The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  The medieval period seemed to have been something of a watershed in the fortunes of the wolf. In Scotland and in England, kings formalised their love of hunting by creating royal parks inside endless miles of fencing. Predators were eliminated inside the parks, and deer stocks decimated by over-hunting were topped up from elsewhere in the realm, and within a few generations the native deer stock was almost obliterated. Yet there remained a stubborn Europe-wide belief among hunting kings that if they killed off the wolves the deer stocks would increase. Yes, but only if they learned to moderate their hunting habits, which they never did.

  Edward I of England took that philosophy to its illogical conclusion when in 1281 he commissioned hunters to eliminate the wolf from the land. His project was so ruthless and so efficient that the wolf was gone within a decade. Without the perceived threat of the wolf in the wild places of England, hunting burgeoned as never before, and soon the roe deer was extinct.

  From that day to this, land managers driven by self-interest and oblivious to the self-evident truths of conservation and bio-diversity have knee-jerked their way from one quick fix to the next. In nineteenth-century Scandinavia, farmers decided to try and eliminate the elk so that there was less competition for their own grazing herds of cattle and sheep. But the elk was the wolf’s main prey species, and in its absence they turned to the next best thing – the very sheep and cattle the farmers wanted to have all the grass. Thousands of peasants were dragooned into an almost military operation to kill the wolves. So a chain reaction began, and within a generation it had wrecked an ecosystem that had evolved for millennia. In time, of course, they had to reintroduce the elk and the wolf simply walked back when no-one was looking. In the twenty-first century, elk-hunters and sheep farmers want to drive out the wolf from parts of Scandanavia again.

  And in the Abruzzi mountains in Italy in the 1970s, wolf biologist Erik Zimen found that wolves were feeding off mountain villagers’ refuse at night. When he investigated the problem he discovered that the local deer population had been exterminated by hunters, so he initiated a deer reintroduction programme and the wolves reverted to type and vanished from the village streets. He had simply put back a missing link in the chain. But it seems the lesson still has to be learned again and again.

  And yet, and yet, even throughout the many centuries of wolf persecution, even as they were being hunted to extinction in many regions of America and Europe, a passionate reverence for wolves has co-existed alongside the loathing, almost exclusively among human enclaves where the relationship with wolves is ancient and unbroken. From the Indians of the great plains to the Inuit of northmost America and Canada to the Laplanders of northmost Europe to the mountain villages of Mediterranean lands, wolves never lost their revered status at the heart of tribal society. They were invoked in rituals of death, fertility, and hunting, admired for their strength, resilience, hunting skills, the social cohesion of the pack, the determined independence of the lone wolf. Nomadic tribes saw themselves in the wolves’ endurance as tireless travellers. Inevitably, such an intimate relationship between man and beast produced extraordinary legend-making, none of it more extraordinary than the phenomenon of ‘wolf children’. It is biologically impossible for wolves to suckle children, but the imagery is created out of a view of the wolf as a wholly benevolent presence.

  There is no more celebrated piece of pro-wolf propaganda in history than the story of Romulus and Remus. It was widespread 2,000 years ago throughout Mediterranean Europe, and the possibility that it originated many centuries earlier on Crete rather than in Italy has done nothing to inhibit its durability or its fame as the founding myth of the Italian nation. Romulus and Remus were twin brothers, the fruit of an unlikely union between Mars, who was the Roman god of war, and a princess variously called Ilia, Rhea, Silvia or Rhea Silvia. Mars, being a god with a 24/7 lifestyle, seems to have abandoned his mistress to the role of single parent. This state of affairs left her vulnerable to the evil intentions of her uncle Amulius, who had the twins banished to the wilderness where he was confident they would die a pitiable death. Unluckily for him, but luckily for legend-making, they sheltered in a cave where they were found by a she-wolf, who suckled them and kept them alive, until a peasant called Faustulus stumbled across them and took them home. He and his wife Acca Larenia raised them as their own children. They obviously had enlightened parenting skills, for Romulus went on to found the city of Rome, which he modestly named after himself, in the suspiciously precise year of 753 BC.

  Somewhere along the way the twins fell out. Whatever the source of the dispute, Romulus killed his brother. Perhaps Remus wanted Roma to be called Rema, who knows? But by then the twins’ fame and their apparent powers of persuasion had achieved reconciliation between the Romans and the neighbouring warmongering Sabines. The twins had become symbolic of the union of the two races within Rome’s embrace, and at a stroke the wolf became the emblematic figurehead of the Roman Empire: it had, after all, nurtured the founder of Rome, and it had long been an object of worship in the Sabines’ animist religion.

  The survival of some tattered remnants of traditions born in the heyday of the Sabines may still explain the tolerance shown to the wolf even today along Europe’s Mediterranean edge. But in the far north of Europe, human attitudes towards the wolf – and particularly those of the Laplanders – are shaped by the inevitable ambivalence that characterises a race of reindeer herders who were also historically hunters. The Lapps, or Sammi, had developed a technique of chasing down wolves with broad skis on deep new snow across the open field, and those who did not own guns had developed ski-sticks with a stabbing point, two more examples of the man’s ingenuity in his endless war on wolves. Erik Zimen’s 1981 book The Wolf reveals some of the consequences in cold statistics:

  In winter domestic animals were kept securely indoors and, as the numbers of natural prey animals had been greatly reduced, the wolves suffered from acute food shortage. This, combined with the enormous pressure put on them by hunting, resulted in a drastic reduction in their numbers within a few years. Between 1827 and 1839 about 500 wolves a year were killed in Sweden, but 20 years later, in 1860, the figure was only 100. A similar drastic reduction took place in Norway and Finland between ten and twenty years later . . . The wolf was restricted to his last refuge areas in the wide, treeless, mountainous areas of the northwest . . . and found security in these almost uninhabited and inaccessible regions, and, thanks to the reindeer, plenty of food. But the Laplanders’ campaign against him continued.

  I wonder about those numbers. As we will see, the nineteenth century was probably the nadir of the relationship between man and wolf, its propaganda the vilest, its contribution to wolf history the most unreliable. It is all too easy to look at something 150 years old and treat it as wise simply because it is old. I have learned to treat every statistic I have seen about wolves with outright hostility – guilty until proved innocent. Killing wolves at the rate of 500 a year in a country the size of Sweden sounds like an overestimate of around 450. It’s so easy to slip an extra zero into the figures over 150 years. But the point is made: the wolf was systematically driven out of all but the wildest landscapes. New roads, aircraft, and the snowmobile with what Zimen called ‘its ecologically devastating effects’ took new tolls even in deepest wilderness.

  The Swedish nature conservation office conducted an inquiry into the distribution and numbers of the four big predators – the wolf, the lynx, the wolverine and the bear – between 1960–64. They found that the wolf was gravely endangered. The few survivors travelled great distances, no doubt an adaptation to the perpetual hunting. The result of the inquiry was public debate on whether the wolf should be protected. Surprisingly enough, many Laplanders came out on the wolf’s side. In spite of the traditional hostility to the wolf, they must have felt respect and admiration for it.

  But as long as there are wolves in reindeer areas, there are bound to be conflicts with the interest of the Laplanders, and revival of
the wolf in this region therefore seems unlikely. Nevertheless, the increasingly understanding and tolerant attitude of the Laplanders towards their hereditary enemy gives some reason for hope.

  Catherine Feher-Elston’s Wolf Song found an unusual source that might explain the ancient foundation of that hope, an abundance of amber:

  The Sammi . . . maintain that there is a sacred connection between the glittering gold colour of wolf eyes and amber. The amber eyes of the wolf are linked to celestial events – comets, ‘falling stars’, and lightning. The full moon is a special ally of the wolf, and both moon and wolf are sacred to the Sammi . . . It is said that when wolves encounter amber, they make prayers to it and kiss the fossilized resin to gain strength and power and communicate with the sacred powers of the sky.

  Such ideas do not sit well with contemporary science, but in a world driven by the global economy it never does any harm to be reminded that many human attitudes to nature were founded among isolated tribes, and that bonds forged with nature in isolation are infinitely more durable than global deals that recognise billions of dollars as their only yardstick. The invention of the snowmobile does not cancel out the historical truths that people are capable of extraordinary acts of faith, that in the countless eras of the Lapps’ evolution before the snowmobile was invented, they lived their lives at nature’s bidding, and they would find sacred things in the wolf as well as inconvenience to their reindeer-dependent economy.

  Catherine Feher-Elston uncovered an even more surprising man-wolf relationship in her own country among the Navajo, one that the twenty-first-century European sheep farmer is not going to like one bit:

  In the Navajo Way, people are responsible for taking good care of their livestock. If a wolf takes a sheep, it is not the fault of the wolf. The wolf is only behaving like a wolf. The shepherd is the guilty one – for not paying close attention and protecting the flock. If too much predation occurs, a combination of negligence and disharmony must be the cause. A hatalii will be consulted to determine the cause of the problem. A ceremony or ‘sing’ will be held to bring the shepherd, flock and family back into harmony.

  All the clan relatives, friends and community will come to the sing to help restore balance. At the conclusion of the ceremonies, the land, people, animals and plants will benefit. Balance will be restored. All will walk again in Beauty.

  We have grown so accustomed to the idea of the wolf as an adversary in so many parts of the northern hemisphere (and nowhere more so than in my own country, where we obliterated it more than 200 years ago) that the possibility of the wolf as a benevolent presence in our midst takes us aback. Yet it is every bit as widespread. And not all of it is rooted in the distant past. In 1998 I travelled to Alaska to make two radio programmes for the BBC, and there I met an independent wolf researcher called Gordon Haber. He was a man whose reputation had gone before him. He had studied with the great Adolph Murie, whose book The Wolves of Mount McKinley was one of a handful of seminal works that spawned the now flourishing literature that is American nature writing. Gordon Haber is comfortably the most uncompromising pro-wolf naturalist I have come across, and for many people uncomfortably the most uncompromising. But I like my champions of nature uncompromising. The good intentions of thousands of professional conservationists across the world are hamstrung by bureaucratic quests to ‘achieve a balance’ or to ‘reconcile all the competing interests’, a doomed philosophy that produces a political swamp and calls it wildness. Such people distrust the Gordon Habers of this world, distrust their certainty, their conviction, their single-minded belief that nature is a better manager of wild country than people, and in the particular case of Gordon Haber, that the wolf is the heartbeat of all of it. I liked him. I sensed a kindred spirit.

  I came across his name again a few years later in a book called The Company of Wolves (1996) by Peter Steinhart, who was writing here about the changing nature of the relationship between man and wolf inside Alaska’s Denali National Park (Denali is the old native name for Mount McKinley. and which has now been restored to both the mountain and the National Park):

  Gordon Haber reports that as more and more backpackers visit Denali, the wolves are becoming increasingly habituated to humans. ‘It’s an everyday event for wolves to walk up to people in the back country or campgrounds and sit down three feet from them,’ says Haber. ‘They pick up a book and walk off with it. They sniff a hand. People will say they looked over their shoulders and there was a wolf sniffing at their heels. It’s a touching kind of relationship. The wolves are totally at ease. It’s like “I see you as a friend.”’

  I love the implication that in the right circumstances, the man-wolf relationship may be reverting to its oldest prototype, in which curiosity begat friendship and mutual admiration. That way lies the salvation of the wild world. By and large the backpackers who trek into Denali National Park seek only the solace and sustenance of wilderness. This behaviour of wolves towards them is not necessarily untypical in places where the wolf population is strong and confident in its landscape and the people’s presence is benevolent and unthreatening.

  Haber must have found much to hearten him in a book called Comeback Wolves – Western Writers Welcome the Wolf Home. It is a collection of essays and poems edited by Gary Wockner, Gregory MacNamee and SueEllen Campbell and published in 2005 to celebrate the return of wolves to the American West. It draws its inspiration from one of those inexplicable lone-wolf journeys that punctuate our awareness of the way wolves behave and captivate the imagination of the wolf’s admirers. The book is dedicated to Wolf 293 F, whose collared body was found on a highway near Idaho Springs, Colorado, where it had been hit by a truck. Its journey had begun in Yellowstone, 500 miles away. No-one knows why, and no-one ever will. But it offers the delicious temptation to believe that nature was sending an ambassador back across the Rockies into one of the wolf’s historic strongholds (a stronghold from which it had been evicted by the white man) to see how the land lies now, to see what kind of welcome it might receive. The animal’s prosaic death might have been the end of the affair, but the Yellowstone connection and the discovery of the heroic nature of the lone wolf’s undertaking touched a nerve, and something very old and very primitive in the American West stirred into life. Many people there thought the wolf was long dead, but it turns out it was only hibernating. Whatever it was (and it might have been an echo of the pioneering spirit that emboldened the Founding Fathers and planted the seed of the American Dream) it touched hearts, and now the wolf is back in the West. This is from an essay in Comeback Wolves by Hal Clifford:

  But nature is saying . . . in the tracks of a lone wolf that came sniffing through Colorado not long ago, that I am here to be reckoned with on my own terms, and that you, Man, are part of me. You and I, we have a relationship.

  We define and redefine the wolf, yet who owns the wolf? The question seems absurd, like asking who owns the wind or the river. Before the United States existed, the peoples who inhabited the American land didn’t even recognize the idea of land ownership. The wolf existed on its own terms, for its own reasons, as all things did. That era has long gone, though, replaced by one in which we have not only private property rights (including the right to use the wind’s power and the river’s water), but also the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. And so the question must be asked and answered: All of us own the wolf, just as all of us own the air we breathe and the water we drink. We depend on air and water, of course. But we depend on the wolf, too, and we have a need to defend the wolf as we defend the air and water – for our own good, not simply for the wolf’s.

  . . . We are not wise enough to understand what in nature, if anything, is expendable. The less we understand (and we understand little), the more we must embrace the precautionary, quasi-religious strategy of proceeding with humility. We must keep all the parts. The act of doing so is our best insurance that nature – including us first and foremost – will thrive.

  Beneath this practical argumen
t lies a moral one: Nature is intrinsically valuable . . . We depend on life. All life depends on life.

  Here and there in the world, a tide is turning back in favour of the wolf, in Yellowstone, Colorado, southern Europe, Norway. In the wilderness of Alaska and Canada and parts of Russia its population remains buoyant enough to win new generations of admirers, and slowly those generations reared on the old dark stories are dying out. The modern chapters of the history are perhaps growing more reliable.

  But now, what of my own country? Scotland, it seems to me, is a special case, and the only one with which I am truly in a position to take issue. After 21 years of making my living writing books and journalism about Scotland’s wild landscapes and wildlife, of looking at nature in Scotland and thinking about what Scotland can do in favour of nature to redress a huge and longstanding imbalance, and after half a lifetime of scrutinising the evidence, it is clear to me that the wolf is at the heart of it all. One of our most durable difficulties, even as the second decade of the twenty-first century dawns, is the way that the wolf has been handed down to us, so that beliefs and fears are still held and still felt here many years after they have been shown up in more enlightened countries to be inventions of the Dark Ages. I have suggested that the nineteenth century was a low point in the unreliable history. I now suggest that Scotland was a landscape that promulgated hate-filled propaganda more zealously than any other. That combination – the Scottish landscape and the Victorian mindset – was truly awful. A handful of voices in particular compounded the countless felonies – Sir Walter Scott inevitably, one of his countless more-or-less-forgotten disciples called Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, two preposterous Jacobite brothers called Sobieski-Stuart, and the man who assembled their wacky outpourings and made them respectable in a single academic book, Professor J.E. Harting.