Esme is braced for boredom when she goes to stay with her gran, but that turns on its head when she discovers Cora – the abandoned kitten Gran found – is actually a wild lynx kitten and is growing fast. On a mission to rewild her, the team pitch their tents on a bleak Highland moor, and the wolves are howling outside… Read more on the inspiration of The Rewilders by Lindsay Littleson below.

The Rewilders
By Lindsay Littleson
Published by Cranachan Publishing

The inspiration for The Rewilders came from an article I read online about a Canadian man who was riding his bike along a wooded trail in Quebec when he found a tiny, abandoned kitten. At first he thought the little creature was a domestic cat, but realised by the size of its paws that it was actually a lynx, so he took the starving animal home, fed it milk from a dropper and called wildlife experts to come and collect it. Intrigued by the fact lynx kittens could be mistaken for domestic cats, I asked the question, What if?

What if Sadie and Jean, two elderly ladies on a Women’s Rural outing to a Highland Estate, discovered a wet, bedraggled kitten, missed the big-paws clue and took the animal home, believing it to be an ordinary moggie? What problems would ensue as the lynx grew bigger and how could they be resolved? Adult Eurasian lynx are large cats, Europe’s third-largest predator after brown bears and wolves. Being solitary, reclusive wild animals, a domestic setting is completely unsuitable. In The Rewilders, Cora the lynx kitten is causing chaos, as Esme and Callum discover when they visit Jean’s house.

When Esme flicked the light switch, Callum gasped. The room was a shambles. A chair was upended, castors still spinning. Smotes of ash from the open fire swirled in the draught. Pictures hung on the walls at crazy angles. A ripped cushion lay on the floor, and its fluffy white feathers spun like snowflakes.

He saw the cat right away. In her natural environment, her reddish-brown fur would have been excellent camouflage, but the poor beast was unable to hide herself against a background of rose-sprigged wallpaper. In a corner of the room, beside a massive oak sideboard, she crouched: dark-spotted, long-legged and about the height of a Labrador.

In The Rewilders, Esme and Callum are sent on a mission to rewild the young lynx, a quest that quickly leads them into danger. One rainy night, the children pitch their tents on a bleak Highland moor and hear wolves howling outside…

I am totally aware that the reintroduction of wolves and lynx is controversial, and that the focus of the rewilding movement in Scotland is currently on restoring our precious peatlands and temperate rain forest, but my hope is that young people read The Rewilders and are inspired to discover more about rewilding. The Scottish Rewilding Alliance’s main goal is ‘a flourishing ecosystem, supporting self-sustaining nature-based economies which secure a future for local communities’ and who wouldn’t support that aim?

The hope is that by planting native trees and reviving damaged peatlands, Scotland’s biodiversity will increase and natural processes will be revived. Scotland’s temperate rainforests are internationally important and contain the world’s rarest bryophytes and lichens, but there are only fragments left and these isolated fragments are unable to regenerate due to high levels of grazing or are being damaged by invasive rhododendron or by the planting of exotic conifers. The Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest has been set up to help restore these precious habitats. And then, perhaps, it might be time to reintroduce large predators…

Reintroducing these animals would be an excellent way of keeping deer on the move, helping to prevent overgrazing and the destruction of young trees. And as Callum tells Esme in The Rewilders, Scotland was once home to both lynx and wolves…

“Wolves and lynx live in the forests of Eastern Europe and North America. Everyone knows that.”                                                                                                                               “Yeah, but they used to live here too, long ago. When Sadie first told me about Cora, I googled lots of information. Scotland is the natural home of both lynx and wolves. In medieval times, lynx were hunted to extinction for their pelts and because farmers were concerned for their livestock. The last wolf was killed here in the eighteenth century. These animals have got as much right to live here as you and me and Luka Rydeski. This is their home.”

Of course, not everybody agrees that reintroducing lynx and wolves is a feasible idea, and in The Rewilders I’ve tried to show that different points of view are valid and that compromise and consensus will be necessary if large predators are ever going to be successfully reintroduced to Scotland.

But personally, I am in full agreement with David Hetherington, author of The Lynx and Us. “When it comes to reintroducing carnivores, starting with lynx is the logical first step … lynx aren’t a physical threat to humans, and they cause fewer problems with livestock than bears and wolves.”

Lynx are such reclusive animals that seeing them in the wild would be unlikely, but their presence would certainly make a walk in the Highlands a more thrilling experience!

The Rewilders by Lindsay Littleson is published by Cranachan Publishing, priced £7.99.