Brenin never lay down in the back of the Jeep. He always liked to see what was coming. Once, many years ago, we had driven from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, all the way to Miami - around 800 miles - and back again. And he stood every inch of the way: his hulking presence blocking out much of the sun and all of the rear traffic. But this time, on this short drive into Béziers, near the village where we were living in the Languedoc, he wouldn't stand; couldn't stand. It was then I knew he was gone. I was taking him to the place where he would die. I had told myself that if he stood up, even for part of the journey, I would give it another day; another 24 hours for a miracle to occur. But now I knew it was over. My friend of the past 11 years would be gone. And I didn't know what sort of person he was going to leave behind.
The dark French midwinter could not have contrasted more starkly with that bright Alabama evening, in early May, when I first brought six-week-old Brenin into my house and into my world. Within two minutes of his arrival - and I am by no means exaggerating - he had pulled the curtains in the living-room (both sets) off their rails and on to the ground. Next, while I was trying to rehang the curtains, he found his way out into the garden and under the house. At the rear, the house was raised off the ground and you could access the area underneath by way of a door built into the brick wall - a door that I had obviously left ajar.
He made his way under the house and then proceeded - methodically, meticulously, but above all quickly - to rip down every single one of the soft, lagged pipes that directed the cold air from the air-conditioning unit up through various vents in the floor. That was Brenin's trademark attitude to the new and unfamiliar. He liked to see what was coming. He would explore it; embrace it. Then he would trash it.
I was a couple of years into my first job - assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa is best known for its university's (American) football team, the Crimson Tide, which the local community embraces with a fervour that surpasses the merely religious - although they're heavily into that, too. Life was good; but I had grown up with dogs - mostly big dogs like Great Danes - and I missed them. And so, one afternoon, I found myself looking through the want-ads section of the Tuscaloosa News.
For much of its relatively short life, the United States of America pursued a policy of systematic eradication of its wolves - through shooting, poisoning, trapping, whatever means necessary. The result is that there are virtually no free wild wolves in the contiguous 48 states. Now that the policy has been abandoned, they've started to make a comeback in parts of Wyoming, Montana and Minnesota, and on some of the islands in the Great Lakes. They have even recently been reintroduced, over the strident protestations of ranchers, into the most famous of US natural parks, Yellowstone.
This resurgence in the wolf population, however, has not yet reached Alabama or the South in general. There are lots of coyotes. And there are a few red wolves in the swamps of Louisiana and east Texas - though no one is really sure what they are, and they may well be the result of historical wolf-coyote hybridisation. But timber wolves, or grey wolves as they are sometimes known (inaccurately, since they can also be black, white and brown), are a distant memory in the southern states.
Therefore I was somewhat surprised when my eye was caught by an advertisement: WOLF CUBS FOR SALE, 96 PER CENT. After a quick phone call, I jumped in the car and headed off to Birmingham, about an hour to the north-east, not entirely sure what I was expecting to find. And so it was, a little later, that I came to be standing, eyeball to eyeball, with the biggest wolf I had ever heard of, let alone seen. The owner had shown me around to the back of the house, and the stable and pen that housed the animals. When the father wolf, Yukon, heard us coming he jumped up at the stable door, just as we arrived there, appearing as if from nowhere.
He was huge and imposing, standing slightly taller than me. I had to look up at his face and his strange yellow eyes. But it was his feet I will always remember. People don't realise just how big wolves' feet are, much bigger than those of dogs. It was his feet that announced Yukon's arrival, the first things I saw as he bounded up to lean over the stable door. They now hung over that door, much bigger than my fists, like furry baseball mitts.
One thing people often ask me about owning a wolf: aren't you ever scared of him? The answer is no. Not because I'm brave, but I think it's because I am very relaxed around dogs. And this is largely the result of my upbringing. Looking back, I realise that, when it comes to dogs, my family are just not normal. We would often take in Great Danes from rescue centres. Sometimes these were lovely animals. Sometimes they were positively psychotic. Blue, a Great Dane unimaginatively named - not by us - after his colour, provides a good case in point. Blue was about three years old when my parents rescued him. And it was easy to understand why he found himself in a rescue centre. Blue had a hobby: the random and indiscriminate biting of people and other animals. Actually, that's not fair: it wasn't random or indiscriminate at all. He just had various, let us call them, idiosyncrasies. One of them was not permitting people to leave the room when he was in it. You could never afford to find yourself in a room with Blue on your own. You always needed someone to distract him while you exited. Of course, they would then need someone else to distract Blue should they wish to leave the room. And so the great wheel of Blue's life turned. Failure to adequately distract him before exiting the room would often result in one's hindquarters being scarred for life. Just ask my brother, Jon.