The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  Whatever the gesture, whatever the creature, you are made aware of the courage it took, you understand a little better because of the momentary intimacy, and you share nature’s comradeship. And on Kodiak Island I became as commonplace as all non-bears, I was suddenly among legions of fellow travellers, the massed ranks of the tribe that defers to bears, and there was no loneliness. And suddenly I too took a bear at face-value and leaned towards her, and who knows, perhaps my leaning assuaged some loneliness in her.

  At our best, at our utterly remarkable best, we are capable of reaching out and being accepted by the tribes of nature, even those tribes – like the Kodiak grizzlies – that instil in us in the most unambiguous terms the awareness that we are not in charge of the situation. And even a wolf for whom we are surely the most sworn of enemies, given our mutual history of one-sided slaughter . . . even a wolf will occasionally pause in its daily routine to watch us go by, to stand out in the open at no distance, to watch with an air of frank curiosity that borders on greeting; or it will provide a concert at 200 metres for a man standing naked on his front porch at 3 a.m. on a Norwegian winter’s morning.

  This is the train of thought that I spill out into the high, cool air above Rannoch Moor, sitting on the plateau summit of Beinn a’Chrulaiste looking east, wondering what it was like after the ice freed it and it grew lightly wooded and the first wolves and bears came prospecting after the first deer – did it look like Yellowstone without the geysers? The first thing I ever read that made me think differently about landscape and wildness and nature came into my mind then, a form of words so familiar to me that I can quote it without looking it up, for it is from the foreword to Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. There is no one book that I have read more often than that one, the first time 40-something years ago (and how it turned my teenage head!), the most recent time about a month ago:

  For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal and as yet he must still, for security, look on some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.

  There is the essence of the argument – to look on some portion of the earth as it was before our species tampered with it. In my own country, that must mean a landscape managed by the wildness of wolves. Yellowstone has shown that it is possible to heal some portion of the earth to something like its old wild self, as it was before we tampered with it. Wilderness can be recreated, so long as we don’t try and do it ourselves. Wolves provide the best – no, the only – means of restoring something like a native landscape to the natives, both human and non-human. Where I might differ with Gavin Maxwell 50 years after he wrote these words is that ‘for security’ is no longer the overriding motive. We profess now to know the worth of conservation, of biodiversity, of a landscape replete with native trees as a force for good in the world. We know as indisputable fact that for an ecosystem to perform to its utmost, its top predators must be in place. Yellowstone has reinforced the message for the benefit of those nations of the watching world that remain to be convinced. Regrettably, mine is among those nations.

  If we were to introduce a bill to the Scottish Parliament tomorrow to put wolves back into the landscape at Rannoch Moor, centrepiece of the new Heartland National Park, with the safeguard that the Scottish government would permit three wolf packs to establish themselves, and beyond that number take controlling action, following the Norwegian model . . . if we were to do that, there would be vigorous opposition from the predictable sources – the farmers’ union, the gamekeepers’ union, the landowners, probably the anglers, probably hillwalkers’ groups. Their arguments are old arguments and they have been defeated in several parts of the world already.

  The most frequent objections will centre on the same old fears that emerged from the Dark Ages, and we now know these are groundless. Wolves do not attack people except in circumstances so unusual and so rare that it is impossible to legislate for them, and almost inevitably they result from people tormenting wolves or trying to feed them. Wolves have very good reason to avoid people, a couple of thousand years’ worth of reasons. As for wolves killing people, no-one knows when that last happened anywhere in the world, whereas here in Scotland we know for certain that we exterminated them; and whereas here in Scotland we know for certain that at least four children have been killed already this century by their own families’ pet dogs.

  The price we must pay, and it is the only price we must pay, is to learn that awareness I encountered at the far end of an Alaskan grizzly bear’s gaze across 20 yards of fireweed: that situations will exist out there in which your species and mine will not be in charge. You may confidently expect much more thoughtful and considerate responses from reintroduced wild wolves towards your species and mine than our species has shown towards its fellow travellers of the animal kingdom all across the planet, and forever.

  The slow string of deer out beyond the lochan shaped like a crab with one claw stops again to browse. No wolf leaps across the mirroring water to disturb their torpor. Like the Yellowstone elk, they have long since forgotten how to behave like red deer. Like the Yellowstone elk they will learn again very quickly once the wolf returns to Rannoch, once they have to share their landscape again with the painter of mountains.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Last Dream

  SHE FELT THE DAWN turn suddenly cold, then she heard swan voices. She crossed a low ridge, a fold in the skin of the Moor, and saw the birds. They were bunched tightly on a lochan, necks tall, calling loudly, staring at the north-west. The water wore that almost-whiteness of the twilit hours, and against it the birds were deep violet. The same shade edged the crests of a thousand wavelets the swans had stirred up in their agitation, as if the surface of the water had caught their mood and determined to share it. They were whooper swans, working north-west up the country before the long flight to Icelandic nesting grounds, stopping off at safe havens their ancestors had used for thousands of years. She knew their voices. The discordant chorus put in her mind the howling of the pack. She became aware again suddenly of her solitude. She knew their loyalty to the same quiet, shallow watersheets among mountains and moors; knew too that they were absent from late spring to early autumn, and that they returned with young birds in their company. That was like the pack returning to a denning site when the new cubs were due.

  She also knew they could see beyond the horizon, further than she could see, sensing the approach of storms or other dangers. Now these twelve raised their heads, their vivid yellow bills, and chorused their alarm at what lay in the unseen north-west. She followed their gaze and put her nose to the north-west wind. At last she smelled snow, that sting-in-the-tail snow, that last dance of winter that confounds so many Highland springs.

  The swans were further troubled by the appearance of a wolf. None of them had seen a wolf before, yet none was in any doubt about what she was. The spoor and the lessons of their ancestors were everywhere around such quiet waters. Race memory among the creatures of a northern hemisphere wilderness is a silken thread that binds centuries. Much concerning the proximity of wolves is inherited by every new generation, undimmed either by the passage of time or the decline of the wolf on the face of the land. So the swans swam pointedly away to the furthest corner of the lochan, putting a hundred yards of open water between themselves and the shore where the wolf stood. They swam in the same tight group, calling as they swam, reinforcing vigilance in each other and the collective purpose of the group. Then they turned to stare into the north-west again, although never at any moment were fewer than two pairs of eyes delegated to watch the wolf.

  She stared too, for curtains of grey-blue, grey-yellow, grey-white, were drawing across the mountains, so that the mountains disappeared eerily by degrees, so that the curtains became advancing waves. Behind the place where the mountains stood, the world was black. She felt the wind grow and grow colder. The first flakes to
uched her and melted. She watched the swans lie down, breasts pointed to the wind, watched them lay their necks along their spines and pillow their heads deep in sumptuous down and between their hugely folded wings.

  She had her own defence against the snow-wind. She lay down, curved her back against it, put her bare nose and furred muzzle between her back legs and swung the thick fur of her tail across her face, and prepared to sit it out, confident in the double luxury of her fur – a dense underfur and an outer layer of long guard hairs. Soon the snow made white ovals of swans and wolf, and a small drift a few inches high built up against her tail. She sighed, and closed her eyes.

  The snow eased. She stood and shook herself and the snow slid from her like the shed skin of an adder. The swans lay still as cocoons, all bar one that raised its head a few inches, watching. She saw then that several other furled swans also watched, that for all their restful appearance, they were not at rest, merely still. But she was not interested in the swans. She shook herself again and the snow flew from her like thistledown in a big wind. She raised her own head to scent the air and it smelled of swans and the icy clean edge of the snow wind. She turned a little west of south so that the wind was over her shoulder, so that she could test it as she travelled just by turning her head. She disappeared into the snow-gloom.

  Her sudden absence disturbed the swans as much as her sudden presence had done. They rose on the water and flexed their wings, shouldered away the snow from their plumage, then gathered loudly and swam into a tight wedge of birds. The wolf could be anywhere, could come at them in a sudden bounding run. Their heads jerked on tall necks, their voices rose, a discordant woodwind fanfare. (They had this in common with the wolf pack when they gave voice: if a note of true harmony was inadvertently struck by two voices, one of them changed pitch at once.) One swan, the self-appointed decision-maker, leaned his neck at the wind, dead straight, brought his wings up above the top of his back and pulled them down hard until the tips of his primary feathers flipped back off the surface of the water. That single wing-beat lifted his entire body clear of the water, and as it lifted he began to run. Running and flying at once, he led the swans into the loud, urgent grace of take-off. Almost at once the swans, too, were lost to the curtained folds of snow, their voices quietening into unseen distance. They flew blind and unerringly into the grey-white north-west.

  The lochan subsided and grew still, a slate-grey silence on the whitened Moor. The snow eased but still fell. The evidence that swan and wolf had lingered there also began to disappear. The swans had a sure journey, a known destination. The wolf had neither. But the Wolf Wind had come with the snow, and she felt for the first time since the killing of her pack that she might be within dreaming reach of other wolves. So she travelled in search of a dreaming place. She travelled more or less south because she had fled the killing of her pack that way, because nothing had persuaded her to change direction, because she had found the ancient refuge of Rannoch. If she found other wolves, if a new beginning was possible, she would lead them back there, back to the difficult place among rocks in the Black Wood of Rannoch, back to the fraternal embrace of the pines. It could begin again there.

  She travelled all that day with the same easy lope, the wolf’s long-distance gait. She rose and fell with the contours of the moor where it heaved in waves and troughs, the old spoor of the Great Ice. Distance was her destination. The solitary snow-furrow of her footfall showed the evenness of her stride. Nothing distracted her from the pursuit of distance. The other creatures of the moor who saw her coming or scented her steady downwind advance gave her room. There was nothing to be gained by intruding on the forced march of a wolf through their territories, not for any of them, whatever their size and numbers and tenacity and courage. They all fell back, made way, and sensed relief when she passed without pause or sideways glance.

  Hours devoured miles, until at last she began to slow and take note of the landscape again. The snow had stopped, and spring sunlight forced the clouds further and further up mountainsides, revealing piece by piece the mountain wall that signalled the southern edge of the moor. At the west end of that wall, the composite mass of Beinn a’ Chreachain and Beinn Achaladair emerged in the aftermath of the storm bloated with snow. She judged the narrow glen down their eastern flanks too difficult in those conditions. The snow had funnelled there and drifted to impassable depths. She chose instead the headwaters of the Tulla Water, saw the river grow and head south-west on easier, lower ground. She would keep its company at least as far as the mountains’ western flanks; there she hoped for an easier route to the south again. She fell in with the river and her new course, and resumed the same travelling rhythm as before, closing with every loping stride the distance between herself and the bidding of the Wolf Wind. Then she saw pine trees.

  After the wild, bare, arduous, snow-deep moor and the looming bulk of the mountains, the sudden distant appearance of Loch Tulla, blue and sunlit, and a new thickening of pine trees beyond reinforced her trust in the beckoning of the Wolf Wind. Miles fell before her, overpowered by her strength, stamina, resolve, and her sense of purpose that was nothing less than life itself, life for all wolves. Evening sun pushed the shadows of the trees out towards her in welcome. She reached the first tree and rubbed her flank joyously against it. She found a patch of bare heather and blaeberry leaves under the canopy of a greater tree where almost no snow had penetrated. She squirmed and rolled in the fragrant understorey of the forest. Every mile since she had left the swans at the lochan, every stride of every mile had been snowbound to the ankle or to the knee. Now she writhed like a cub in the snowless green. She was back among brother pines, like the pines that had shaded and scented her earliest days in Strathspey, and in the fraternal embrace of pines she felt at ease again.

  She walked slower, deep into the trees, found a patch of new grass yellowed by the evening sun, curved her spine down into it, wrapped her tail over her face and closed her eyes. Her heaving flank slowed into a settled rhythm. She summoned one last dream and sent it away across the forest, a wolf track that left no footprint.

  ENDNOTES

  1. For the definitive, full-blooded account of the way the Nez Perces were treated by the U.S. government, read Dee Brown’s classic of the American West, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

  2. The other species were eleven bison, seven wolves, four deer, three moose, two black bears, one pronghorn antelope, one golden eagle(!), one red fox, one otter and ‘sixteen unknown prey’.