“Hairs. Real lynx hairs!” I said to myself. This was getting exciting. There, on the corner of a neatly stacked woodpile were a few pale, fine hairs about 70 cm. above the ground. And then, remembering what I’d been told about the lynx’s territorial habits, I bent over for a sniff – and nearly fell over. There it was: the unmistakable, eye-watering-but-not-unpleasant, smell of cat urine (some of my friends think I’m strange). The cat in this case being 20 odd kilograms of pale-eyed, tufty-eared, side-burned and altogether alluring lynx. I was thrilled. This was the closest I’d ever come to seeing one in the wild.

We might as well have been searching for ghosts. Lynx are so elusive that I knew the chances of seeing one were remote, even when walking through their domain of Norway spruce, larch and beech. But not to see even a trace was uncanny, and elevated their status in my mind as the coolest cat around.

I was woken by howling below my bedroom window, instantly transporting me from fully asleep to fully awake. All senses primed, the realisation soon came that this was not a wolf, but a Malamute, the husky-like dog owned by my hosts, and one which was used for tracking wolves in the winter. It seemed to prefer this ancestral form of communication to barking!