The Forest as Symbol in Once There Were Wolves: Interconnectedness, Loss, and the Wild Home
The Forest as a Physical Place and Symbolic Anchor
The forest in Once There Were Wolves appears in two primary forms: the ancient temperate rainforest of British Columbia where Inti and Aggie spent childhood summers with their father, and the Scottish Cairngorms—specifically the Abernethy Forest—where Inti leads the wolf reintroduction project. The novel also gestures toward what the Scottish forest once was: a vast expanse of rowan, aspen, birch, juniper, and oak that stretched across the hills before centuries of clearing reduced it to a few scattered groves of Caledonian pines.
The forest is not merely a setting. It is the novel's central symbol, carrying three intertwined meanings: interconnectedness, loss, and the wild home that both humans and wolves seek. These meanings shift across the narrative, from childhood memory to site of violence to place of renewal.
Interconnectedness: The Forest as a Living Web
The most explicit symbolic treatment of the forest comes in Chapter 3, when Inti recalls her father's teaching. He lay flat on the earth with his daughters and told them the forest has a beating heart beneath the ground. Trees communicate through tangled roots, he explained—they warn each other of danger and share sustenance. They are like a family, stronger together. This image of the root web becomes the novel's governing metaphor for connection.
The father's lesson resonates with Inti Flynn's mirror-touch synesthesia, the neurological condition that makes her feel the physical sensations of others. Just as trees share sensation through their roots, Inti shares sensation with every living creature she observes. The forest's underground network is a natural analogue to her condition: both are systems in which no individual experience is truly private. When Inti watches wolves interact, she feels their pain and pleasure as her own, just as the trees in her father's forest whisper to one another through their roots. This connection between the forest's web and Inti's embodied empathy is central to the novel's theme of embodied empathy and moral responsibility.
The interconnectedness of the forest also extends to the relationship between the wolves and the land itself. The novel describes the Scottish forest as having been waiting for the wolves to wake it from its long slumber. Inti explains to Lainey Burns that wolves will change the course of rivers and breathe life back into the land—a claim grounded in the ecological concept of trophic cascades, where predators reshape entire ecosystems. The forest, the wolves, the deer, and the rivers form a single interdependent system, much like the root web the father described. This is the novel's vision of rewilding and ecological restoration made concrete.
Loss: The Clear-Cut Valley and the Lone Douglas Fir
The forest's second symbolic meaning is loss. The novel's most devastating forest image is the clear-cut valley that Inti's father reveals to his daughters on their tenth birthday. After five days of walking through lush forest, they step out into an empty valley where every tree has been hacked down and carried away. In the midst of the wreckage stands a single Douglas fir—the mightiest tree Inti has ever seen—which her father had marked with green tape decades earlier to keep, ending his career as a logger.
The lone Douglas fir becomes a symbol of what is lost when the web is broken. Inti asks if the tree is lonely, aching for roots reaching to find nothing to hold. Her father weeps against the trunk—the only time his daughters ever see him cry. The image haunts Inti into adulthood; she dreams of the lonely fir and wakes certain its roots were her own, reaching to find no others.
The clear-cut valley also connects to the novel's treatment of domestic violence and intergenerational trauma. The father's guilt over his logging career mirrors the broader pattern of harm that runs through the novel—the abuse that Aggie suffers, the violence Stuart Burns inflicts on Lainey, the trauma that shapes both twins' adult lives. The forest's destruction is not only ecological but emotional: it represents the damage that humans inflict on the systems that sustain them, whether those systems are forests or families.
The Wild Home: Belonging and Restoration
The forest's third meaning is the wild home—a place of belonging that both humans and wolves seek. Inti describes her father's forest as their true home, the place they belonged, a landscape that made sense of her. The wolves, carried in crates to the Scottish forest, are also seeking home: the novel notes that the land knows them well and has been waiting for them. The wolf reintroduction is framed as a return, not an introduction.
The forest as home is complicated by the violence that occurs within it. In Chapter 11, Inti walks home through foggy woods and stumbles upon Stuart Burns's body—a discovery that forces her to bury the corpse to protect the wolves. The forest, once a place of safety and belonging, becomes a site of concealment and moral compromise. Aggie later confesses that she followed Stuart into the forest and stabbed him there. The wild home is thus also a place where the novel's characters must confront the limits of their own morality, a tension explored in the theme of concealment for a greater good.
By the epilogue, the forest's meaning has shifted again. Ash, the alpha female wolf, has died peacefully surrounded by her family. Inti has removed every radio collar so the wolves can live truly free. In spring, new growth appears: willow and alder shoots. Inti shows her daughter how to press her ear to the ground and listen—a direct echo of the father's lesson about the forest's beating heart. The forest has been restored, and the next generation is learning to hear it.
Character Connections
The forest binds the novel's central characters together. For Inti, it is both origin and vocation: she comes from the British Columbia forest and dedicates her life to restoring the Scottish one. For Aggie, the forest is where she follows their father into the wild at the novel's end, choosing the same path of withdrawal that he took. For Duncan MacTavish, the forest is initially a place of fear—he admits he dislikes wolves because they frighten the local people—but his hike through Abernethy Forest with Inti, where they watch an osprey catch a trout and observe wolves hunting a deer, transforms his understanding. The forest becomes the site of his conversion from skeptic to protector.
The wolves themselves are inseparable from the forest symbol. Ash, the first wolf to establish a pack in the new land, is described as having guided her family through the land and taught them to survive. The forest and the wolves are mutually constitutive: the forest needs the wolves to restore its ecological balance, and the wolves need the forest to survive. This relationship is the heart of the novel's twin identity and sacrificial love theme, as Inti's devotion to the wolves mirrors her devotion to her sister.
Study Questions
1. How does the father's lesson about tree roots function as a symbol for the novel's broader themes?
The father's teaching that trees communicate through tangled roots—warning each other of danger and sharing sustenance—establishes the novel's central metaphor of interconnectedness. The root web mirrors Inti's mirror-touch synesthesia, which makes her feel others' sensations as her own. It also anticipates the ecological relationship between wolves and the land: the wolves restore the forest, and the forest sustains the wolves. The image recurs in the epilogue when Inti teaches her daughter to press her ear to the ground and listen, suggesting that the lesson of interconnection passes to the next generation.
2. What does the lone Douglas fir represent, and how does it connect to the novel's treatment of loss?
The lone Douglas fir, spared by Inti's father when he was a logger, represents both the possibility of redemption and the enormity of what has been lost. It is one of the last of its kind—99 percent of old-growth Douglas firs have been cut down. The tree's isolation mirrors the isolation of the characters: Inti dreams that its roots are her own, reaching to find nothing to hold. The fir also connects to the novel's treatment of domestic violence and trauma: the father's guilt over his logging career parallels the harm that characters inflict on one another, and the clear-cut valley stands as a visible scar of human destruction.
3. How does the forest's meaning change over the course of the novel?
The forest begins as a place of childhood belonging—Inti's true home in British Columbia. In Scotland, it becomes the site of the rewilding project, a landscape waiting to be restored. The forest's meaning darkens when Inti discovers Stuart Burns's body in the woods and buries him there, making the forest a place of concealment and moral compromise. By the epilogue, the forest has been restored: new growth appears, the wolves are free, and Inti's daughter runs through the heather. The forest's arc mirrors the novel's movement from loss toward renewal.
4. How does the forest function as a wild home for both humans and wolves?
The forest is the place where both humans and wolves seek belonging. Inti describes her father's forest as the place where she belonged, and the wolves are described as returning to a land that has been waiting for them. The novel frames the wolf reintroduction as a homecoming rather than an introduction. However, the forest as home is complicated by violence: Aggie kills Stuart in the forest, and Inti buries his body there. The wild home is thus not a simple refuge but a place where characters must confront difficult moral choices. In the epilogue, the forest becomes a home for the next generation, as Inti's daughter runs through the heather and learns to listen to the ground.