Lot valley, a few hundred meters from the hamlet of Lassouts (Aveyron), where he lives.
Zone difficult to protect
The French Office for Biodiversity took droppings, hair, urine and blood. The organism evokes traces belonging to a solitary male, probably originating from a pack in the Alps, where the species had reappeared in 1992. It also evokes the presence of a wolf in the Grands Causses, where several cases of predation among herds were reported. But the track of this female is quickly lost. And Julien Coquentin begins to dream.
“I imagine that the ghost of the wolf killed more than a hundred and twenty years ago still wanders in the nearby forest until it ends up crossing the living wolf of today”, evokes the child of the country. He says he was rocked, like all the inhabitants of Aveyron, Lozère and northern Hérault, by the legend of the beast of Gévaudan: a wolf, or rather wolves, who, in the 1760s, would have devoured more than a hundred humans.
This story “always infuse the spirits”, reports Julien Coquentin, and the animal is still “totemic” Today. The photographer therefore begins a field investigation in the company of a dowser on the trail of wolf traps hidden in the undergrowth.
Julien Coquentin says he wants to track down the idea we have of the wolf, “its trace in our heads, our meadows, our farms”.
This vast region, in the south-west of the Massif Central, has the particularity of having been classified, in 2019, as a difficult to protect area, a unique case in France justified by the presence of the largest sheep farms in the country. This status gives breeders, who are not forced to fence pastures, the right to dispatch sworn individuals to kill the wolf.
You have 58.4% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.