Dartmoor sprawls across 368 square miles of southern England: a rainy upland of bogs, heath and moors nibbled by stubby ponies. Here and there across the wilderness are the scattered remnants of Bronze Age cairns and huts. The Britons who built them lived in a forested country prowled by wolves and bears, where beavers dammed the rivers and giant aurochs grazed. Among them, elusive and solitary, crept the lynx.
Unless he was recaptured last night, the two-year-old Flaviu is the first lynx to be roaming wild in Britain for more than 1,000 years. Born in captivity in Kent, he was brought to Dartmoor Zoological Park in Devon and, on his first night away from his mother, the terrified creature chewed his way out of his