The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  Curiously, it is nothing more than an aside in Lauder’s otherwise more or less factual account of the floods. As the floodwaters poured down the Findhorn laying waste to the lands around what had been MacQueen’s domain, there is a pause in Lauder’s narrative. He summons the shade of Sir Walter to his cause, and goes into wolf-overdrive. Incidentally MacQueen is described as a laird rather than a stalker, and Ballachrochin (Harting’s Pall-a-chrocain) becomes Pollochock. Now, fasten your seatbelts:

  Immediately within the pass, and on the right bank, stand the bare ruins of the interesting little man-sion house of Pollochock. Macqueen, the laird of this little property, is said to have been nearer seven than six feet high, proportionately built, and active as a roebuck. Though he was alive within half a century, it is said that in his youth he killed the last wolf that infested this district. The prevailing story is this:

  A poor woman, crossing the mountains with two children, was assailed by the wolf, and the infants devoured, and she escaped with difficulty to Moy Hall. The chief of Mackintosh no sooner heard of the tragic fate of the babes, than, moved by pity and rage he despatched orders to his clan and vassals to assemble at 12 o’clock to proceed in a body to destroy the wolf. Pollochock was one of those vassals, and being then in the vigour of youth, and possessed of gigantic strength and determined courage, his appearance was eagerly looked for to take a lead in the enterprise. But the hour came, and all were assembled except him to whom they most trusted. Unwilling to go without him the impatient chief fretted and fumed through the hall; till at length, about an hour after the appointed time, in stalked Pollochock dressed in his full Highland attire; ‘I am little used to wait thus for any man,’ exclaimed the chafed chieftain, ‘and less still for thee, Pollochock, especially when such a game is afoot as we are boune after!’ ‘What sort o’ game are ye after, Mackintosh?’ said Pollochock simply and not quite understanding his allusion. ‘The wolf, sir,’ replied Mackintosh; did not my messenger instruct you?’ ‘Ou aye, that’s true,’ answered Pollochock, with a good-humoured smile; ‘troth I had forgotten. But an that be a’,’ continued he, groping with his right hand among the ample folds of his plaid, ‘there’s the wolf’s head!’ Exclamations of astonishment and admiration burst from the chief and clansmen as he held out the grim and bloody head of the monster at arm’s length, for the gratification of those who crowded around him.

  ‘As I came through the slochk by east the hill there,’ said he, as if talking of some everyday occurrence, ‘I foregathered wi’ the beast. My long dog there turned him. I buckled wi’ him, and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig, and brought awa’ his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious creatures.’

  ‘My noble Pollochcock!’ cried the chief in ecstasy; ‘the deed was worthy of thee! In memorial of thy hardihood, I here bestow upon thee Seannachan, to yield meal for thy good greyhound in all time coming.’

  Seannachan, or the old field, is directly opposite to Pollochock. The ten acres of which it consisted were entirely destroyed by the flood . . .

  Sir Thomas Dick Lauder would go on to become one of the most active members of the Scott Monument Committee that eventually heaved that colossal stone monstrosity into the airspace above Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh. His novels are now as extinct as Scotland’s wolves and much less likely to be reintroduced. Infestations of Scott are still widespread.

  So where does that leave Scotland’s last wolf? Lauder acknowledged in a footnote:

  Wolves are believed to have been extirpated in Scotland about the year 1680, but there is reason to suppose that they partially existed in remote districts considerably after that period.

  There, at least, is a rare outbreak of common sense. The last wolf known to have been killed by a man will most certainly not have been the last wolf. Everywhere in the world where wolves still occur naturally, people who live close to them speak of how difficult it is to see them. My Norwegian friends spent eight years making a half-hour film because they wanted to film only wild wolves being wild, wolves they found only by tracking them with their eyes and ears. Time after time they waited for hours, days, knowing there were wolves in the area, hearing them, tracking them, and not seeing them. Although this made their job much more difficult, it was a quality they admired. And the copious American literature of wolves is replete with similar responses among many native tribes. Lopez wrote in Of Wolves and Men:

  Wolves are elusive, secretive creatures. L. David Mech, who has been studying them in the wild for twenty years, has come upon only a dozen on the ground that he didn’t first see from an airplane or track down with the aid of a radio collar. Elusiveness is a defensive trait and it is conceivable that its function is to avoid detection by other wolves, so adjacent packs can overlap their territories and run little risk of fatally encountering each other. This would allow an area to ‘breathe’ more easily as game populations fluctuated. It would also facilitate the movement of dispersing wolves.

  And in places like Highland Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it would be a first line of defence against the two-legged creature that had brought it to the brink of extinction. It is possible too that under such circumstances wolves might refine that capacity for elusiveness by reducing their dependence on howling, adding silence to their ability to move through the land with the stealth of shadows.

  The story of the Findhorn wolf and the date of 1743 have proved stubbornly durable. The efforts of the Scott-obsessed Lauder, the myth-making Sobieski-Stuarts, and Professor Harting have forged not just a nineteenth-century fairy tale but a twenty-first-century stumbling block that denies access to the truth about the wolf in Scotland. As recently as the last quarter of the twentieth century, some serious conservation voices were still lending it their support. Even David Stephen, a naturalist of uncompromising daring, wrote:

  When and where was the last Scottish wolf killed? The story that ought to be true, and may well be, is that told of Macqueen of Pall-a-Chrocain, on the Findhorn, stalker to the Mackintosh of Mackintosh. Macqueen is usually given the credit for slaying the last wolf in Caledonia which, at that time, was not so stern or wild as man has since made it. The year was 1743 – a bare two years before the last of the Stuarts raised his standard at Glenfinnan.

  When the black beast, as the wolf was called, had killed two children, the Laird of Mackintosh called a tainchel to round him up, and Macqueen was the leader of the expedition sent against him. Macqueen’s story is surely the shortest and most remarkable story in the literature . . .

  There follows, uncritically, the famous Lauder quotation. So David Stephen also swallowed the Harting version of events.

  Then there is Erik Zimen, indisputably among the leading authorities on the wolf in Europe, but who is still willing to quote the date:

  As in England, hunting alone failed to exterminate the wolf in Scotland. Forests had to be cleared before it grew rarer in the middle of the seventeenth century. The last wolf was not killed till a century later, apparently in 1743.

  Pure Harting again. Yet, I can’t imagine he read Harting (more likely he accepted the much repeated date and slipped in the gentle qualification of the word ‘apparently’). If he had, he would surely have scoffed at the reference to the ‘large black beast’, because a simple reference in his book, The Wolf, puts the last nail in the coffin of the Findhorn story. He wrote:

  Wolves in human clothing are to be seen hanging from gallows in medieval illustrations. Obviously no real distinction was made between wolves and wolf men, and presumably many of the reported attacks on human beings were attributed to werewolves. In many of these illustrations the wolves are black, though there are no black wolves in Europe.

  No. There are no black wolves in Europe, and the Findhorn story is a lie.

  Zimen adds a telling afterthought. In the early 1970s he led a World Wildlife Fund study of wolves in the Abruzzi region of Italy, remarkably close to Rome. Writing of the black wolf illus
trations he noted:

  Presumably they were confused with dogs, which does not seem at all improbable after our experiences in the Abruzzi. During our last summer there, for instance, we were told a dead wolf had been found near Campo di Giove. We went there, and it was immediately obvious that it was a perfectly ordinary dog, though it had the colouring of a wolf. But we completely failed to persuade the many curious villagers who came to see it of the fact. They were convinced it was a wolf – in an area where men and wolves had lived side by side for thousands of years.

  People have sought to blacken the character of the wolf for a thousand years, perhaps longer, and it is beyond dispute that either by accident or design wolves were blamed for the crimes of dogs, and they still are.

  When might we have lost the last of our wolves? Probably later than we think, for the last scattered remnants of the wolf population would have been almost impossible to find if they chose not to be found. I have a preference for a notion that the last wolf of all died old and alone in a cave, somewhere like Rannoch Moor, far from the gaze of humankind.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rannoch

  There is another, far less obvious, kind of communication wolves employ, which is perhaps extrasensory, or at least beyond our range of perception. I have noticed that captive animals at rest seem to pick up cues from each other even though there is no audible sound and they are out of visual contact. Their backs may be turned to each other or one may be off in some trees in a corner of the pen. When an animal stares intently at something, for example, it apparently creates some kind of tension. Other animals respond by lifting their heads and turning without hesitation to look at the area where the first animal is staring. In my experience it was often the subordinate animals that responded first and the alpha animals last. Perhaps further research will establish a firmer foundation for this. It hints, of course, at much.

  – Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (1978)

  WOLVES ALSO DREAM. You will know of course that they howl, and that by howling they advertise their presence, status, numbers, location, state of health, state of mind, purpose, and other secrecies known only to wolves and those other tribes of nature that have good cause to listen and understand. They also yap to each other and whuff and growl intimately to mates and siblings and strangers. A domestic dog’s race memory echoes some of those traits, but when a dog dreams the memory and the meaning of the dream stay within the skull. It is not so with wolves. A wolf dreams with purpose, to create a picture, a mental image important to the dreamer and therefore to all wolves. For unlike your dog, which is loyal only to you, the wolf’s loyalty is to the tribe, not to the race memory but to the living race.

  So the dreamer wolf sends that which was dreamed and all wolves within its reach receive it, stand still and consider its meaning, and respond in ways the dreamer will understand, dreaming and sending individually and collectively, according to circumstances and the capabilities of the dreamers, for not all wolves are equally gifted dreamers. There may be many responses to a dream in a land of wolf plenty, although unanimity in a pack is sometimes articulated in a single dream utterance. Or a failure of response is a death knell.

  Dreams travel by the wolf wind. By that wind wolves can air their dreams to sow among all the wolves within reach of their dreaming. And by that wind wolves can dream back in response, for the wind works both ways, to and fro between dreamers:

  – Yes, it is so.

  – No, your fear is misplaced; it is not so in the west.

  – Yes, this was foretold.

  – No, this is news.

  – I am going south.

  – No, come north, the south is no longer safe.

  – Deer are poor in the east. The forest is thinning.

  – The wolf wind is faint. The distance between wolves is too great. Come closer.

  Even in a land where wolves have been driven out, the wolf wind still blows, scenting among cold spoors for the sense of them even among their absences.

  Such a land is Rannoch Moor in the Central Highlands of Scotland, straddling the borders of the old counties of Perthshire, Argyll, and Inverness-shire. In the hey-day of the Highland clans it was the last refuge of the Broken Men who survived or tried and failed to survive there in isolation, without clan lands, without a chief. There they were more or less safe from their enemies, and had only each other and the wilderness of the Moor to worry about. For similar reasons, Rannoch was also the inevitable last refuge of the Highland wolf, not the Findhorn, or Sutherland or Skye or Stirling or Killiecrankie or any one of a dozen other ‘last wolf’ claimants. Rannoch is, according to Fraser Darling,

  the site of a great reservoir of ice in glacial times, fed by the glaciers streaming from the ice caps on the Black Mount and the other massifs. The ice piling up in the spacious saucer overspilled eastwards along the line of Lochs Rannoch, Dunalastair and Tummel, westwards through Glen Etive and Glencoe and southwards through Glen Orchy. Moor of Rannoch ice also streamed northwards into the heart of Badenoch through the long glen now filled by the narrow finger of Loch Ericht. The paths of the ice are marked by belts of moraines and the courses of streams laid down in glacial times . . . On the moraines, trees followed the ice and the Moor may have been extensively wooded as recently as Roman times. Surviving fragments of this old forest can still be seen in the Black Wood of Rannoch . . . in the blanket bogs for which the Moor is famous, there are the roots of the ancient forest embedded in the peat . . . The Moor is but a stage in the pageant of the ages of ice, forest and mankind.

  And wolf. Throughout all the stages of the pageant, there was the wolf. Rannoch Moor is the heart of the landscape of the Central Highlands, a source of lifeblood. It was the wolf’s heartland too. Before and after the ice, before, during and after the trees, and long before mankind, the wolf knew that heartland as a sanctuary. And when in time things fared less well for the wolf, and the clans of Scotland for that matter, men learned from its loyalty to the Moor as a last resort, and the lost tribes – the Broken Men – adopted it as their own last resort too.

  CHAPTER 8

  Devon

  A savage aspect, a frightful howl, an insupportable odour, fierce habits, and a malignant disposition, are the leading qualities in its nature, which render it dangerous and detested when living and useless when dead. For this reason, hunting the wolf is a favourite diversion among the great in some countries; and it is a species of the chase at which reason need not blush, nor humanity drop a tear.

  – Children’s textbook, England, 1806

  I PAUSED THE CD, fast-reversed it about half a minute and pressed ‘play’ again. This is the bit I was trying to find. I heard the quietly reassuring voice of Shaun Ellis:

  ‘I decided the alpha male and I were going to have a fight over a duck.’

  My own voice cut in at once; I heard its incredulous edge:

  ‘You decided?’

  ‘I know what you’re going to say: Why on earth would I pick a fight with a dominant 120lb alpha male wolf over a duck? Have a cup of tea and a biscuit in the café and let him have it!

  ‘But this comes back to what we call “daily testing” . . . our ability to test our peers if you like, and their ability to defend us often comes down to food defence. The principle behind it is . . . if he’s not prepared to defend his duck in this case then we have to think seriously about his ability to defend us as a unit.

  ‘On this occasion he was no more prepared to give up his duck than he was his leadership. And he proved this by running over to me as I picked the duck up, knocked me to the ground with his chest, then, bless his heart, he decided he would discipline me in exactly the same way he would another wolf. He decided to give me a muzzling . . .’

  A muzzling?

  Well, bless his heart, the dominant wolf places his mouth round the muzzle of a lower ranking member of the pack. Shaun Ellis, although unquestionably a human being, believes he has achieved a middle-ranking status in a captive wolf pack, but clearly, b
eing a human being, he has no muzzle, so the alpha male’s open mouth was ‘placed’ round his face.

  ‘They nip with a degree of severity they think that animal requires, so they can be quite balanced in their teaching. He had the capability to do me a serious amount of damage, but that’s where the balance comes in. Even if I pinch skin here now, you can see that it leaves a mark, but I came out of that enclosure without a mark on my face.’

  I heard my own voice say ‘Really?’ and I can imagine the expression on my face as I spoke. Shaun Ellis, who has doubtless heard that ‘really?’ and seen that expression a hundred times before, asked me to imagine I had a handful of small twigs in my hands and I was starting to try and crush them, and just at the point where I think they are about to break, the grip is released. That’s what the muzzling was like.

  ‘So they can be that aware in their teaching,’ he said.

  He analysed the moment thus:

  ‘He obviously sensed an element of fear in me, as you can imagine with something like that happening for the first time; so when it was all over he came over to me, rubbed his head against me, then it was the licking of the face and we were all bonded together in a few short seconds to make sure we are still a family. And to this day, if anything happened in that enclosure, he’ll still be the one I’ll always run to because I know the same balance he showed me that day instilled trust in me to know that he will defend me at all costs.’