The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  Number 14 baffled Yellowstone’s professional staff more than most, and appears to have got under the skin of Doug Smith. The summer after her death, he rode out on horseback ‘to find what was left of her. Not surprisingly, little was waiting for me but bone and hide. I found too the dead moose she’d been battling with, also entirely consumed by scavengers. I knelt one last time by her tattered carcase, feeling the quiet of this extraordinary spot in the Yellowstone back-country. A slight breeze came up, fingering the tall summer grass. Looking around, all in all it seemed a beautiful place to come to rest.’

  The entire Yellowstone reintroduction project was only possible because of the Nez Perce tribe and its particular relationship with wolves. The first wolves were released onto the Nez Perce reservation; the tribe offered them a home at a time when state authorities refused to handle wolf management programmes. Wolf reintroduction was political dynamite, and politics prevailed over wolves. Only eighty years before, the US government initiated a policy of wolf extermination, a state of affairs that lasted until 1973 when President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act. The wolf was the first animal to be listed as endangered.

  Few people would have blamed the Nez Perces if they had declined to assist the United States government in the resettlement of Canadian wolves into Yellowstone. Historically, no tribe was treated more brutally by white America than the Nez Perces, but as the head of the recovery programme Ed Bangs put it, ‘The Nez Perces revere wolves: they have a different way of looking at animals.’

  Catherine Feher-Elston, an archaeologist and historian who has worked with many indigenous peoples across the world, wrote of the Nez Perce relationship with wolves in her 2004 book Wolfsong:

  Nez Perce call wolf He’me. Wolf is an embodiment of past, present and future to them . . . Levi Holt, a Nez Perce who worked with the wolves, maintains that wolf recovery helps return the Nez Perces and all people to balance, dignity and the right way to live. ‘Restoring the wolf, protecting the wolf, sharing our lives with the wolf gives us a chance to have our culture reborn,’ says Holt. ‘We know that successful recovery will lead to delisting of the wolf. We know that some ranchers fear wolves will hurt their livestock. We know that if states take over wolf management and wolves are delisted, some people will hunt wolves. But our tribe will not take part in hunting wolves. People will not be allowed to hunt them on Nez Perce lands. We will honour our ancient relationships. What affects them affects us.’

  Holt says that when he remembers everything the wolves and his own tribe have endured together, he looks at the wolves and prays, ‘We mourned your death. We were saddened by your exile. We rejoice in your return.’

  Remember these things whenever you encounter stories of the wolf’s savagery, stories of the wolf as a wilful slaughterer of innocent children, a terroriser of isolated human communities, a despoiler of human graves, a devourer of battlefield corpses; whenever you encounter the wolf cast in the Devil’s clothes, remember too that where people have always lived closely with wolves and still do, they are often protective of the relationship and sometimes pray for them.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Cold Spoor

  Was Waternish perhaps the last hold of heathendom in Skye, as it certainly was of wolves?

  – Otta Swire, Skye – The Island and Its Legends (1961)

  SOMETIMES YOU just have to walk the landscape to see what rubs off. You go with no more than half an idea in your head: something happened here once, you tell yourself, or someone else has told you and you at least half-believe it. And you want to know if the landscape itself still holds the scent or the sense of it. It is a nature writer’s way of looking at the landscape. You go with your senses open to anything and everything, looking for the cold spoor of what it was that passed this way. Even a cold spoor is better than no spoor at all. Perhaps there will be a whiff of something on the wind. Perhaps the long absence of wolves will drop hints of their old presence the way something suggestive of what unfurled and died and vanished there forever seems to occur when you walk the battlefield of Culloden. When the naturalist and nature writer David Stephen wrote a novel about Scotland’s last wolf he called the wolf Alba, the Gaelic word for Scotland. His was a symbolic wolf that died on 16 April 1746, the date of Culloden. Scotland died, he was saying, with Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil, and the wolf died with it. It is certainly unarguable that both events impoverished Scotland immeasurably.

  Yet Culloden is a known historical event with a known outcome. There were eyewitnesses and survivors. As a species, we write down our own story. But in the matter of Scotland’s wolves, there are almost no certainties at all. The more I explored our old wolf stories, the more elusive the truth became. The few historical accounts of wolf-related events are rich in distortion and quite bereft of what we now know in the twenty-first century about wolf biology. Yet the wolf has not changed. The wolf the Yellowstone Wolf Project began to reintroduce in 1995 (the project proceeds apace as I write) is the same wolf that storytellers from the Middle Ages to the Victorians crossed swords with, the same wolf that appears in the lens of a Norwegian wildlife cameraman in the twenty-first century. Yet it has become clear to me in the course of writing this book that almost nothing in so-called historical records about the wolf in Scotland is reliable, almost nothing at all.

  So part of my response has been to walk the landscape to see what rubs off. Perhaps the old rocks, the oldest trees will speak to me more directly and with more honesty than the ghosts of the old people. So I travel, hoping against hope that perhaps just being there will flush out some extra awareness that lives on in that landscape, a connection that illuminates the past and makes it relevant to what the poet Kathleen Raine called ‘this very here and now of clouds moving across a still sky’.

  I began with the north-leaning peninsula of Waternish on the island of Skye in search of the scent or the sense of its wolves. The particular half-an-idea that directed my feet there had been implanted by Seton Gordon, an old sage of both Skye and nature writing. His long life (he died in 1977 at the age of 90) and his fascination for both wildlife and the handed-down word-of-mouth history of the landscape and its people gave him a reach far back beyond the range of most writers of his time. And he had written in The Charm of Skye (1928) about wolf pits on a Waternish hillside. And Skye has a place in my heart not easily explained considering I am an east-coast mainlander from Dundee, and the slightest excuse to return has always been fine with me.

  Waternish, or Vaternish in the old maps and old books like Seton Gordon’s, is out-on-a-limb Skye. Skye is the Winged Isle of the Norseman. Of the island’s four ‘wings’, Sleat boasts two ferry terminals and one end of the Skye Bridge, Duirinish is veined enough with roads for a stranger to need a road map, and Trotternish has a ferry connection to the Western Isles, a ring road, a couple of hairy east-west road crossings and Portree on the doorstep. But Waternish owns only a thin string of road that runs between the crest of a long hill and the sea. It begins with Fairy Bridge and ends with Trumpan, the one a by-passed stone bridge with a reputation for supernatural encounters and spooking horses, the other a ruined church famed for a massacre, and for the last resting place of a notorious madwoman. And nearby is Cnoc a’ Chrochaidh, the Hanging Knoll. There is little here to mitigate Waternish’s isolation.

  There is also something almost tangibly Norse at work, something more redolent of Shetland than Skye. There is a clutch of Norse-tongued names – Lustra, Halistra, Dun Hallin, Trumpan, the offshore islands of Isay, Mingay and Clett. And Waternish feels like its own island with a land bridge to Skye, much like Ardnamurchan’s barely physical attachment to mainland Scotland, and which makes for self-containment in a community. Some islanders elsewhere on Skye look askance at the Waternish folk, and doubtless vice versa. The landscape of Waternish is a factor in all this too, for in terms of its blunt, raw beauty, and especially its seaward prospects, there is nothing like it, even on Skye.

  Legend and his
torical fact (separating the two was never an easy task, especially among Gaels) have conspired to blacken the reputation of Waternish. Every legend is liberally bloodied, witches performed black deeds in the guise of cats, the centuries-old MacLeod-MacDonald feud commemorated at Trumpan was gruesome even by their own dire standards of clan warfare, and – wouldn’t you believe it? – the peninsula has the reputation of being Skye’s stronghold of wolves. Whether this last claim accounts for much of the darker side of Waternish lore is nothing more than speculation of my own, but I now advance it with some confidence because it is true of almost all the reputed haunts of wolves throughout Scotland. For all the cultural sophistication of the Gaels, they suffered from the same blind prejudice towards the wolf as most other northern European peoples, the same willingness to blacken its reputation at every opportunity. That the Gaels willingly exterminated wolves from their realm makes them no more and no less culpable than most of the rest of Scots, Britons, and half the tribes of the northern hemisphere. If wolves or stories of wolves have a home on Skye, here is as likely as anywhere and likelier than most.

  But Waternish was still early in my explorations of the landscape of Scotland’s wolves. It seems to me now that if there ever were wolves on Skye (and hints of a tradition prove nothing, not in the flaky depths of that malaise of Scotland’s wolf landscape I think of as ‘last wolf syndrome’, a previously undiscovered chronic medical condition that attacks the corner of the human brain dealing in rational thought), it might have been in just such a far-flung northern outpost that they clung on longest, that they made their last stand in the face of the relentless encroachment and wolf-hatred of the people. The coastal woods under Geary and the tumultuous alders at Waternish House suggest that, three or four hundred years ago, Waternish would have been more wooded than it is now, and that too could have assisted their tenuous survival, although woodland has never been essential to wolves. Seton Gordon had written:

  Other relics of the past age are the remains of long wolf traps. These are on the hill near Trumpan and must be of great age, for the oldest inhabitant has no tradition of when the last wolf was trapped in Skye. The traps are long pits dug into the hillside. In length they are some 24 feet, and in breadth approximately three feet. They are now almost filled in, but their shape can be seen at a glance. The entrance, too, is visible. There is a tradition among the old people of Waternish that the bait for the wolves was a piece of flesh placed near the upper end of the trap – the traps were all dug parallel with the slope of the hill – and presumably the wolf was imprisoned on entering by a door which closed behind it.

  Here was my first brush with contradiction in the matter of communities and their wolf traditions. The ‘oldest inhabitant’ had no tradition of when the last wolf was trapped, yet the ‘old people’ did have a tradition about how the trap was made and baited. And then there was the truly implausible bit, as recorded by Otta Swire in her book, Skye – The Island and Its Legends (1961):

  There are still faint traces of ancient wolf-traps to be seen. Indeed, so comparatively recent are they that tradition still lingers of how a hunter accidentally fell into his trap and was saved by his companion, one Gillie Chriosd Chaim, who caught the wolf by the tail and so held it . . .

  Um. Typical wolf behaviour might have been either to back away from the man who had fallen in, or to scramble free itself (and if a man could do it, rest assured a wolf could do it with ease). The one element of the story likely to have induced a hostile reaction in the wolf is the Alice-in-Wonderland-ish detail of someone else coming up behind it and grabbing its tail, an idea about as likely in the real world as the Mad Hatter’s tea party. It is a shame that the wolf declines in real life to live up to its ancient reputation, for there would have been a delicious natural justice if the hunter had been torn apart in his own pit by the very quarry whose death the pit had been designed to achieve.

  Elsewhere on Skye, at Prince Charlie’s Cave near Elgol, Otta Swire notes that it has a claim to be where ‘one of the earlier Mackinnon chiefs, being attacked by a wolf, slew the creature by forcing a deer bone down its throat, a feat still commemorated in the Mackinnon arms.’

  Despite the Grimm-esque quality of the yarn-spinning, she is confident enough to assess Waternish’s reputation thus: ‘Was it perhaps the last hold of heathendom in Skye, as it certainly was of wolves?’ Yet no-one has ever supplied a scrap of evidence to back up that ‘certainly’.

  Back in the real world of Waternish in December, I looked out across Loch Bay where a conifer plantation ends and the cliff belt about the waist of Sgurr a Bhagh begins. Beneath it hang folds of skirts fashioned from native trees, untrampled, ungrazed, unfelled, unburned, the natural order. I watched them grow grey and darkly purple one quiet midwinter afternoon and thought the wolves would have loved them.

  There were only two hours of usable daylight left. There was no prospect of afterglow or moonlight to steal from the long northern night, merely the certainty of a dirty afternoon, a week before the shortest day, growing progressively dirtier. Wind had blasted rain into submission, but that was all that had submitted. It had looked an unenticing prospect when the squalls thudded through a half-dark noon, but by one o’clock they had ceased their percussive flaying of the window where I worked, and I rose from the writing table and went out into the island. By two I was scrambling through a little gully on the flank of Beinn na Boineide and the air was the icy breath of the Arctic. If anything else was to fall from that sky that day it would be snow.

  I have long since learned to value fragments stolen from the unlikeliest days: two hours on a hillside in Waternish can amount to an energising expedition after a long morning writing. A mind weary with word-making can be blown clean and uncluttered, and goes eagerly in pursuit of the wolf image it has made for itself. There is no long, patient stalk to consider, nothing to pack, nothing to prepare. There is just jacket, scarf, wellies, gloves, binoculars and an afterthought apple for my pocket. Then there is just the being there.

  I love the gloaming hour whatever the season, the folding away of the daylight creatures and the unfolding of night lives, the brief pause of overlapping regimes. Here an owl might contemplate an eagle, the turning head of a wind-perched kestrel might follow a low-flying skein of whooper swans homing in on a roosting lochan. At the same hour on a December day a decade or two before Culloden, a fox might have stepped deferentially aside from a hunting wolf.

  At a little over 1,000 feet, Beinn na Boineide, the Bonnet Hill, is the head and shoulders of all Waternish. I tramped up out of the gully, breathed easier on the slopes above, saw the sea widen and Waternish’s own shape and shade of moorland hill lengthen. With no light in the sky the moor grasses smouldered with their own dark flame. There was no bright point in all the landscape. A slab of dark grey cloud lowered and squatted on Waternish, so I walked north keeping below it, following the line of overgrown dykes until I stumbled on the bed of an old track. A slow, downhill, breaking wave of peat and moss and lichen had overwhelmed the bones of dykes and track, obliterated the art of the builders. If there was anything left of the old wolf traps, if I could find what was left, if there had ever been wolf traps at all other than in a storyteller’s imagination, this was what I could expect to find . . . their grown-over ghosts.

  Once I would have walked here among birch, hazel, oak, ash, rowan, alder, willow, pine, aspen maybe, an airy woodland shaped into contrary uphill waves by the sea wind. Once, the road-and-dyke builder might have stood here among such trees and watched a wolf catch his scent on the wind, test it, and step quietly away from it. I allowed myself to believe that much, for the moment. Then a buzzard cried close by and almost at once rounded a buttress moving sideways across the strengthening wind, led by the primary feathers of her left wing. And I was above and behind the bird, so I crouched to be a rock on the hillside, well placed to watch her harness the wind to her bidding. When I put the glasses on her she almost filled them.

  She sat on the wind
rather than hovering like a kestrel. She held her wings in rigid concave arches, flexing them only briefly to make minute adjustments of her position or to drift away a yard or two over the moor only to turn again into the wind, yellow legs dangling. Her head restlessly scanned the moor below, ahead and to either side, and to the far horizons. In perhaps ten minutes, she was never further than 20 yards from where I had first seen her. Then she started to drift towards me, sideways and slightly backwards, conceding a few yards of airspace to the wind. As the bird drifted, she also rose, climbing the hillside backwards. In that attitude she passed above my head, low and dark and huge. Instantly the tables were turned. Now she was above and behind me, and I guessed that her scrutiny of the landscape was now riveted on me: the watcher watched.

  Or the hunter hunted. So I thought, of course, of the hunter who fell into the wolf pit. And when the buzzard called again, she was so close that I wondered if she might take my moor-coloured stillness at face value, mistake my hooded, hunched shape for a rock, and make a taloned perch of me. But it was only the steely downcurving edge of her voice that cleaved through me and put an iced chill between my shoulder blades. I felt something between primitive thrill and cold electric shock, neither of them particularly comfortable.