by Jim Crumley
Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages.
Oh did they, indeed? There are two problems here. The first is that wolves don’t “howl hungrily”. They howl to talk to each other over distance. And they do it at different times of the day and night and at all phases of the moon and when there is no moon at all. They do it when they’re hungry, they do it when their bellies are full, they do it to announce their presence, their numbers, their state of health, their territorial boundaries. Howling is wolf-to-wolf conversation and it is pack-bonding. It has nothing to do with snow or hunger or January. Or the moon.
The second problem is that wolves don’t go hungry “amid the cold and deep snows of winter” because as I have already explained, (a) it can never get too cold for wolves, and (b) deep snow is when wolves are at their strongest and their prey at its weakest. They feed sumptuously in midwinter, and the surplus from the unfinished kills they leave behind feeds many, many other mouths. They had no need whatever to go anywhere near a village in the north-eastern states in winter, and they know from a few thousand years of their history that there are very sound reasons for avoiding human settlements, the most pressing of which is that they get shot.
Even if there were tribes that referred to the first full moon of the year as the wolf moon, then that still doesn’t explain the story. I went in search of those conspicuously unnamed tribes, and you will be less than amazed to discover that I found none. What I did find was a Native American Studies source that listed all the names of all the moons (for they are all named, in much the same way as we name the months). Then I narrowed the list down to the tribes of the northern and north-eastern states, and this is what I found for January, the first full moon of the year:
Abenaki – greetings maker moon; Algonquin – sun has no strength to thaw moon; Anishinaabe – great spirits moon; Cherokee – cold moon; Cree – moon when the old fellow spreads the brush; Lakota – hard moon; Mohawk – the big cold moon; Passamaquoddy – whirling wind moon; Potawatomi – moon of the bear; Winnebago – fish running moon; and Sioux – wolves run together moon, the only wolf reference. There was no other mention of a specific wolf moon for any tribe anywhere; this despite the fact that there were moons named for eagle, grey goose, snow goose, frog, ducks moult, and birds fly south.
I could be uncharitable and say that this was the farmers using their magazine to spread a little seasonal anti-wolf propaganda, but even if that were the case, it does not excuse newspapers in this country publishing such rot. But our 21st-century media, as in many other northern hemisphere countries, cannot resist taking a potshot at wolves. In general, basic journalistic principles – like a respect for truth and thorough research – are abandoned when the subject is nature, and when it is the wolf then the level of abandonment goes into overdrive. Exaggeration, misinformation, jokes and profound ignorance characterise the coverage. It has been that way for a long time. But there is no longer an excuse. It took me about fifteen minutes to pull the story apart. When I wrote The Last Wolf, it took me a day and a half to prove to my entire satisfaction that the story of the death of Scotland’s last wolf up the River Findhorn in 1743 was a work of pure fiction. Yet it has been unquestioningly regurgitated since 1829 (when it was first written down) and still reappears even in some nature conservation thinking uttered by people who should really know better.
This is what the wolf is up against.
This is what champions of wolf reintroduction are up against, and ahead lies a lengthy struggle to overwhelm the forces of ignorance, indifference and downright hostility from much of Scotland’s landowning class.
But my best guess is that the wolves will be back. The climate has begun to inch away from the dark forces of Victorian prejudice to which much of Scottish land management practice still clings. Community buy-outs of estates have forced their way on to the political and social agenda of the land. In December 2016, the Arkaig Community Trust, in partnership with Woodland Trust Scotland, announced the purchase of 2,500 acres of Scots pine woodland above Loch Arkaig in Inverness-shire, having raised £500,000 in nine months. The woodland was described as “degraded”, but the management strategy is based on the restoration and expansion of a key native habitat. The move is symptomatic of a new optimism that has begun to enliven social and political debate in Scotland, at the heart of which is a new relationship with the land, with nature.
And just a month earlier, the Scottish Government approved the formal reintroduction of beavers into Scotland after a five-year official trial in Argyll and the simultaneous emergence of a slightly less official population on Tayside accumulated from mysterious sources, but demonstrably thriving. The government courageously announced that its decision would embrace both groups, despite sustained hostility from farmers in Angus and Perthshire which included random shooting of beavers and setting snares on dams and lodges. Both beaver groups would be allowed to expand their range naturally, and other areas of Scotland would be targeted for reintroductions.
The precedent is a significant one for wolves. Reintroduction of bird species had always been regarded as a more straightforward process, but a significant mammal with a capacity to redesign its chosen landscape, creating and expanding wetland, slowing the flow of watercourses, making new habitats and opportunities for a vast range of species of fish, plants, insects and birds . . . all that indicates a willingness in government and nature conservation to challenge the old order, to make a space for new thinking. All that must mean that there is a greater likelihood now than at any time in the last 200 years for the return of the wolf to Scotland.
It was in that frame of mind that three days after the last snowfall of the winter (so far advanced was March that it was also just one day before the clocks went forward), I headed back to the Rannoch-Moor-facing flank of Beinn a’ Chrulaiste. As was the way throughout that winter, no sooner had the snow fallen than the temperature climbed again, and what I found was a land in transition again. There was sunlight, but there was also a high, thin damask of cloud. The mountains were zebra-striped with snow and dark rock. The Moor wore all the wolf shades from dark brown through all the shades of grey and the slate of pools and lochans, all of it shot through with the white of old snow patches, a confetti of white. It occurred to me that twenty wolves could walk across that spreadeagled land and I would be lucky to see one of them.
I mention this because Beinn a’ Chrulaiste is a mountain which lives in mortal fear of its deer, and because wolves and deer and Rannoch Moor were part of my purpose on the mountain. And because of the red deer hinds clustered within yards of the car park of the Kings House right under Beinn a’ Chrulaiste when I parked there. Such an occurrence is by no means unusual in Highland Scotland, which has been wolfless for more than 200 years now, and in that time the deer have forgotten how to behave like deer. Studies at Yellowstone have shown how deer quickly re-learn forgotten behaviour in the company of reintroduced wolves. The very presence of wolves keeps the deer herds on the move so that the impact on the land of their relentless grazing is reduced immediately. I asked Beinn a’ Chrulaiste what it thought of the idea of a wilderness national park with wolves right here, and it agreed with me.
For nineteen consecutive weeks through the summer and early autumn of 2001, I paused under Beinn a’ Chrulaiste at midnight. I had been asked to give a talk every Tuesday evening to a different group of American visitors on board a small cruise ship that was moored for the night at Neptune’s Staircase, a majestic chain of locks on the Caledonian Canal. It was a delightful commission. The audiences were warm and engaged, the meal I shared with them was excellent, the job paid well, and the drive between Glen Dochart (where I lived at the time) and the ship’s berth a little to the west of Fort William was hardly a hardship. Every week, more or less around midnight, my drive home wound up through the tight black-rock curves of the Pass of Glencoe, and then the road would open out to accommodate the broad miles of Rannoch Moor on my
left, the mountains of the Black Mount on my right. Immediately before that there was the small matter of passing between the scene-stealer (Buachaille Etive Mòr) and the unsung off-to-one-side mountain, Beinn a’ Chrulaiste. And every week, I crept along that long, straight road among hundreds and hundreds of red deer. Just past Beinn a’ Chrulaiste, I slipped into a layby, wound down the window, switched off the engine and tuned in to the midnight secrecies of the red deer.
As far as I could see, there were two reasons for the gathering. One was that the lush grass on the roadside verge was off-limits during the daytime because of the volume of traffic. After midnight, mine was often the only car on the road for miles at a time.
The second reason was that they liked the warmth of the road and lay down on it. Sometimes I had to treat them like roundabouts. Here was the living proof of Aldo Leopold’s theory. Here were fearless deer in a wolfless landscape, deer which had long since forgotten how to behave like their ancestors behaved when they shared the land with wolves. And there was the mountain that lived in mortal fear of so many deer. If you climb Beinn a’ Chrulaiste by the burn that feeds into the River Etive near the Kings House, you can count the number of trees on the mountain as you climb. One.
Such is the legacy of the wolfless years, the God-with-the-pruning-shears years. The memory drifted back into mind when I pulled in to the Kings House on a late March day of 2017, and I found a posse of red deer dozing by the car park.
I sought out the company of the burn which emerges into the overworld from the unknowable inner heart of the mountain among its summit rocks. The re-interpretation of that burn as a kind of pulmonary artery of the mountain is irresistible, ferrying lifeblood to the landscape’s lungs, sustenance for all nature, and nature writers for that matter. Just below the watershed I sat in pale sunlight on a rock in the middle of the burn and between two talkative little waterfalls, a notebook and a map in my lap, a sandwich in my hand and the makings of a cup of tea. I fished the teabag from the cup with a finger and in the process I spilled tea over a few square inches of the Ordnance Survey’s idea of Rannoch Moor. I immediately thought of Sweet Medwin Water, of that map, those stains. I wiped the Rannoch tea, watched the residue darken, and left it where it was. The tradition is alive and well, George, on this off-to-one-side mountain between Glencoe and Rannoch, as it was in the southern Pentland Hills. The rock where I sat was pale pink, and the melting snow had imbued the burn with a hint of the green of glaciers in its pools and glimmers of yellow in its cataracts and small falls.
For an hour, possibly longer, I did nothing at all but look around, drinking tea and burn water, and drinking in that astounding land. Slowly I realised that the peculiarities of the light and that high, thin cloud conferred on the snow the frailest, the palest, the iciest shade of blue you ever saw. Yet that very frailty of that blue was all-pervasive, for it was held fast and underpinned in every large and small fragment of snow. And every snow fragment was in turn buttressed and secured by black rock and dark brown heather stems, but then again these seemed to be held in place by the snow. But the blue was as transient as eggshells and the whole effect was of a phenomenon that might crack apart in a million places at once and the whole palette of the landscape collapse, or slide away into gullies, burns, rivers.
The temperature climbed into the early afternoon, the wind drifted away, and I could almost sense the mountain shaking itself free of the warming, dwindling snow – like a wolf. On my way down, the change in the underfoot conditions was marked. The whole hillside was charged with the movement of impromptu burns and waterslides, so many of them that I was struck with an image of migrating eels, albeit it a downstream migration. They burbled and gurgled. They mumbled, rumbled and tumbled. They wriggled, giggled and jiggled. They croaked and joked. They glittered and chattered. They tripped and skipped. And the Allt a’ Ballaich, the mountain pulmonary, drank them all and surged on its way down to the distant glen of the River Etive.
Back at the car park, a tourist minibus had decanted its passengers beside the deer, some of which had walked right up to the bus, clearly in expectation of being hand-fed. I have no doubt the visitors get a kick out of the encounter. God knows what the deer get out of it, but none of it will be healthy.
Once the bus had gone, they went back to browsing and drowsing. One grey-faced old hind lay in a flat-out curve on the grass. She hadn’t moved to greet the bus. When she lay with her chin in the moss and her ears erect (and with the notable absence of a thick tail to wrap round her muzzle), there was a moment when I thought she looked like nothing so much as an old wolf.
If you drive south between the edge of Rannoch Moor and the mountains of the Black Mount, as I did in the late afternoon of the last day of winter, you should pause to have a look out at the Moor just where there is a cluster of lochans not far from the road. The islands in the lochans reveal the true nature of this land, which is that it should be lightly wooded. They reveal it only because no deer graze there. Any crossing of the Moor reveals the same thing, except that the only evidence of trees you encounter is their broken, long-dead bones protruding from the peat. Too many deer impoverish the land, and then because the land is impoverished and cannot sustain so many deer, the health of the deer herds themselves is also impoverished.
Remember Paul Errington, writing in 1967:
Of all the native biological constituents of a northern wilderness scene, I should say that the wolves present the greatest test of human wisdom and good intentions.
Watching the old hind with the wolf face I thought that, fifty years later, it’s time to put our wisdom and good intentions to the test. It’s long past time.
Chapter Nine
Hark the Herald Eagle
Mountain dark at the year’s end
then hark! the herald eagle
(a golden ray):
“I am the Light.”
The planet we inhabit spins on its axis in deepest midwinter in such a way that it begins to draw closer to the sun, even as we tend to draw closer towards the fire. But regardless of what the thermometer may tell us, regardless of what winter may yet have to throw at us, an irrevocable process of warming and brightening is already dimly underway. The darkest days and the longest nights are already behind us, and nothing in nature misses the change, unless of course it’s hibernating. You could be forgiven for thinking that the first place to mark the change would be somewhere mild in the west, perhaps a shoreline lulled by the Gulf Stream where palm trees nod agreeably in gardens. But it is not so. The first truly conspicuous indication that winter is on the wane is one of grand gestures, and high in the landlocked mountains at that, and even while winter still seethes.
At the rounded end of a dipping hill shoulder, I was pretending to be a small piece of the big rock at my back. It is at a little over 1,500 feet, and somewhere in that wild and roadless terrain between the glens of Balquhidder and Dochart. The rock is on more or less level ground, the first respite after the steep plod up from one of those small cul-de-sac glens that plough deep into the hills then abruptly seem to think better of the idea. The shoulder climbs away from the rock, rises in a series of false summits to a rough cairn a thousand feet higher.
I sat there because quarter of an hour ago now I saw a golden eagle climbing in wide spirals up through one of those vast internal spaces enclosed by the flanks of the big hills. Then as it reached some kind of zenith in its own mind, it drifted south on the north wind towards the summit of this very hill. As it happens, I know this eagle, or at least I recognise it: a male, almost universally dark, a kind of mahogany shade, except that those feathers on the nape of his neck that ornithology decided long ago were of a distinctive enough shade to christen the bird “golden” . . . that feathered headdress seemed to me to have a particular burnish. I know where it is accustomed to nest. I also have a rough idea (very rough – I have no grasp at all of how a golden eagle thinks) of how it defines its territory. After years spent watching the same two pairs on adjac
ent territories, I have begun to believe that the boundaries may be determined not by distance or geographical features but rather by flying time away from the nest, and so the boundaries of territory will fluctuate with the wind direction. But when golden eagles mark out their territories, when they begin to restate their claim, when they embark upon their own idea of the annual festival of New Year, they do so by display-flying above the same prominent landscape features. However flexible the boundaries of territory may be on a day-to-day basis, year after year they announce their renewed presence to the rest of the watching world in the same places, and these may (I’m guessing again) mark the territory’s non-negotiable core.
So I sat with the big rock at my back because I saw the eagle climb and drift towards the summit of the long hill shoulder, and because I know from many hours spent here over many old winters, that this particular hill shoulder is important in that particular eagle’s scheme of things. And as I sat, I told myself this: if the eagle in question is about to do what I think it may be about to do, then I am in the right place at the right time, and this could be good. I faced south, the rock shielding me from the north wind, and I prepared for the near certainty of getting very cold very slowly.