The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  Making generous allowance, his Lochaber-Rannoch claim might amount to four or five hundred square miles, which in turn might just amount to the territory of a single pack. The brothers’ ‘Loch Sloi’ is a mystery, unless they meant tiny Loch Sloy near the north end of Loch Lomond, though it was hardly a nineteenth-century landmark. Yet that was enough for Harting to pronounce the demise of ‘large tracts of forests in the Highlands’. If that was true . . .

  But what was really happening in the Highlands at the turn of the seventeenth century? Smout, MacDonald and Watson write in The Native Woodlands of Scotland that in 1503 the Scottish Parliament announced that the country’s timber supply was utterly destroyed:

  . . . probably reflecting at least the King’s vexation in not being able to get his hands on the supplies he needed for his castles and ships. The tone of legislation in the next two centuries was consistently anxiety-ridden. Acts of 1535, 1607 and 1661 enjoined the planting and protection of timber . . . and Parliament in 1609, while stating that large woods had recently been discovered in the North was anxious that their value should not be frittered away.

  So the presumption of King and Parliament was specifically against destroying more woodland, and would hardly have been likely to put the discomfort of the lieges at the sound of a howling wolf before the needs of the State.

  As soon as you start to scratch the surface of what has passed for received wisdom about wolves throughout Scotland for at least the last 500 years, it cracks open, crumbles, and dematerialises into clouds of useless dust. Harting, alas, is the only one who collected some of its source material. It could have done with a more rigorous historian. Perhaps the most vivid evidence of just how lightly he scrutinised his sources emerges from Wales, and the story of the death of a wolf in the reign of King John, so the early part of the thirteenth century. He prefaces the story with the words, ‘it is not at all unlikely that it is founded on fact.’ Without further explanation he unleashes the following on his gullible readership:

  Llewellyn, who was Prince of Wales in the reign of King John, resided at the foot of Snowdon, and, amongst a number of hounds which he possessed, had one of rare excellence which had been given to him by the King. [You get the sense already that it is not going to go well for the hound of rare excellence.] On one occasion, during the absence of the family, a Wolf entered the house; and Llewellyn, who first returned, was met at the door by his favourite dog, who came out, covered with blood, to greet his master. The prince, alarmed, ran into the house, to find his child’s cradle overturned, and the ground flowing with blood. In a moment of terror, imagining the dog had killed the child, he plunged his sword into his body, and laid him dead on the spot. But, on turning up the cradle, he found his boy alive and sleeping by the side of the dead Wolf. The circumstance had such an effect on the mind of the prince, that he erected a tomb over the faithful dog’s grave.

  Where do you start with such a story? The Prince of Wales left a baby alone in the house with a hound for a guardian? He had no staff in his house? And if he had, they failed to hear a fight to the death between a hound and a wolf? And they let the hound answer the door to their returning master?

  All of this presupposes, of course, that the wolf did indeed enter the house. The door of the house with the unguarded child was left open? Perhaps the wolf jumped onto the roof and went down the chimney? Then it walked through the many rooms until it found the one it wanted – the nursery with the cradle and the sleeping, unguarded child. It was about to clamp its jaws around the throat of the infant when the hound of rare excellence, the King’s gift, chanced on the scene and – of course – killed the wolf.

  ‘It is not at all unlikely that it is founded on fact . . . ’

  Likewise the Scalds of the North singing how the son of Siward gave the corpses of the French as a choice banquet for the wolves of Northumberland, no doubt. Two of the most durable indictments levelled against wolves in Britain were that they scavenged battlefields (hence the quotation at the start of this chapter) and dug out corpses from their graves. I heard the battlefield one perpetuated as recently as 2008 in the BBC’s much-praised History of Scotland series. Presenter Neil Oliver, so scrupulous in his debunking of the myths that have enshrouded our human history for centuries, tossed it in as a footnote to an account of a twelfth-century battle involving a grandson of Malcolm Canmore somewhere down near the Mersey, observing that ‘the corpses were picked over by wolves and carrion crows’. No other line in the whole series was that casual. There was no justification for it. It added nothing to the story he was telling other than the ancient image of a wolf with blood dripping from fangs.

  It reminded me of a story told by the American nature writer Barry Lopez in his book Of Wolves and Men (1978). It concerned a visit to a school by a wolf and its handler as part of a wolf education programme. Before the visit the teacher had asked them to draw a wolf, with predictable results – fierce animals with big fangs. After the visit the teacher asked them to draw another picture. ‘This time,’ wrote Lopez, ‘there were no fangs. All the pictures showed wolves with very big feet.’

  It is possible that there were wolves at the aftermath of the battle. And carrion crows. And, foxes, ravens, buzzards, kites, cats, dogs . . . especially dogs, many dogs, which after all accompany men wherever they go, whatever they do. But there is no record of any of it. An assumption is made based on the repeatedly offered mantra of the ages, not on hard evidence offered by reliable historical record. A song composed by the Scalds of the North to honour Siward’s victory would have lauded him as a warrior hero and belittled his enemies with all the venom at their disposal. Biologically, it would be as reliable as bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover and nightingales singing in Berkeley Square. But no-one tried to palm off those examples of the songwriter’s craft as historical evidence. The language used by Freeman in his Northern Conquest and quoted by Harting is the language of the Scalds who were paid to make their employer look good for the benefit of posterity. It was also their job to make the vanquished enemy look contemptible and unworthy of their place on the battlefield, so have them arrayed as a choice banquet for wolves, food for the lowest form of life! But when the Scalds of the North sang their song, did they know if wolves actually even liked human flesh? And did Freeman or Harting? And does anyone know now?

  Wolves have preferences in what they eat. Scotland has never been short of deer, and for many millennia, these evolved with the wolf, and their movements and populations were shaped by wolves. And for many centuries cattle were the principal currency of the natives. In the last few hundred years before their extinction, killing deer would have put wolves in direct conflict with hunting kings and their royal hunting parks, and killing cattle would have put them in conflict with more or less everyone else. And before all that, the westward spread of Christianity had brought its demonising culture with it. The work of discrediting the wolf had begun and it lasted for more or less 2,000 years. It has still not quite died out, but at least now there are reintroduction programmes in America and Europe, reliable biological studies, hard evidence, wolf education programmes, and a growing presumption in favour of the animal as a benificent force in the land.

  But some places are slower on the uptake than others, and nowhere is slower than Scotland, despite a European Union Habitats and Species Directive of 1992 compelling member governments to consider ways of reintroducing wolves. Putting the wolf back into Scotland could be done tomorrow, or indeed, with what’s left of today, but the old lies and myths are well dug in and stubborn. Many farmers and landowners and estate managers are still constrained by short-term thinking and self-interest, and quite unwilling to give the wolf anything like a fair hearing. The wolf is still the devourer of children, the scavenger of battlefields, the grave-robber.

  There are places all over the Highlands in particular with burial grounds on islands either in lochs or offshore – Loch Awe in Argyll, Loch Leven near Glencoe, Handa Island in Sutherland for example
– whose existence is put down to the wolf’s reputation as a grave-robber. Yet grave-robbing sounds too much like hard work to reach a source of carrion. It doesn’t mean it never happened (and it would not have to happen often to establish the reputation – twice would have done it), if, say, the corpse was hastily buried in a shallow grave and without any kind of coffin. But island burial grounds are more likely to have originated in communities where good grazing land was at a premium: no point in wasting it on a field of the dead. The burial ground on Inishail in Loch Awe is still in use, incidentally, particularly by the Dukes of Argyll, more than 200 years after the last wolf died.

  Both charges – the battlefield scavenger and the grave-robber – are unsubstantiated. They were levelled in a climate of wolf hatred. Such activities would have brought the wolf into quite unnecessary close contact with the two-legged creature it routinely went out of its way to avoid, and with good reason. The charges do not stand up to close historical or biological scrutiny. If the wolf was guilty as charged, it was the exception rather than the rule, whereas grave-robbing and battlefield scavenging was routinely practised by the species that levelled the charges – by people. And that species is still the only one that frequently kills children – people, and their pet dogs of course.

  The rest of it was down to the myth-making of the centuries, to the songs of the Scalds of the North. The notion of the Rabid Droves was a fallacy.

  CHAPTER 5

  Last Wolf Syndrome

  ONE OF THE BY-PRODUCTS of our age-old hostility towards the wolf is Last Wolf Syndrome. This phenomenon arose not simply out of a desire to cleanse the land of wolves, but also reflected the competitive element that thrives in any hunting culture. Reputations and rewards were at stake if people could be persuaded that the wolf you killed was the very last in that country, that county, that state, that district. In such a fevered climate, wolf hatred was heightened and Last Wolf stories began, you might say, to infest the land in droves. Last Wolf Syndrome seems to have originated in eastern Europe and spread rapidly, like all good infestations should. It engulfed Britain and effortlessly crossed the Atlantic with the early white settlers. As the stories spread it became clear that there were common ground rules. The wolf had to be hideously terrifying, preferably huge and black, and had to have killed someone vulnerable. The hunter had to be preternaturally gifted and heroic. At the end of the story, it was truth that was killed, a bloodied mess on the floor of a cave, usually with its head severed. Harting waded waist-deep in the gore of these stories.

  An example of this occurs in an account of the slaughter of a remarkable wolf killed by one of the lairds of Chisolm in Gleann Chon-fhiadh, or the Wolves’ Glen, a noted retreat of these animals in the sixteenth century.

  The animal in question had made her den in a pile of loose rocks, whence she made excursions in every direction until she became the terror of the country. At length, the season of her cubs increasing her ferocity, and having killed some of the neighbouring people, she attracted the enterprise of the Laird of Chisolm and his brother, then two gallant young hunters, and they resolved to attempt her destruction. For this they set off alone from Strath Glass, and having tracked her to her den, discovered by her traces that she was abroad; but detecting the little pattering feet of the cubs in the sand about the mouth of the den, the elder crept into the chasm with his drawn dirk, and began the work of vengeance on the litter. While he was thus occupied, the Wolf returned, and infuriated by the expiring yelps of her cubs, rushed at the entrance, regardless of the younger Chisolm, who made a stroke at her with his spear, but such was her velocity that he missed her and broke the point of his weapon. His brother, however, met the animal as she entered, and being armed with the left-handed lamhainn chruaidh, or steel gauntlet, much used by the Highlanders and Irish, as the Wolf rushed openmouthed upon him, he thrust the iron fist into her jaws, and stabbed her in the breast with his dirk, while his brother, striking at her flank with the broken spear, after a desperate struggle she was drawn out dead.

  Gasp.

  So, you get the gist. It’s a run-of-the-mill example, with echoes of Skye, although I admit I did not see the stuff about the left-handed gauntlet coming. My inquiries on that particular subject drew a total blank. Whatever the lamhainn chruaidh may have been, it was far from ‘characteristic of the Highlanders and Irish’. Indeed, it is far from clear what practical purpose it might have served other than the one in question – jamming into the open jaws of a wolf that happened to be running at you with its mouth open.

  And then there was Sutherland. To this day, a cairn by the side of the A9 near Helmsdale lays claim to the killing of the last wolf in Sutherland, a deed done in Glen Loth, although there are rival claims from Assynt and Strath Halladale, all of them in the decade between 1690 and 1700. Inevitably, none died a natural or even a vaguely credible death, but if you believe in the notion of a folk mind that gathered and articulated these stories, it finally took leave of its senses in Glen Loth. Glen Loth is a bit-part player in the pageant of east Sutherland’s mountainous landscape. Here, all the great valleys that drain into the North Sea are straths – Strath Fleet, Strath Brora, Strath of Kildonan – and in that company, Glen Loth is a skinny and unsung thoroughfare, unsung apart from the Pythonesque madness of its contribution to Last Wolf Syndrome. Its story is this (and see if you can spot the now familiar ingredients):

  A Helmsdale man called Polson, his son, and another local lad, found a wolf’s den in a small cave with a narrow entrance. Polson sent the boys in. Bones and horns, feathers and eggshells littered the floor. Then five or six cubs were found inside. The boys had been told what to do. Soon Polson heard the death cries of the cubs. Enter the female wolf ‘raging furiously at the cries of her young,’ according to one of a number of graphic accounts. It goes on:

  As she attempted to leap down, at one bound Polson instinctively threw himself forward and succeeded in catching a firm hold of the animal’s long and bushy tail, just as the forepart of her body was within the narrow entrance of the cavern. He had unluckily placed his gun against a rock when aiding the boys in their descent, and could not now reach it. Without apprising the lads below of their imminent peril, the stout hunter kept a firm grip of the wolf’s tail, which he wound round his left arm, and although the maddened brute scrambled and twisted and strove with all her might to force herself down to the rescue of her cubs, Polson was just able with the exertion of all his strength to keep her from going forward. In the midst of this singular struggle, which passed in silence, his son within the cave, finding the light excluded from above asked in Gaelic, ‘Father, what is keeping the light from us?’ ‘If the root of the tail breaks,’ replied he, ‘you will soon know that.’

  And, of course, the hunter prevailed, jamming the she-wolf into the rocks, unsheathing his knife and stabbing her so often that at last ‘she was easily dragged back and finished’.

  If you had never waded through yards of last wolf stories but encountered instead only the handful that caught the wolf by the tail, you could be forgiven for thinking there was something in it. If on the other hand, you had done the required wading, you would be utterly convinced that there is less than nothing in it. But I went in search of greater authority, and found it in Erik Zimen’s book, The Wolf. Zimen was German, grew up in Sweden, got a doctorate for his work in wolf ecology from the University of Kiel, did post-doctorate work with the famed biologist Konrad Lorenz in Bavaria, then led a trail-blazing wolf conservation project in Italy’s Abruzzi National Park. In the throes of all that he encountered many wolf stories from many countries, and found countless variations on the same few well-worn themes:

  There is no lack of such incredible stories. A celebrated German hunting writer, for instance, describes quite seriously an incident said to have happened in central Sweden in 1727. A minister . . . heard the howling of wolves from a wolf pit he had dug. (Just imagine trapped wolves ‘making their dreadful lonely voices heard,’ as it says in the book.) I
n trying to kill one of the six wolves that ferociously bared their teeth at him, he fell into the pit himself, but miraculously the wolves did not tear him to pieces but used his back to climb out of the pit and escape.

  Another echo of Skye.

  Many stories keep cropping up in different areas in a similar form. There is the story of . . . the solitary individual who is attacked by wolves on a cold winter night. He defends himself with his sword and succeeds in killing or wounding several of them. The rest withdraw and the man puts his sword back in its sheath. But that is a mistake, because the wolves attack again, and this time the bloodstained sword is frozen in the sheath, with the result that only a few remnants of the man are left, as well as the sword, of course, as evidence of the tragic event.

  There is a striking resemblance in stories coming from many areas. The Russian version – the troika pursued by wolves on a winter night – has been repeated a thousand times. Its North American counterpart has the hero alone with his dog at a campfire and he has to defend himself against attacking wolves by swinging his cudgel. All these stories happen on a winter night and in all of them the ammunition runs out, but the hero’s courage, resourcefulness, and strength enable him to win against all odds.

  In the course of my work with wolves I have heard or read a large number of such stories, told by aged sportsmen in the Carpathians or German ex-servicemen who fought in Russia. Many of them have exactly the same plot and can thus be dismissed as unimaginative reproduction of the standard repertoire of aggressive tactics attributed to the wolf. Others, though sometimes more imaginative, are so full of phoney details about wolf behaviour that they are incredible . . . In the great majority of these stories there is a complete lack of critical questioning.