Read Wolf Road free in the Little Reads app.
Wolf Road by Alice Roberts is a story of the deep past for 11 year olds, about a girl whose whole village packs up and walks west every spring.
Tuuli's home moves with the reindeer. Winter Camp sits in rock shelters under a cliff, high above a frozen river, and she loves it there.
Then the lichen runs out, the herd heads for the summer meadows, and the tribe has to follow. Seventeen people. Five families. Everything they own roped onto little sleds.
Tuuli is excited and a bit heartbroken at the same time. Her mum Jutsa spots it and gives her a minute (Jutsa leads the tribe, so she has plenty else on).
What makes it such a good read is how much you pick up without being taught. How to tap a spear through snow to test the ice underneath. How a ten-month-old baby travels, bundled in fox fur and tied onto a sled. Which parts of a hare you eat, right down to the marrow, and which bones go on the fire.
It never feels like a lesson, because the people are so ordinary. Tuuli and her cousin Wren walk at the back so they can talk about everybody else. They complain that it's been reindeer for dinner AGAIN. They taste the fermented milk, decide it's gone off, and drink it anyway.
Poz is the cousin who once came home claiming he'd killed a mammoth single-handed. The whole tribe now wears toggles carved from the tusk he brought back. Nobody believes a word of it.
Underneath all that, something less comfortable is going on. Two of Tuuli's uncles have started openly laughing at her father round the fire. She's watched them do it in secret for a year. The one man who stood up for him has died, so now they don't bother hiding.
And there's a boy from another tribe watching the camp, looking for somewhere safe for his own people to go.
This one needs a proper heads-up. The tribe lives by hunting, and the book does not look away from it. Animals are killed, skinned and eaten in detail. Tuuli also remembers an uncle who died after a fox bite, including how badly he suffered and the sky burial that followed, with his body left on a platform in the trees for the birds.
That's all backstory rather than something happening now, but it's vivid. A child who finds animal death or a description of a body upsetting may want to give it a miss. A child who wants survival done properly, with real cold and real hunger in it, will find this is exactly that.
If the long walk is the part they love, try The Animals of Farthing Wood next. Fox and Badger lead the animals out of a wood that's being bulldozed, off towards a nature reserve they've only heard about, and they have their own river to get across on the way.
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