There has been an ecological triumph in the province of Sweden where I've spent the past t

hree weeks. The wolf and the lynx have both returned to the forests. The naturalists have been rejoicing. There's been a TV documentary. Meanwhile the local farmers and hunters have disappeared into the forests with their rifles. Jan and Lennart, the sons of the farmer at the end of the lake, were particularly aggrieved that the lynx (that's a wild cat to you townies) was killing "their" deer, and the urban bureaucrats who had decided to protect it only increased their rage. They vowed to track the animal down. "Did they kill it？" I asked one local man. "They didn't say", he replied with a hint of a wink.

What does the word "rural" mean to you？ Organic, perhaps. Wholesome. Gemeinschaft (or do I mean Gesellschaft？). Conservative. Marx's "rural idiocy" maybe. To me the countryside is about paranoia. It breeds independence and idiosyncrasy and other nice things but also the sort of people who wander onto Capitol Hill in order to kill some senators or declare war on the FBI for being an essentially socialist organization. For people who live in and off the countryside, there always seems to be the idea that "they"—the bureaucrats, the government, the city folk—are out to get them.

What they despise almost as much as city folk themselves are the sort of things that city folk like about the countryside, footpaths, beauty spots, old buildings, rare flora and fauna, ancient sites of historical interest. To select from my experience of the past few weeks, the land that was once owned by my late grandparents contained a meadow that was famous across Sweden (well, it was once featured on the front page of the local newspaper) for its rare plants. A couple of weeks ago my cousin—an engineer and part-time farmer with a flock of four sheep and one ram—fenced the meadow off, set the sheep loose into it and within two days it duly looked like a bit of scrub in a corner of a derelict industrial estate. Incidentally, when your correspondent went to investigate this vandalism, the said ram pursued him across the field in a way that was later said to be hilarious to onlookers.

Another local man carries around a special bullet in case he should ever get on the trail of a wolf. The normal bullets used for hunting deer and elk have soft tips so that they spread out on contact and cause devastating fatal wounds. But this special wolf bullet has a hard tip so that it will pass right through the animal, leaving a relatively small (though almost certainly fatal) wound. The dying wolf will then probably walk tens of miles before it dies, thus preventing "them" from identifying the slayers of this absurdly protected predator. And this happens in a province which has a wolf as its official symbol.

There's more. A neighboring lake has become home to what I was informed is an exceedingly rare kind of hawk. But the local people who have spotted it have kept its presence a closely guarded secret. If they told ornithologists about it, then the next thing that would happen is that they would probably want to come into the area and start to look at the bloody thing, and once these bureaucrats and scientists get their claws into an area, who knows where it will end？

Much of this is probably true of rural areas everywhere, but in Sweden it has been exacerbated by the Byzantine bureaucracy that was generated by 40 years of social democracy, a system that led both to some of the finest public services and to the situation in which the country's greatest living artist, Ingmar Bergman, under suspicion of a minor tax transgression, was publicly arrested and interrogated in a manner that might have been thought excessive by Beria.

One of the fundamental Swedish rights is entitled allamansrdtt, which permits anybody to walk, pick berries or mushrooms virtually anywhere. Some local business

A．hated

B．distrust

C．contempt

D．reverence