The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  THE LAST WOLF

  OTHER TITLES BY JIM CRUMLEY

  Nature Writing

  The Winter Whale

  Brother Nature

  Something Out There

  A High and Lonely Place

  The Company of Swans

  Gulfs of Blue Air (A Highland Journey)

  Among Mountains

  Among Islands

  The Heart of Skye

  The Heart of Mull

  The Heart of the Cairngorms

  Badgers on the Highland Edge

  Waters of the Wild Swan

  The Pentland Hills

  Shetland – Land of the Ocean

  Glencoe – Monarch of Glens

  West Highland Landscape

  St Kilda

  Fiction

  The Mountain of Light

  The Goalie

  Autobiography

  The Road and the Miles (A Homage to Dundee)

  Urban Landscape

  Portrait of Edinburgh

  The Royal Mile

  This eBook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Jim Crumley, 2010

  The moral right of Jim Crumley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-84158-847-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-520-8

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Remember well

  GEORGE GARSON

  (1930–2010)

  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.

  – Paul Errington, Of Predation and Life (1967)

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1 False Wolves and True

  2 A Cold Spoor

  3 An Unreliable History

  4 The Rabid Droves

  5 Last Wolf Syndrome

  6 The Findhorn

  7 Rannoch

  8 Devon

  9 The Black Wood

  10 Norway

  11 The First Dreams

  12 Yellowstone

  13 A Dance with the Moon

  14 The Absence of Wolves

  15 A Dark Memory

  16 Rannoch Once More

  17 The Last Dream

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Society of Authors that greatly assisted the cause of this work.

  Thanks to the publishers of the following works for permission to quote from them in the text:

  Decade of the Wolf by Douglas Smith and Gary Ferguson, Lyons Press, 2005

  Comeback Wolves edited by Gary Wockner, Gregory McNamee and SueEllen Campbell, Johnson Books, 2005

  Wolfsong by Catherine Feher-Elston, 2004

  On the Crofters’ Trail by David Craig, Cape, 1990

  Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, Touchstone, 1978

  The Wolf by Erik Zimen, Souvenir Press, 1981

  The Company of Wolves by Peter Steinhart, Vintage, 1996

  The author is also grateful to the late Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac), Margiad Evans (Autobiography) and Seton Gordon (The Charm of Skye) for books which had a profound influence on his life and work, and to J.E. Harting (British Animals Extinct Within Historic Times) whose book did no such thing, but without which this book would have been much tougher to write.

  Particular thanks to my friend and landscape painter of distinction, Sherry Palmer of New Hampshire, for choice examples of American wolf literature and for countless cuttings of American journalism on the subject of wolves; and to Molly Pickall and Sarah Deopsomer of the Yellowstone Wolf Project who were extremely helpful and encouraging.

  PROLOGUE

  The Painter of Mountains

  THE THING about the mountain after the wolves came was that it started to change colour. We noticed the change the second year, in the spring. All along the level shelf at the foot of the screes where the deer used to gather in the evening there was a strange haze. We had never seen that haze before. It was pale green and it floated an inch or two above the ground, a low-lying, pale green mist.

  We had only ever seen the red deer there, deer by the hundred, deer browsing the land to a grey-brown all-but-bareness, all-but-bare and all-but-dead. It is, we thought, what deer do. They gathered in the places that sheltered them, places that accommodated their safety-in-numbers temperament. And every morning, once the sun had warmed the mountain, they climbed to higher pastures. They commuted up and down the mountain. But their days routinely ended browsing the level shelf to the bone, to the almost-death of the grasses, mosses, lichens, flowers. When there was nothing left to eat they moved. But as soon as new growth began they returned because they liked the comfort of the shelf under the screes, and the browsing to almost-death resumed. In the long wolfless decades they forgot how to behave like deer. Then the wolves came back, and overnight they remembered.

  We looked out one evening and there were no deer. None. We scoured the lower slopes, all the ways we knew the deer came down the mountain in the evening. Nothing.

  We saw no deer for weeks without knowing why, until on the stillest of evenings a wolf howled. We had never heard a wolf howl. Not even the oldest folk in the glen held the memory of wolves, only the handed-down stories that grew out of an old darkness. That howl, when it came, when it sidled round the mountain edge the way a new-born breeze stirs mist out of stillness, when it stirred things in us we could not name because we had no words for what we had never felt and never known . . . that howl sounded a new beginning for everything in the glen that lived. Everything that lived, breathed, ran, flapped, flew, flowered – and all of us – were changed from that moment.

  And in the spring of the second year after the wolves came, we saw the mountain start to change colour. Where the deer had been, where they smothered – suffocated – the growth, bit and bit again the heather-high trees (twenty years old, twenty inches high and going nowhere until at last they were bitten to death) . . . in that second spring we saw the evening sun illuminate a green haze, low on the land. At first we didn’t understand its meaning, so we climbed from the floor of the glen to the old deer terrace, and we found its meaning: fresh, sweet, young, vivid, green grass. The wolves, by keeping the deer constantly on the move, had restored to the mountain a lost meadow.

  And as the spring advanced, flowers! Splashes of white and yellow and blue, and the grass ankle-deep. And with every new season after that, the new growth summoned others to the change: butterflies, moths, berries, berry-and-butterfly-eating birds; then the first new trees.

  It has been ten years since the wolves came back. Their howls have become the mountain’s anthem. The deer still come back to the old terrace, of course, but in much smaller groups, and only for a few days at a time. Then they vanish, and we know they have moved on to the rhythm demanded of them by the wolves. The trees are many, and tall, taller than the biggest stag. The oldest memories in the glen do not remember trees before.

  Now, every year at the first hint of spring, we watch the low sun in the evening for the first illumination of the new green mist.

  The wolf that was handed down from the old darkness was a slayer of babies, a robber of graves, and a despoiler of the
battlefield dead. The wolf that howls in our dusk is a painter of mountains.

  CHAPTER 1

  False Wolves and True

  Clearly, this is an animal less likely to offer scientists irrefutable facts than to lure us on a long and crooked journey of constant learning.

  – Douglas W. Smith and Gary Ferguson, Decade of the Wolf (2005)

  I MET A MAN in Norway who told me this true story: ‘A friend calls me one Saturday morning . . . he has sled dogs, and in the night these dogs had been very upset and made much noises. He was going out to shout at the dogs, and he doesn’t have nothing on him, and it was winter. And he was standing there shouting at the dogs and then they were quiet. And when they were quiet he heard a concert from wolves 200 metres from his house. And he was standing there pure naked. Can you imagine that feeling? Nothing on you!’

  I said, ‘That’s got to be the ultimate wilderness experience.’

  My Norwegian friend said, ‘Yeah, he thought so too!’

  Ah, but then the story grew legs, became what the Norwegians call ‘a walking story’. My friend heard it again two weeks later from a completely different source. The ‘concert from wolves’ at 200 metres had become a slavering pack that confronted the man and threatened him so that he had to drive them off, and was lucky to escape with his life.

  ‘That was in 14 days,’ he said. ‘What about 140 days? Or 140 years?’

  The process of wolf-legend-making is far from extinct, but that is what happens with some people and wolves. The truth is never enough for them. The man who told me this story is a wildlife photographer and film-maker. He and a friend had just completed a TV film about a pack of wolves that had taken eight years to make. That particular pack’s territory is around 1,000 square miles. They find the wolves by tracking them in the winter when the pack uses frozen rivers and lakes as highways and the wolves write their story in the snow. The film-makers read other clues, such as the behaviour of ravens; ravens are forever leading them to wolf kills.

  ‘Tell Jim how many ravens you saw on one wolf-killed moose,’ one Norwegian film-maker urged the other.

  ‘Seventy,’ he said, and to make sure I had understood his heavily-accented English he elaborated: ‘Seven times ten.’

  Both men were openly hostile towards biologists who fit radio collars and transmitters to wolves after first firing tranquilliser darts into them from planes or helicopters so the collars and transmitters can be fitted. They raged against the stress the darting causes the wolves. One said: ‘The uncollared wolves are the real wild wolves. These people who use the radio collaring . . . it seems to be the wolves are only things. It’s like a computer game.’

  I smiled and told them of Aldo Leopold’s observation in his timeless landmark in the literature of the natural world, A Sand County Almanac: ‘Most books of nature writing never mention the wind because they are written behind stoves.’

  They smiled back. ‘It’s the same thing! And it’s very exciting to not know everything. If you know everything, it’s not exciting.’

  The Norwegian Government permits four wolf packs in the country. When I met the film-makers, three out of the four packs, and all the packs in neighbouring Sweden, were collared and tracked by computer. The film-makers were fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the Koppang pack, the one they had filmed. They spoke about the need to allow the wolf to retain its mysteries. Their language surprised me, because, historically, Scandinavians have not made the wolf welcome, and here they were using the kind of language I associate with indigenous North Americans. I liked them because they spoke my language too, and because historically, Scots did not make the wolf welcome either.

  I mention all this because in any exploration of the wolf in Scotland, sooner or later someone somewhere will ask you to believe that the last wolf in Scotland – in all Britain, for that matter – was killed in the valley of the River Findhorn south-east of Inverness, around 1743. You will also be asked to believe that the history-making wolf-slayer was a MacQueen, a stalker and a man of giant stature. He would be. Wolf legend is no place for Davids, only Goliaths.

  He was six feet seven inches. There’s a coincidence – the same height as Scotland’s greatest historical hero, William Wallace, or at least the same height as William Wallace’s legend has grown to in the 700 years since he died. Like Wallace, MacQueen was possessed of extraordinary powers of strength and courage; and in addition he had ‘the best deer hounds in the country’. Well, he would have. You would expect nothing less. The wolf he killed (with his dirk and his bare hands) was huge and black. Well, it would be, you would expect nothing less. And it had killed two children as they crossed the hills accompanied only by their mother. What, only two? When the story was first published in 1830, the Victorians swallowed it whole, in the grand tradition of wolf stories.

  And here’s another coincidence. At the same time, the Victorians were high on a heady cocktail of Scottish history and Sir Walter Scott, and in that frame of mind, were in the throes of building an extraordinary national monument to one of the greatest figures in any rational assessment of Scottish history – William Wallace. His monument stands on a hilltop on the edge of Stirling within sight of the scene of his finest hour, the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. The coat of arms of the old royal burgh of Stirling was a wolf.

  The Victorians loved the story of MacQueen as much as they loathed anything with claws, teeth and hooked beaks. Killing nature’s creatures (and often stuffing the results and displaying them in glass cases or on the walls of castles and great houses) was a national pastime among the gun-toting classes. It occurred to no-one that the last wolf in Scotland might not have been killed by a man; nor that it might have died old and alone in a cave, perhaps in the vast wild embrace of Rannoch Moor in the Central Highlands, or in the empty Flow Country of the far north, and many years after any human being last saw a wolf. No-one challenged the evidence on which the story of MacQueen and his casual heroics was hung and presented as fact. But that is what you are up against when you consider the place of the wolf in my country, and for that matter, in so many other countries. That is what I am up against in this book. But first, here is a glimpse of the animal we are talking about: not a supposed-to-be wolf but a real wolf.

  She was known as number 14 and her mate was Old Blue. Even if it does sound like the first line of a bad country and western song, it was a match made in heaven, or at least in Yellowstone, which in wolf terms is much the same thing. Biologists like Douglas Smith who are deeply embedded in the project to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the northern United States give wolves numbers or, very occasionally, names, to help keep track of them. Number 14 and Old Blue were two remarkable animals, even by the rarefied standards of the tribe of wild wolves. The average lifespan of a Yellowstone wolf is three to four years. Old Blue was almost 12 when he died, at which point Number 14 had to be at least eight years younger. She learned prodigiously from such a seen-it-all-before wolf as Old Blue, so that when he died, she was equipped for anything that the North American wilderness could throw at her. But first she did something astonishing.

  In the last few months of his life, Old Blue and number 14 mated one last time. But when he died, number 14 took off, leaving behind her pups and yearling wolves, leaving the territory of the pack. Alpha female wolves don’t take off when they have pups, don’t abandon their families. It doesn’t happen. But 14 took off alone into deep snow, into a landscape that according to Smith, was ‘so inhospitable it contained not a single track of another animal’.

  She was eventually found by a spotting plane, gave it a single cold stare, then simply continued travelling until all efforts at tracking her failed. She vanished.

  She was gone for a week. Then quite suddenly she turned up again, rejoined her family and the rest of the pack. Smith wrote: ‘Though no-one wanted to say 14 travelled alone so far because she was mourning the loss of her mate, some of us privately wondered.’

  Travel is the wol
f’s natural habitat. With no alpha male, but possessed of all the experience and survival skills of Old Blue, number 14 waited for the elk migration to come down from the high ground, then led her pack away, following the elk. Their travels took them into the neighbouring wolf pack territory and into a battle. They killed the resident alpha male and some of the others fled; two died in a snow avalanche. These were found the following summer, ‘their skeletons at the foot of a small waterfall, shrouded in the lavender blooms of harebell’.

  Number 14’s audacious move shook up the established order in that part of Yellowstone, and her pack acquired a huge territory with a single battle, no casualties and no alpha male. But the new territory was harsh in winter, the elk all but vanished, and the pack would have to rely on the formidable prey of bison. At first they travelled further into the National Elk Refuge, but then, and for reasons no-one understood, she led the way back to her hard-won heartland and stayed there, as uncompromising in the life she chose to lead as the territory she won for her pack.

  Number 14 was found dead at the age of six, but even her death had something of an aura about it. When national park staff found her, there was a golden eagle on her carcase, and if you like your appreciation of nature well garnished with symbolism, what more do you need than that? The carcase of a moose lay nearby. It seems that an epic encounter had killed both prey and predator. Later observation of the spot revealed a grizzly bear covering her carcase as if it was the bear’s own kill. There are no memorials to wolves like these, no epitaphs or eulogies. They live and die at the cutting edge of nature. The death of Number 14 was attended by golden eagle and grizzly bear, and it may be she was mourned by her own kind. Nature marked her passing in a way that honoured her astounding life.

  The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in 1995 after an absence of 70 years has been well documented; the lives of many individual wolves have sprung into sharp focus, and their stories have travelled the world. Yet despite these years of precious discovery, despite the sum of accumulated knowledge of earlier wolf biologists and nature writers, and despite the best of twenty-first-century technology, wolves are forever baffling and outwitting our own species. We simply don’t know why they do certain things. ‘Clearly,’ wrote Smith and Ferguson in Decade of the Wolf, ‘this is an animal less likely to offer scientists irrefutable facts than to lure us on a long and crooked journey of constant learning.’