The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  So there was an old early July afternoon and early evening the day before or the day after my birthday and I was walking back south down Glen Ample, my head full of the deer and the sight and the sound and the smell of them, and as I walked out to where I had left my car I was redesigning the glen in my mind so that it looked not as it once did but rather as it could look with only a little realignment of landowning policy, a little willingness to accept the failures of past and present regimes, and the colossal miracle that will be required before your species and mine acknowledges one essential truth: that the wolf will do the job better than you or me.

  There are three small summits on the glen’s blunt western ridge, all named by the Gaelic language, all saying exactly what they mean. The northmost is Meall nan Oighreag, which is the hill of the cloudberry, and sure enough, cloudberry grows vigorously there. The middle one is Sgiath a’Chaise; sgiath is a wing and caise is steepness and sure enough the summit is wing-shaped and the steepest contours on that side of the glen cram around it. The third is Meall Mor, which more or less means the big lump, and, especially seen from down on Loch Lubnaig, it is exactly that. Between the Wing and the Lump there is a crag whose name is Creag a’ Mhadaidh, which is the Wolf’s Crag, and while, as we have already seen, names on maps that insinuate the once-upon-a-times of wolves are as biologically reliable as Aesop, there is a stronger case to be made where the surrounding landscape has been named with such precision. There is, for example, many a Creag na h-Iolaire – the eagle crag – hereabouts where eagles still perch or nest as they must have done for centuries, many a Creag an Fhithich – Raven Crag – that still resounds to the loud proclamations of ravens. And there can be few places in the whole of Britain further removed from the influence of Viking or Saxon than Highland Perthshire, so none further removed from their Wolfs and Ulfs and Olafs that doom so many folklorists to disappointment when they go looking for genuine wolf place names. Nor is there a local last wolf tradition, no historical perversions of hunter-heroism that invite ridicule like Strath Glass, Sutherland, and the Findhorn. And when you watch the deer on the run within their own landscape, watch how they use it and watch how they are constrained and made vulnerable by it, there is, at the very least, a sense of the wolf at work in such a landscape, and the presence of a Creag a’ Mhadaidh perhaps acquires a degree of credibility.

  The glen subsided into a sultry early evening, a seductive mood of edgy, unrelaxed tranquillity, as though perhaps there was a storm under the horizon but heading this way. I had seen something in a flock of whooper swans a few months earlier that had sown that particular seed. I had stopped to watch them from my car where they grazed in a field, the car partially screened by a skinny hedge. The birds were relaxed and grazing, untroubled by my presence. I had been there for about half an hour when suddenly every bird stood erect, heads held high, facing west. I swivelled the binoculars to see what might have alarmed them; anything from a dog-walking farmer to a passing white-tailed eagle might have induced such a spontaneous and unanimous response. I found nothing. Still the disquiet flowed through the flock like a wind among fallen leaves. They called constantly for fully ten minutes before a crack of thunder and a shaft of lightning heralded a short and ferocious storm that blackened the visible world, whitened the ground with hailstones and rocked the car with gusts. No hint of the storm had offered itself to me, but the swans had known about it while it was still under the horizon.

  In my Perthshire glen on a summer’s evening a few hundred feet below the Wolf Crag, then, I felt some unnameable disquiet, and I thought of the swans and the storm. And I had just been handed a vivid enactment of the effect of the absence of wolves, and in the midst of it all there was a crag named for a wolf. I can’t see storms under the horizon; yet I was picking up on something apparently still out of reach. It would take much longer than it took the swans to sniff out the storm, but in time I realised that my nature writer’s sensibilities were responding for the first time to the crackling energy of the sense of a wolf presence in my own landscape. And that was what had been the root of my disquiet.

  I walked out and drove home. There was no storm that night, and the morning after dawned clear as the headwaters of the Allt a’ Choire Fhuadaraich, the burn of the corrie of cooling, where the deer sought sanctuary and relief when a midsummer midday grew uncomfortably sultry, and wolfishly edgy.

  For nineteen consecutive Tuesdays of summer and early autumn a few years ago, I gave a series of talks to groups of American visitors on a ship purpose-built to cruise between Inverness and Oban by way of the lochs and canals of the Great Glen. Each Tuesday she berthed for the evening at the top of the tumultuous series of canal locks near Fort William known as Neptune’s Staircase. I drove from Glen Dochart, where I was living at the time, by way of the Blackmount, the edge of Rannoch Moor and Glencoe, boarded the ship, had a meal with the people who would be my audience, did my talk about the landscape and wildlife of Highland Scotland, then drove home.

  It was an agreeable and well-paid assignment, and that late-night drive home became a delightful ritual, the job done, the adrenalin of performance cooled, the landscape as remarkable as anything you can drive through the length and breadth of the land, the roads empty. I would drive through Glencoe somewhere around midnight, and often my car was the only wakeful movement in a still and slumberous world. I became familiar with the wheel of the stars across that portion of Highland sky, the coming and going of the moon, and on the long straights south-east and south after the night-black pyramid of Buachaille Etive Mor, the unfailing presence all along the roadside of hundreds of red deer. They walked, stood, and often lay all over the road, and moved off reluctantly at the approach of my car. They came down to the road at that hour to graze the lush grass of the verges and to moonbathe on the warm tarmac of the A82. (I thought of the wolf on I-70.) Their eyes stared back weirdly at the passing headlights, but I was always aware of the shadowy shapes of the hordes just beyond the range of the lights. So I developed the habit of stopping in a lay-by, switching off everything, opening the windows and letting the silence and the darkness rush in.

  Eyes and ears take time to readjust to the demands of such drastically changed circumstances. I found eventually that it helped to sit for a couple of minutes with my eyes closed, then when I opened them the night was a bright place. By then, too, my ears had begun to accommodate the unsilent night, the conversations of a relaxed deer herd, the yap of a fox, the moans of owls, the quiet passage of water, the layers of pitch that make up the voice of an easy breeze.

  Soon the car became a part of the landscape, albeit one that didn’t smell like it, and the deer treated it accordingly. That is, they ignored it, they walked round it, often no more than a couple of yards away, but never closer than that. They grazed nearby, they muttered to each other. I guessed that even with the windows open the smell of the car masked the scent of the animal within, and as long as I stayed quiet and still and inside, they were quite untroubled.

  I had no wish to trouble them, it was enough to sit still among them for a few minutes, using only my night eyes to try and make them out, to distinguish size and characteristics of individuals. Besides, I was dressed for after-dinner conversation on a cruise ship, not for the fine line the A82 treads there between the mountains of the Black Mount and the colossal night-blackness of Rannoch Moor, where, in my own mind, Scotland’s last wolves surely worked the deer herds and for many years outwitted the outrageous determination of mankind to wipe them from the face of the land, once and for all.

  Sitting there alone with the night and surrounded by the complacent deer, I harboured the thought that yes, mankind wiped the wolf from the face of the land once, but not once and for all; that here is surely where the wolf’s story should begin again.

  Once, I wondered what effect it would have on the deer if I bought a CD of wolves howling, and if I slipped it into the car’s CD player and cranked up the volume and let that ancient anthem of the landscape loos
e again through the open windows. What dim inheritance might stir in the breast of a red deer then? But I baulked at the artificial basis of the notion, and I have never gone back to sit among the deer an hour after midnight, never bought the CD. I’ll wait for the real thing to come along, as sooner or later it surely will.

  But I know that it was out there, in the careful embrace of Rannoch Moor, that a single wolf lingered, alone until age and loneliness finally defeated her, and she spent her final days trying to make contact with others of her kin by the only means left to her when travel and howling had failed. Then I thought that they may say the last Caledonian wolf is dead, but the truth is she is not yet born.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Dark Memory

  TREE BY TREE she travelled the morning, deeper into the Black Wood of Rannoch, higher too, for the Black Wood reached many miles to the south and west, feathered the slopes of many hills and mountainsides with pale and dark blue-green and bottle-green plumes. She skirted a wide, boggy clearing with scattered heathery hummocks. The pines in the bog were poor and skinny; they fared ill and died young. On the knolls they prospered in ones and twos, heftily limbed and wide-crowned. But her gaze was held by a solitary rowan. Its short, thick trunk tilted away from a cluster of rocks about its roots. Its branchy spread was even and rounded. A thick, vivid green fur of moss that covered the rocks had spread to the lower trunk, ending in a dead-straight diagonal across the trunk, the same angle at which the tree leaned. The tree had grown straight, then leaned in later life in response to some upheaval among the rocks, or the encroachment of the bog.

  The rocks formed a corner from which the crumbled base of old walls emerged low and straight and at right angles. The bright grey of the rock showed here and there through many decades of gathering moss and lichen: a house, another refuge of the Broken Men, the rowan deliberately planted to fend off malevolent forces, a forlorn hope on the edge of Rannoch Moor.

  Then she tired of the rowan and a new mood took hold of her. She pranced on her hind legs a few paces, touched down lightly on her front paws and sprang into the air to land again on her hind legs, a giddy dancing moment of play. She pawed at a butterfly, the first of that spring, then leapt to snap her jaws at it, but it swithered out of her reach. She stopped abruptly and looked round to see if any watching eyes had noticed her antics, found none.

  She turned uphill then and walked on, skirting the clearing, keeping to the lightly spaced trees around its edge. The trees, the fitful sunlight, their shadows, all broke up the travelling shape of her into meaningless fragments, a shape that moved at the edge of things, a shadow among shadows, soundless as butterflies, defeating even eagle eyes.

  She started to move west. She crossed the high ground of Cnoc Eoghainn and the glen beyond, skirted the conical hill of Leagag by the oakwoods of its northern slopes. Oakwood light is quite different from pinewood light, especially in that tight-budded northern spring. The pines clothe the slopes in crowds of overlapping crowns like the feathers on furled eagle wings. But oaks insist on their own space, clothe the slopes in far-flung branches like herds of stags. In winter and spring especially, sunlight lies on the floor of the oakwoods in dark-edged pools. She moved through these pools and their shadowed edges and her grey and black and pale tan fur shone and then faded, shone and then faded, and she walked on, and then she left the oaks behind and was back in the lightest of the pinewood again as the trees thinned, and then she began to catch the scents and the sense of the open moor itself.

  She remembered the horse suddenly. She remembered its pale, grey-gold sturdiness, the sense of its ancient wildness that still beat as a second heart, for all that it did its rider’s bidding. It had also been alert to her presence. She splashed into the tumbling waters of Gleann Duibhe, the Black Glen, the last westward gesture of the Black Wood before it succumbed to the big winds that scoured the moor. She lay down in a shallow pool and lapped water and sunlight.

  And then there was a darker memory. The shouts and stench of men, the high-pitched wail of the big hounds that stood taller than her by a head and ran like gusts of fast winds; the horses, a row of advancing hooves blocking the natural line of escape. The wolves had scattered and turned, taking their chances with the hounds and the blades and clubs of the men. But she alone had run on straight at the horses, ran straight for the hooves of the biggest horse, and even as its rider leaned at her with sword arm raised, the horse shied away from her, giving her space, and she went through that space as a falcon moves through air. For horses work not just in partnership with people, but also with that loyalty to wildness that sustains wolves. Faced with the running wolf, the horse adhered to that older, original loyalty.

  So she had run through the horses and on into the deepest, darkest recesses of that Strathspey pine forest with no backward glance at the blood-letting of the hunt. The pack’s best chance was to scatter widely and divide the hunt into fragments. But the hunt had chosen its time and place and strategy carefully, and turned out in force. The first encircling rush killed three, and maimed two others. One more was pursued by three hounds, caught by the throat on the hillside and torn apart, but it killed one of the hounds in the process. Then the hunt reassembled and went scouring the country for the possibility of survivors.

  She had heard the hounds again, loud and closing. She came to a river. She jumped into a deep pool darkened by overhanging branches, and swam to a shallow ledge at its upstream edge. She slithered onto that rocky bed and let the weight of the water press her into it, submerged her head and lay there with only the tilted tip of her muzzle above the water, breathing. She wanted to gulp air, to pant, but stone stillness and ruthless, painful control of her breathing was her only chance to live. The water, the branches and the fluctuating light, broke up her shape, the water killed her scent. So neither sight-hound nor scent-hound discerned her.

  To be a shadow among shadows, to move at the edge of things, these were the things that gave her life meaning, and she was unusually accomplished at both. She alone survived the hunt. And alone was how she travelled from Strathspey to Rannoch. And the memory of it all had resurfaced when she lay down full length in a shallow river pool by the edge of Rannoch Moor.

  She shook off the memory of the hunt as she shook off the waters of the Abhainn Duibhe. She walked west until she had left the living trees behind, although there, out on the high, bright edge of the Moor of Rannoch, she walked among the bleached bones of the corpses of trees that once shaded even the gaunt bareness of the Moor. She sat there for a sunset hour above herds of ambling deer, watched the reddening sun blaze low over the heave and sprawl of the Moor, burnished by loch and lochan, grizzled by smashed rock in every imaginable form, defended by the blades and barbs of its own wildness. She moved again in the dusk, still west, away from the memory of trees into a land as treeless as oceans. In another hour she walked side by side with her own moonshadow, with nature at its most demanding and its most accommodating, for what was she but a mobile fragment of the one true wilderness where she walked?

  CHAPTER 16

  Rannoch Once More

  I have sat long and often and listened to the ancient river speech, to the windsong of three birches and a rowan, the rowan above a meeting of waterfalls, which should be a portentous place. And the word on the wind and in the speech of the river is that the trees and the wolves and the people will be back.

  – Jim Crumley, Something Out There (2002)

  I HAVE RETURNED to the high bright edge of Rannoch Moor. I have had it in my mind for a long time now that this is where to restore wolves to Scotland.

  Why here?

  In the first place it is wild, if not exactly wilderness. With the addition of wolves it could reincarnate as wilderness. They can do that. Rannoch Moor is more or less empty of people, and for a while at least, it will be important that the wolves are not disturbed by people while they find their feet in the new territory, although I imagine they will recognise it at once as an old wolf territory. N
or, I suppose, should people be disturbed by the wolves for a while, although that will change, and soon enough the people will come hundreds of miles for the remote prospect of seeing and hearing wolves. I have heard it said again and again that you cannot reintroduce wolves without a widespread education programme, and maybe there is a certain amount that can be done to prepare the ground, but in truth the only way to be educated about wolves is to allow them into our midst, to give them space and time, and to watch and learn from them. They owe us nothing, we owe them everything. What we did to wolves would be called ethnic cleansing if we had done it to people.

  In the second place, Rannoch Moor is high and wide-open, which means it has long, hard winters. Wolves are designed for long, hard winters and prosper while their prey species weaken. It simply never gets too cold for a wolf.

  In the third place it has food, specifically red deer. Studies in Europe and America have shown that if you reintroduce wolves from an area where their main prey species is deer or elk or moose or buffalo, they bring that preference with them and it transfers down through subsequent generations. So we reintroduce European wolves accustomed to red deer, and having conspicuously failed in recent years to reduce red deer populations to numbers that the land can sustain, we can watch how wolves do it.

  In the fourth place, it is central. Out-on-a-limb wolf populations (especially reintroduced wolves) isolated on an island or in a coastal corner of the landscape are vulnerable to disease and attacks from people; there will be some people who will resist the reintroduction – with wolves there always will be.