Ways of Being Alive

This is where tracking enters, and it's more than a picturesque hobby. For Morizot, following an animal's trace is a philosophical exercise disguised as a walk. A print in the mud is a sign left by a being pursuing its own purposes, and to read it you have to reconstruct those purposes — where was it heading, was it hunting or fleeing, alone or with others, calm or pressed. You're not just identifying a species. You're inferring a mind at work in the landscape, an intention that isn't yours.

He describes tracking as learning to read the world as a text that has always been written and that we simply forgot how to decipher. Every meadow is dense with these inscriptions. The tracker becomes a kind of interpreter, moving between the visible sign and the invisible life behind it, constantly testing hypotheses against the next clue. Sometimes you're wrong. The animal doubles back, the story you'd built collapses, you start again. That humility — the willingness to be corrected by the world — is part of the point.

The wolf is Morizot's central case, and he's careful about why. In French cultural imagination the wolf is almost pure symbol — the fairy-tale predator, the emblem of wild nature, or, on the other side, the livestock-killer that ranchers have every reason to hate. Both readings turn the animal into a screen for human projection. Morizot wants to peel the symbolism away and meet the wolf as what it actually is: a returning neighbor, moving into territory that people also use, with its own social life, its own hunting economy, its own politics within the pack.

The return is real and recent. Wolves recolonized France on their own, crossing from Italy into the Mercantour region in the early 1990s after being absent for roughly sixty years. Nobody reintroduced them; they walked back. And they walked into a landscape now full of highways, ski resorts, sheep, and people who had forgotten how to share ground with a large predator. The result is genuine conflict — flocks attacked, shepherds furious, a bitter public argument between those who want the wolf protected and those who want it gone.

The word Morizot lands on is diplomacy. It sounds almost provocative applied to animals — diplomacy implies negotiation between parties, and wolves don't sign treaties. But he means it more than metaphorically. A diplomat operates between groups whose interests genuinely differ, who won't simply merge, and who must nonetheless find workable arrangements for coexistence. That, he argues, is precisely our situation with the returning wolf, and with the living world more broadly. We are not going to eliminate the other side, and we are not going to fuse with it into harmony. We have to negotiate terms of shared use.

This reframing does real work. It moves past the exhausted opposition between exploiting nature and preserving it untouched — between the rancher who wants the predator dead and the purist who wants humans out of the picture entirely. Both imagine a world cleanly divided into human zones and wild zones. Diplomacy assumes the opposite: interests will keep overlapping, frictions will keep arising, and the task is to craft arrangements that let different forms of life persist alongside each other without one simply erasing the other.

Back on the ridge in the Haut-Var, the tracks in the snow are still just tracks — four pads, a clean line, an animal that passed a few hours ago and is now somewhere over the next ridge, watching the valley in ways we'll never fully reconstruct. What changes, in Morizot's account, is not the wolf but the person reading its trace. To attend is to grant that the animal is a subject with a life of its own, moving through a territory it shares with us, neither villain nor emblem. The print stops being scenery and becomes an address, a message from a neighbor.