The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  The district . . . was well calculated to have given harbour to the last of a savage race. All the country round his haunt was an extent of wild and desolate moorland hills, beyond which, in the west, there was retreat to the vast wilderness of the Monadhliath, an immense tract of desert mountains utterly uninhabited, and unfrequented except by summer herds and herdsmen, but when the cattle had retired, abundantly replenished with deer and other game, to give ample provision to the ‘wild dogs’.

  And if he had added the Cairngorms into the equation, here was – and still is – an area of around 600 square miles that could have accommodated – and still could – a pack of wolves. One pack, mind you, not an infestation.

  I crossed the Findhorn at Dulsie Bridge, a spectacular example of General Wade’s bridge-building capabilities as he stamped the land with military roads in the aftermath of Culloden; the whorls of the London government’s fingerprints were unmistakable. It was the beginning of the subjugation of the Highlands. The Clearances would be the end of the process. But for all that it represents, Dulsie Bridge was and still is an exquisite marriage of architecture and engineering and the stonemason’s art.

  I began to close in on MacQueen by way of a furtive, narrowing, deteriorating road that tiptoed through thick woodland. Suddenly the road slipped the leash of the trees and dropped to the river. Pheasants and partridges scattered on both sides, or simply ran ahead of the car for hundreds of yards. The wolves would have loved them. Clear views of the river confirmed the map’s diagnosis, that the next five or six upstream miles of the Findhorn were folded deep in a sinuous canyon. About halfway up and on the far side of the river was a tiny square marked Ballachrochin. In my mind’s eye I saw a small and roofless stone ruin, walls caved in, a discernible doorway; perhaps the gables still stood, and an owl or a kestrel or a raven nested in the ghost of chimney.

  I weighed up the possibilities. Bulldozed roads climbed the far hillside, and there was an estate bridge near Drynachan Lodge. If I could walk up that road to get above the canyon, I could look down on Ballachrochin, and scatter the bones of a 260-year-old story on the twenty-first-century landscape. I met a keeper outside his house, explained my mission, my wolf project, my interest in MacQueen and the story in which he had the starring role, and asked if I might use the bridge and walk up the bulldozed road across the glen. It was a Sunday, and I didn’t expect there to be anyone shooting up there.

  My request was met with a quiet smile, and an assurance that I would not find many wolves at Ballachrochin. If he knew the story of MacQueen, he expressed not the slightest interest in it. He was more concerned about where I walked.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather you stayed this side of the river. We have a great many birds up on the other side. But if you park at the end of the tarmac road you’ll have a lovely walk up this side and you’ll see all you need to see of Ballachrochin.’

  And so I did. I climbed high above the river on an easy track, then abandoned it to follow the upper edge of the canyon. Upstream, the Findhorn wound its way south-west, catching sunlight and shadow, dodging in and out of sight, until one last far-off blue-black mountainside terminated the view. Beyond that mountainside the unseen A9 would be clattering indifferently by as it curved round the lower reaches of Strathdearn.

  At that stage, I was quietly pleased with my strategy. I had a late lunch on a high, heathery seat in the sunshine. The river uncoiled far below round a flat and grassy bowl, beyond which patches of old birch-wood dropped hints of the old woodland character of the place. A small and derelict stone house stood in the middle of the flat green sward. I guessed it was as prone to flooding as any house in the Highlands. Anyway, it was at least a hundred years too modern for MacQueen.

  Sunlight was highlighting some strange patterns high up on the far hillside. I put the binoculars on them and found . . . fields. What on earth were they planting away up there? Then I realised that whatever it was, its principle purpose was to provide cover for thousands and thousands of partridges and pheasants. I could imagine the neighbourhood golden eagles queuing up over such a hillside. I could also imagine there might be a degree of hostility on this particular estate to the notion of wolves returning to the site of their legendary last stand, and perhaps that had explained the keeper’s unenthusiastic response.

  I walked on, still heading south-west, slowly unravelling the river, coil after coil, half drunk on the honeyed smell of the heather and the sun and the play of light and shadow on near and far hillsides, and the dance of it on the water. Then I saw clusters of chimneys protruding from distant trees. But they were not decrepit chimneys, and they were not broken-down stone, and they were not the chimneys of a small and roofless ruin. There were also rather a lot of them. The building they served was new and white and shielded from prying eyes by trees and it was very big. Whatever may have stood there in 1743, the twenty-first-century Ballachrochin is a substantial mansion house.

  I felt defeated. The estate was modern and forward-thinking and looked prosperous, and seemed utterly indifferent to its old claim to fame. Highland tourism routinely makes a meal of the landscape’s association with historical events: not here. There is no plaque, no notice, no leaflet, no hint that a giant called MacQueen had ever set foot here, far less killed a wolf, the wolf, the last wolf, the very last Last Wolf. For no good reason at all now that I think about it, I had expected to find a glen like so many others in the Highlands, beleaguered by its past, and shorn of its potential by 150 years of over-dependence on too many sheep and too many deer and too few natives. Instead there were clusters of white chimneys and thousands of partridges. And here and there along the river, expensive four-wheel-drive this-and-thats ferried anglers out to the choice beats. From time to time the voices of the anglers, a touch too strident for my comfort, rode the thermals up to where I sat. And suddenly nothing fitted.

  What now? I had had MacQueen in my sights all the time I was travelling north, all the way from the southern Highland Edge to Carrbridge to the revelation of Creag Eairlaich, the slow drive over the Wade bridge and through the trees. Ballachrochin was to be the gunfight at the OK Corral, the duel in the sun where I would shoot holes in MacQueen’s reputation. But Ballachrochin was doubly shut in – by its Victorian tree planting and the river’s canyon walls. There was no-one to shoot at, and my mission seemed ludicrous. What did I expect to find – a seven-feet-long rusting iron bedstead standing in the ruins?

  But I still believed the last wolf story was fiction, like all the others, that MacQueen was just one more fictional component in a fictional story with a fictional dialogue; that he had a walk-on part in a fake history. Yet somehow I had still thought I was going to nail him in his own backyard. But if he was a fiction he had no back yard, and Ballachrochin was only a storyteller’s stage set. The possibility of wolves had been palpable on the summit of Creag Eairlaich. There had been that extraordinary sense of being led, of destination. There, I had been working with reality, with a living landscape where real wolves had lived and could live again. Then I allowed myself to be distracted by the ghost of a man who may never have lived at all.

  But MacQueen was still the key to disproving the last wolf story, and it was necessary to disprove it so that history would have to look again at the place of the wolf in Scotland and make a more thoughtful assessment. And that would surely assist the cause of the wolf’s return. But how do you begin to disprove a story set in 1743, whose central character may or may not have existed, a story whose landscape setting treats it with an indifferent shrug?

  I drove to Inverness in the rain, spent several hours in a public library reading turgid local histories and old wildlife books and romanticised explorations of Highland landscapes written by obscure hacks a hundred years ago, looking in vain for some indisputable fact or flimsy hint that would allow me to lay to rest MacQueen and his last wolf and 1743 and all that once and for all. All I found were Harting quotes and Harting rewrites, and such a sniffy indifference from the
solitary member of staff that the morning settled on me like a personal rain cloud.

  I found a quiet bar and considered once again the gospel according to Harting in some detail.

  The last of their race was killed by MacQueen of Pall-a-chrocain, who died in the year 1797, and was the most celebrated ‘carnach’ of the Findhorn for an unknown period.

  I don’t know what a carnach is. The only meaning I can find for the word is ‘a rocky place’ which is not what Harting was looking for. The implication is that he had a bit of a reputation ‘for an unknown period’ which is as meaningless a character reference as I have ever encountered.

  Of gigantic stature, six feet seven inches in height, he was equally remarkable for his strength, courage, and celebrity as a deer-stalker, and had the best ‘long dogs’ or deer hounds in the country.

  I remembered Erik Zimen’s appraisal of so many wolf stories from Europe: ‘All these stories happen on a winter night . . . the hero’s courage, resourcefulness, and strength enable him to win against the odds.’ I wished I had his book with me in the bar, but I did not. I only had Harting’s.

  One winter’s day [Zimen noted it was almost always a winter day] he received a message from the Laird of MacIntosh that a large ‘black beast’, supposed to be a Wolf, had appeared in the glens, and the day before killed two children, who with their mother were crossing the hills from Calder [possibly Cawdor], in consequence of which a ‘Tainchel’ or ‘gathering’ to drive the country was called to meet at a tryst above Fi-Giuthas, where MacQueen was invited to attend with his dogs. He informed himself of the place where the children had been killed, the last tracks of the Wolf, and the conjectures of his haunt, and promised assistance.

  All the ingredients of the European wolf fable are in place: it is winter, the wolf is large and black, a figure is crossing the winter landscape (the addition of two children is an adornment), the hunter is huge and possessed of great strength and will surely prevail so that the wolf-oppressed population can rest easy in their beds again, and walk the hills alone in winter with impunity and with their vulnerability unexploited. Harting ploughed on:

  In the morning the ‘Tainchel’ has long assembled, and MacIntosh waited with impatience, but MacQueen did not arrive. His dogs and himself were, however, auxiliaries too important to be left behind, and they continued to wait until the best of a hunter’s morning was gone, when at last he appeared, and MacIntosh received him with an irritable expression of disappointment.

  ‘Ciod a a chabhag?’ (‘What was the hurry?’) said he of Pall-a-chrocain.

  MacIntosh gave an indignant retort, and all present made some impatient reply.

  MacQueen lifted his plaid and drew the black, bloody head of the Wolf from under his arm!

  ‘Sin e dhuibh!’ (‘There it is for you!’) said he, and tossed it on the grass in the midst of the surprised circle.

  There then follows MacQueen’s account of the deed in his own words, complete with Harting’s helpful if approximate translations, and if you were tempted to afford the story any shred of credibility thus far, credibility now dies with the last black, child-slaying beast of the Findhorn:

  ‘As I came through the slochk (i.e. ravine) by east the hill there,’ said he as if talking of some everyday occurrence, ‘I foregathered wi’ the beast. My long dog there turned him. I buckled wi’ him and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig (i.e., cut his throat) and brought awa’ his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious creatures.’

  Suddenly the Gaelic-speaking MacQueen is reduced to a single word of Gaelic (Harting opts for a phonetic rendering of slochd, meaning a pass rather than a ravine) and starts havering away in Lowland Scots, not just Lowland Scots but something that reads as if it was trying desperately to be a piece of dialogue from a novel by Sir Walter Scott, but not quite carrying it off. Undemanding posterity has put the two events together – the 1743 slaying and the direct speech of MacQueen – but as Harting points out (and many subsequent writers have chosen to ignore for it doesn’t half ruin the story) the whole thing was written down by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder in 1830 in his account of the Moray floods of the previous year.

  I closed Harting’s book for the last time, hoping against hope that I would have no further use of it for a long, long time. The colossal folly of the Victorians freed them from the reality of the natural world to such an extent that they had clasped to their collective bosom such a grotesquely mangled representation of what – if anything at all – happened here. I sipped my beer and looked out at the rain thudding against the window of the bar in long diagonal streaks, reducing Inverness to a grey blur. And the passage of time, I thought, has reduced the reputation of the wolf to much the same thing.

  As I drove home I thought about Lauder, about whom I knew next to nothing. He was a minor Scottish writer, and like all minor Scottish writers of the time he lived in the colossal shadow of Scott. Scott had published 21 novels between 1814 and 1828. Scotland, much of the rest of Britain, and – crucially – Queen Victoria were obsessed by him. He was a renowned manipulator of historical events, who, among other things, had transformed Rob Roy into something he never was in real life and created a landscape called the Trossachs; both these inventions live on in the twenty-first century. W.H. Murray, whose Rob Roy – His Life and Times was published in 1982, has written:

  In righting the wrong done to Rob Roy’s name by Scott, and by the historians whom he and others followed, I have found Rob Roy to be of stronger character than the early writers had imagined. Their works on Rob Roy require so much correction and refutation that few readers would wish to plough a way through the quagmire.

  And then I had what Hemingway called ‘one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry’, and as it happened, at that point I was both. It was this: MacQueen was Lauder’s Rob Roy. A few days later I was in the Scottish Library in Edinburgh.

  ‘Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bart., of Grange and Fountainhall, FRSE’ is the byline on his best-known book, The Great Moray Floods of 1829. Grange is a posh part of Edinburgh, Fountainhall is near Haddington in East Lothian, and FRSE indicates a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sir Thomas was minor aristocracy, with roots deeply embedded in Edinburgh society, who numbered the architect William Playfair (designer of the National Gallery of Scotland), the ubiquitous Lord Cockburn, and almost inevitably Sir Walter Scott among his acquaintances. But he spent much of his adult life at Relugas in Forres near the Moray coast, and was there to witness the frightening floods of 1829. His life was rich and varied, and his achievements included many commendable public works for people less fortunate than himself, but he did rather flatter himself that he could write. He was so in thrall to Scott that when he tackled a historical romance based on the life of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, Lord of Badenoch, the son of Robert II, and the fourteenth century’s most charming Highland thug, otherwise known as the Wolf of Badenoch, he felt compelled to issue a curious third-person disclaimer in a foreword spattered with code names for Scott:

  The author has been accused of being an imitator of the Great Unknown. In his own defence he must say that he is far from being wilfully so. In truth, his greatest anxiety has been to avoid intruding profanely into the sacred haunts of the Master Enchanter. But let it be remembered that the Mighty Spirit of the Magician has already so filled the labyrinth of Romance that it is not easy to venture within its precincts without feeling his influence; and to say that, in exploring the intricacies of these Wizard paths, one is to be denounced for unwittingly treading upon those flowers which have been pressed by his giant foot, amounts to a perfect prohibition of all entrance there.

  By the time he started to write The Great Moray Floods of 1829 then, he had already acknowledged the helpless nature of his thraldom to the admittedly overwhelming influence of Scott. In Lauder’s Wolfe of Badenoch, that conspicuously affected final ‘e’ appears to serve no purpose other than to di
fferentiate between his hero and the four-legged wolf that becomes embroiled in mortal combat (and loses, of course) with one of the book’s other characters. It is educational to savour some of the language that colours his account of the fight:

  He saw an enormous wolf making towards him, the oblique and sinister eyes of the animal flashing fire, his jaws extended and tongue lolling out . . .

  The panting and frothy jaws and long sharp tusks of the infuriated beast . . .

  The muscles of the neck of a wolf are well known to be so powerful that they enable the animal to carry off a sheep with ease . . .

  Long sharp tusks? Ye Gods! Then, a little later in the book when Wolfe, his two-legged and tusk-less hero, loses patience with some hapless wretch:

  The ferocious Wolfe could stand this no longer. His eyes flashed fire . . .

  Sound familiar? Yet it is to this man that history has turned, uncritical and unquestioning, for the very words that have become the epitaph of the wolf in Scotland. When you read those words in the relative academic calm of Harting’s book they simply strike you as ludicrous. But if Harting had read Lauder’s account of the last wolf in full, you like to think he might have recognised whose influence was guiding the writing hand of the author and dismissed it as the witterings of the Wizard’s disciple, a poor imitation of the Great Unknown.