by Jim Crumley
So the tail-pullers are simply symptomatic of a story-telling tradition that has left its spoor all over Europe. When it crossed the Atlantic with the early settlers, it cut no ice with native Americans, who knew better and had inherited an ancient relationship that accorded the wolf the status of an equal. The American nature writer, Barry Lopez, touched on that relationship in Of Wolves and Men:
The Nunamiut Eskimos, the Naskapi Indians of Labrador, the tribes of the northern plains of the North Pacific Coast . . . are all, in a sense, timeless. Even those tribes we can converse with today because they happen to live in our own age, are timeless; the ideas that surface in conversation with them (even inside a helicopter at 2,000 feet) are ancient ideas . . . And the life they lead, you notice, tagging along behind them as they hunt, really is replete with examples of the way wolves do things. Over thousands of years, Eskimos and wolves have tended to develop the same kind of efficiency in the Arctic.
And Zimen wrote:
Stories told by aged Eskimos show a surprising knowledge of the ecology and behaviour of the wolf. They too hunted it for its pelt and later for bounty paid by the government for dead wolves. But, like Indians, they do not share the hatred of the wolf that is so evident in other societies. Their idea of the wolf coincides to a large extent with ours of the present day. There are differences only on a few points. According to the Eskimo, the wolf is not only highly intelligent and social, which rouses their admiration, but frequently acts with insight and deliberation – an idea that after four years’ work in the Abruzzi no longer seems to me to be so completely off the mark.
As wolf populations began to dwindle towards local extinctions, then, the European storytelling tradition acquired the extra edge of Last Wolf Syndrome. I was intrigued by two accounts of the killing of the last one in Scotland. The first story, claiming it for Perthshire, attracted me because it is so matter-of-fact. The other, giving the honour to a certain MacQueen and placing it in the strath of the River Findhorn, caught my attention because its complete absence of credibility has not stopped it from becoming widely accepted as authentic. The Perthshire killing was said to have happened at the Pass of Killiecrankie, where in 1680 Sir Ewan Cameron of Lochiel reputedly shot what was popularly believed at the time to be the last wolf in Scotland, an event for which Harting had unearthed an intriguing footnote:
In the sale catalogue of the ‘London Museum’ which was disposed of by auction in April 1818, there is the following entry: ‘Lot 832. Wolf – a noble animal in a large glass case. The last Wolf killed in Scotland by Sir E. Cameron.’
So at least it seems clear that a wolf was killed there, and there is the refreshing absence of preposterous detail or hunter-heroics. Cameron of Locheil simply shot it and had it stuffed. In 1818, staff at the London Museum clearly believed they were selling the last wolf killed in Scotland (not the last wolf, note, merely the last one killed), and bear in mind that this was still eight years before Thomas Dick Lauder published an extraordinary account of the intrepid MacQueen and his exploits up the Findhorn in 1743. Until Lauder’s book was published in 1830, there had been no challenger to Locheil’s claim to fame, therefore it is quite possible that there was no challenger, because Mac-Queen never did kill a wolf up the Findhorn in 1743 or any other year.
Before I went to up to the Findhorn in search of MacQueen, then, I headed for the Pass of Killiecrankie just off the A9 and just north of Pitlochry. The Pass is now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland as a surviving example of ancient native woodland and as the setting of a famous battle in 1689 between Jacobite and Hanoverian forces, the Jacobites led by Viscount Dundee, whose army included none other than the same Sir Ewan Cameron of Locheil in its ranks. The Jacobites’ spectacular victory was marred only by the death of the man known as Bonnie Dundee.
Tourism has moved in. There is no avoiding the visitor centre and its walk-this-way regime, nor the interpretative material that seems to assume the average visitor has a mental age of five. But trees still throng the steep flanks of the pass, mostly oaks, although despite the tourist leaflet explanation that the name Killiecrankie means aspen wood there are precious few aspens. A quiet midweek autumn day with a good seasonal blaze in the foliage and with the River Garry preferably in boisterous spate offer the best circumstances for outwitting the tourist industry here and coming to terms with some sense of a place with a continuous woodland evolution over 8,000 years. The steepness of the gorge has saved the trees from the twin fates of so much ancient woodland – overgrazing by sheep and deer and overexploitation by people. Catch it early with a morning mist swithering above the gorge and have the epochal stillness of the trees vie with the turbulence of the river. Then, perhaps, you can briefly believe in wolves.
Perhaps. But so much has gone from places like Killicrankie. It has a conservationist’s fence thrown round it because it is so small, a rearguard action whose best endeavour is to sustain a remnant. And wolves need more than remnants, they need space, hundreds of square miles of it for a single pack. I decided to try the visitor centre as a kind of last resort. Perhaps there were archives, insights.
I was very courteously received. I explained my mission. Yes, they were aware of the story of Ewan Cameron of Locheil and the last wolf in Perthshire, and there used to be something about it in the audiovisual programme, but that had been redone recently and the wolf story was edited out. I wondered why out loud. There was no answer. We leafed through some folders of documents and drew a blank. The woman who handled my inquiry said she would go and consult the centre manager. She was back in a few minutes. Her boss’s verdict was that Locheil had indeed shot the last Perthshire wolf there in 1680, ‘but the last one of all was killed near Inverness in 1720 by an old woman who hit it with a frying pan’.
I offered my polite thanks and left. I sat in the car in the visitor centre car park in the rain with a cup of visitor centre coffee and laughed out loud. This is what our wilderness heritage has become. Millions of years of evolution, much of that evolution shaped by the presence of wolves just as they continue to shape the evolution of those northern hemisphere landscapes where they still hold sway, and all that legacy has become a footnote, a throwaway line about an old woman and a frying pan. I remembered something my dear old friend Marion Campbell of Kilberry wrote on the subject of trying to extract a sense of the past from the myths we are left with:
Those myths survive only in the faintest echoes, all meaning lost, their outer shells turned into comic tales. They stir in our deepest subconscious like fish in a pool, the last link in a chain of oral learning.
For you will search the oldest written texts we know and all those that followed until Scotland lost interest in its absent wolf over a hundred years ago, but you will search in vain for the real living wolf, for it is not there. Myths survive but ‘only in the faintest echoes, all meaning lost, their outer shells turned into comic tales.’ The stories – the countless stories – about how innumerable ‘last wolves’ met their fate are exactly that – stories. Those stories and many others that paint the wolf as a bloody-fanged disciple of the Devil punctuate the face of our landscape from the northmost Scotland to southmost England. Each one is nothing more than a headstone to the passing, not of a wild animal, but of an oral tradition. The real wild wolf, that may or may not have lived around the edges of the storytellers’ lives, was never allowed to put in an appearance in the stories. And none of them is more damning of the whole absurd tradition than the one about the old woman and the frying pan.
It was set in that hotbed of anti-wolf propaganda that was Strath Glass. Or perhaps it was just that they bred generations of supremely accomplished storytellers there. And it involved one of the classic ingredients identified by Erik Zimen – the solitary figure in a winter landscape, just before Christmas. And of course it too proved irresistible to Professor Harting:
Another story is on record of a Wolf killed by a woman . . . near Strui [Struy] on the north side of Strath Glass. She had go
ne to Strui a little before Christmas to borrow a griddle (a thick circular plate of iron, with an iron loop handle and one side for lifting, and used for baking bread). Having procured it, and being on her way home, she sat down upon an old cairn to rest and gossip with a neighbour, when suddenly a scraping of stones and rustling of dead leaves were heard, and the head of a wolf protruded from a crevice at her side. Instead of fleeing in alarm, however, ‘she dealt him such a blow on the skull with the full swing of her iron discuss, that it brained him on the stone which served for his emerging head.’
This tradition was probably one of the latest in the district, and seems to have belonged to a period when the Wolves were near their end.
So it was with a heavy and sceptical heart that I turned north for the valley of the Findhorn River in search of the spoor of MacQueen and what so many writers over so many centuries have been only too willing to acknowledge was the last wolf of all.
CHAPTER 6
The Findhorn
‘Every district,’ says Stuart in his ‘Lays of the Deer Forest,’ ‘has its “last’ Wolf,” and there were probably several which were later than that killed by Sir Ewan Cameron. The “last” of Strath Glass was killed at Gusachan according to tradition “at no very distant period” . . . and the last of the Findhorn and also (as there seems every reason to believe) the last of the species in Scotland, at a place between Fi-Giuthas and Pall-a-chrocain, and according to popular chronology no longer ago than 1743.’
– James Edmund Harting, British Animals Extinct Within Historic Times (1880)
THE VICTORIANS inflicted a regime of wildlife slaughter on Highland Scotland. It co-existed alongside a peculiarly persuasive strain of romanticism for which Sir Walter Scott was more or less single-handedly responsible, and the London government’s grim imposition of the Highland Clearances on the natives, whom they replaced with huge flocks of sheep and great herds of red deer. This heady combination of forces instilled a doctrine of hatred for anything in nature that wore a hook to its beak or talons to its feet, or anything that used tooth and claw to go about its daily business. In such a climate, it is not hard to envisage the Victorian mindset’s reverence for the slaying of the last wolf by a heroic hunter a hundred years before. What a fine example from recent history to uphold for the benefit of the modern Victorian stalker! A celebrity hunter whose superhuman strength and astounding heroism had accounted for the last dreadful child-slaying, devil-black vestige of the Highland wolf was surely a story worth telling and re-telling and handing down the generations like an old family bible, to be believed in its entirety because no-one dared to disbelieve.
I decided to visit the River Findhorn in search of ‘a place between Fi-Giuthas and Pall-a-chrocain’ to see what they might make of the story there today, if they made anything of it at all, and to see if the last wolf of the Findhorn was any better served by posterity than the last wolf of Perthshire was at Killiecrankie. Fi-Giuthas has vanished from the map if it was ever there, but Harting’s occasional use of Gaelic, whether in place names or slivers of conversation, swithers between actual and approximate Gaelic words and phonetic stabs at the sound of the words. Giuthas is a Gaelic word meaning pine tree. Fi could be a phonetic attempt at rendering fiadh, the Gaelic for a deer, or feidh, the plural, and what he wrote down as Fi-Giuthas was a pinewood known for its deer, in which case time has erased it from the landscape as well as the map. His Pall-a-chrocain is there though, rendered on modern maps as Ballachrochin, which is near enough given the Gaelic language’s tendency to make the letter ‘b’ at the beginning of a word sound like ‘p’. Baile is the Gaelic for a township and the source of most ‘Bal’ place names, and crobhcan means anything crooked or twisted or bent into a roughly-formed ‘S’ shape, which describes the River Findhorn at Ballachrochin more or less perfectly.
The Findhorn rises in the Monadhliath, 20 miles south of Inverness, and flows more or less north-east to the Moray Firth at Findhorn Bay. It is a truly beautiful river, but it is eclipsed in the thoughtless gaze of twenty-first-century tourism by its near neighbour, the Spey, which also rises in the Monadhliath and flows along a parallel course to meet the sea at Spey Bay, but is longer, wider and many times more famous, a world-renowned focal point of the whisky industry, a salmon river of distinction and a magnet for tourism. Its broad strath and the many communities along its banks service the Cairngorms National Park, and good roads accompany it over much of its length on both banks. The Findhorn, by comparison, ploughs its furrow through a landscape more or less empty of people, and mostly has to make do with estate tracks, a solitary whisky distillery at Tomatin, and the exquisite hidden treasure that is Dulsie Bridge built by General Wade.
Its upper reaches flow through Strath Dearn, which may explain a curious reference in Harting’s book that had me baffled for months and sent me on an extravagant wild-goose chase, for he had written that ‘in the districts where Wolves last abounded, many traditions of their history and haunts have descended to our time. The greatest number preserved in one circle were in the neighbourhood of Strath Earn.’
The Earn flows east out of Loch Earn through the comparatively douce landscapes around Comrie and Crieff, then wends a decidedly Lowland course to join the Tay east of Perth. It is a landscape I have known more or less all my life, and not once had I come across a wolf tradition there. So I set about scouring known historical sources for signs of an infestation of wolves. None revealed itself. Then I started to study maps of the Findhorn, a landscape with which I was relatively unfamiliar, and I found Strath Dearn. Harting or his publisher or the publisher of the twentieth-century reprint had made a simple typo.
I decided to approach MacQueen’s country from the north, circling stealthily (like a wolf, as I fancied it) east of the River Findhorn by way of the vast spaciousness of a high moorland B-road that climbs north out of Carrbridge and breasts the 1,300-feet contour amid a small clutch of craggy hilltops, one of which is called Creag a’Ghiuthas. It must be several miles from there to the nearest pine tree today, but perhaps when the landscape was named, that high moorland sprawl was also a high pinewood sprawl and the pinewood known for its deer, and the whole wild landscape of the Findhorn known for its wolves.
This is a big landscape by Scottish standards, the wild moorland miles to east and west, lower-lying woodland to the north where the land starts to dip towards the distant sea, and to the south there are sightlines into the northern Cairngorms to put your heart in your mouth. From many compass points the distant Cairngorms fold into each other and create the deceptively unimpressive aspect of a slabby plateau. People have died being unimpressed by their first sight of the Cairngorms. But from the high ground to the north they mass awesomely into an army of mountains, sliced into battalions by the great troughs of Gleann Einich and the Lairg Ghru. There is no doubting their scale, no escaping their intimidating aspect. Standing on the small plateau summit of Creag Eairaich and looking around, something fundamental changed in me. The possibility that I had so fondly entertained for so long of reintroducing wolves into my own country suddenly acquired a ferociously practical reality.
‘Look at this place,’ I said aloud to no-one. ‘How can anyone believe that there should not be wolves here?’
The sheer scope and uncompromising wildness of the landscape in almost every direction imposed itself on my solitude with a quite unexpected forcefulness. It had never been on my preferred list of wolf-reintroduction landscapes, a short list headed by Rannoch Moor, but it had just imposed itself on my list quite uninvited. Uniquely in the course of these journeys among old wolf haunts I toyed with the notion that I had been led there. It is, of course, the most unscientific of arguments, and it was preached to a converted audience of one by the audience itself, but science is not the only valid consideration in a phenomenon as emotive as the place of wolves in a landscape.
Science can be ponderous and myopic and blinkered by both history and politics. For example, as I write this a small group of Norwegia
n beavers is being released from quarantine into the wild in Knapdale, Argyll, a timid attempt at reintroduction hamstrung with safeguards and qualifications and tags and radio-collars, a five-year study and a threat by the scheme’s partners to cull or sterilise the beavers if things go wrong in the eyes of those influential vested interests who have opposed the scheme from the start. It has taken 15 years to get us to this point, thanks largely to ponderous, blinkered, myopic science and less than inspirational politics. It is that long ago now since I made a radio programme on the subject, and a senior official at Scottish Natural Heritage said on air that we would have beavers back in Scotland in two years. Science and politics had other ideas. If it has been so ponderous a process for beavers, which eat nothing more precious to us than willow bark, it is not easy to be optimistic that science and politics will fast-track wolf reintroduction onto the agenda.
But I stood on the summit of Creag Eairaich and a peculiar sense of purpose attended the moment. Perhaps in retrospect it was not so surprising, for my life at that point was consumed in the process of making this book, fighting the wolf’s corner, criss-crossing the country in pursuit of the elusive sense of them in my native landscapes more than 200 years after they vanished off the face of my portion of the earth, borrowing from the experiences of other countries where the presence of the wolf is unbroken or where it has found its own way back or where it has been put back. And I was closing in on the spoor of the most outrageous of all Scotland’s wolf traditions, the one that had been regurgitated so often over so many years that it had acquired a specific significance as the moment when Scotland was finally rid of its wolves, and because it had a date it had become history. Yet, curiously enough, Harting of all people had paused in the face of this landscape and made an uncharacteristically realistic assessment of it, considering the wildly extravagant use to which he was putting it, although whether he was ever here is less than clear or likely.
