The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  I asked:

  ‘And he got to keep the duck?’

  ‘He got to keep the duck, oh yeah,’ – then a chuckle – ‘and all the others after that.’

  I pressed the pause button on the CD player again.

  Shaun Ellis’s business card says ‘Wolf Pack Management’. I met him in 2003 when I was making two programmes for BBC Radio 4 with the collective title of The Real Wolf. I have the two programmes on that CD. Since then he has become something of a celebrity thanks to three television programmes and attendant publicity, an exposure to the limelight that was, alas, shaped by the editorial values of Channel Five. I, for one, could have wished for a more thoughtful approach on his behalf, and for that matter on behalf of wolves. Whatever you think of Shaun Ellis and his lifestyle as a member of a captive wolf pack, he is never less than thoughtful about his work. He is big and burly and hairy, which I suppose is what you might expect of someone with that business card and that lifestyle, but he is also as calm as he is thoughtful, and quietly spoken and not without charm, which isn’t what you might expect from someone the tabloids have got in the habit of calling the Wolf Man.

  Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park is on the north coast of Devon not far from Ilfracombe, a corner of England’s deep south that seems to spend much of its time catering for the kind of knotted-hanky tourism I had rather assumed was extinct. At any rate, it is in that unlikely context that I have come closest to a living wolf. It dashed behind me, about three yards from where I was sitting, doubtless wondering, as indeed I was myself, why I was inside its enclosure. There was a surreal aspect to it all, for Shaun Ellis’s wolf enclosure is not only a very serious study of wolf behaviour, it is also a tourist attraction where conversation is occasionally and ludicrously drowned out by the hysterical soundtrack of screaming monkeys and belching fake dinosaurs, to name but two of the wolves’ more incongruous neighbours.

  The daily wolf walk is a crowd-pleaser. It is very easy to miss the profoundly serious nature of this endeavour; it would be very easy to scoff, and many find scoffing irresistible. As his girlfriend Helen would tell Channel Five while she was being groomed for a role within the pack as a nanny to imminent cubs: ‘People think of me as a bit unhinged.’

  But the wildlife and dinosaur park happens to be where Shaun Ellis found the land he needed. And no matter that Devon is also home to the Wolf River and a claim to the site of the killing of the last wolf in England (of which more later), his project is rooted a few thousand miles further west, in the tribal lands of the Nez Perce Indians in the northern United States. It was to the Nez Perces, you may remember, that the architects of the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction programme turned, knowing their special relationship with wolves, their fellow feeling as a hounded species,1 and it was the Nez Perces who agreed to the reintroduction of the wolves on their lands when the state authorities deemed it too politically combustible to endorse. And Shaun Ellis went to meet them.

  Like all people who have lived alongside wolves for thousands of years, they have their wolf stories, many of which have legendary aspects, but the nature of the legends reveals a people who thought of the wolf as a friend and a teacher, and the contrast with the wolf of Europe could hardly be more marked. The story that impressed Shaun Ellis most, the one that underpins his work in Devon, is the one in which wolves taught tribesmen the wolf talk.

  It concerned the time towards the end of the American Civil War, when both conditions for the Nez Perces and the climate were extremely harsh. Tribesmen who went out on solitary expeditions were caught in storms and took refuge in caves, only to discover that the caves were already occupied by wolf cubs. But instead of the frenzied hostility that greeted the Highlanders in wolf stories the adult wolves treated the Nez Perces with nothing more threatening than aloofness. There again, the tribesmen were only sheltering, not killing the cubs, and their attitude to the wolf was one of high regard, of admiration for its hunting skills and the tribe-like social organisation of the pack.

  These solo treks by the Nez Perces were, according to the stories at least, serious undertakings. Holing up in a cave during the worst of winter weather was routine for them, not the inevitable life-and-death ordeal that such a story would have signified in Europe. Slowly, over time, after what Shaun Ellis described as ‘a period of trust’, the adult wolves would allow the tribesman to feed off the same food as they brought in for the pups. The trust improved to the point where the wolves started to teach the people how to survive the winter alongside them. Sometimes the tribesmen were away for four or five years, and when at last they returned to their villages, the chiefs said that that the language they brought back was ‘the wolf talk’. Shaun Ellis took that idea at face value, wondered if there was any truth in it, and made it the foundation of his work:

  ‘It seemed to be above anything else we could gain just by study. That’s how it started many years ago. Could we go back to captive packs, get them as instinctive as possible, get them as close to nature as we can, then infiltrate the packs and live alongside them with the view to getting this language back?’

  The ‘language’ is not a thing of recognisable human sounds but rather a subtle blend of body posture, smell and wolf voice. But how do you persuade a wolf pack – even a captive one – with its strictly administered social hierarchy, to accept a human infiltrator and treat him as a member of the pack? Shaun Ellis’s solution was inventive. He played recordings of wolf howls over loudspeakers just outside the enclosure, a phantom pack in a neighbouring territory. The result, he reasoned, would be an urge within his captive pack to boost their numbers. They couldn’t do it by breeding because there was no female back then, so instead of introducing another wolf, he presented . . . himself; not as a man, certainly not as a wolf, but simply as a member of the pack, albeit one that would have to be taught the occasional lesson to reinforce the wolves’ idea of his place in their scheme of things. Hence the fight over the duck, hence the muzzling, which I would imagine is as unambiguous a fragment of wolf language as any human being has ever had to learn.

  And with that image firmly located in the forefront of my mind, I was invited inside the wolves’ enclosure. A few years before, on Kodiak Island, Alaska, again working for radio, I had watched an adult female grizzly bear climb up from the river where she had been fishing, walk in a purposeful arc behind our small group of four, turn and walk along a path of her own making through shoulder-high fireweed, pause twenty yards away, then stand on her hind legs so that her great bear head was something like eight feet up in the air. I asked my guide, Scott Shelton, what she was doing.

  ‘Oh she’s just having a look.’

  ‘At us?’

  ‘Oh no, at you – she knows what I look like.’

  It is a curiosity of my character for which I can take no credit, and which has astonished me more than once, that I have never felt fear in nature’s company, and for the bear that was having a look at me from twenty yards away I felt only warmth and admiration. Now a wolf was ambling along a path of its making towards me from about fifty yards away and the uppermost thought in my head concerned the size of its feet. I remembered the bear then. I asked Shaun Ellis what the wolf was doing, coming for a look?

  ‘They’re already communicating with us; they’re identifying you by smell, by body posture.’

  Even there, even inside that high and uncompromising wire fence inside a park designed unambiguously for tourists, I felt a surge of exultation. Hey, I’ve been identified by a wolf!

  The wolf turned back, hesitant in the face of this new creature to be identified, this creature without fear, this creature that watched and heard the rhythmic soft slap of his footfall and thrilled to something nameless, primitive and ancient. Then the monkeys started screaming again and the thing evaporated, and the creature who had to be identified by a wolf reminded himself that whatever was going on here, it was going on inside a wire fence and a wolf isn’t whole as long as it is denied its natural habitat, and its
natural habitat is travel within a territory of a thousand square miles, or into the unknown like Number 14 when she lost Old Blue.

  I sat and watched Shaun Ellis communicating with his captive wolves, a rabbit in his hand, showing it to a wolf then running away, trying to stimulate the pre-hunting behaviour of wild wolves. As I watched I thought that while these wolves might well learn the pre-hunting behaviour from this non-wolf, they might yet never learn to hunt for themselves.

  He crouched down and turned sideways-on to one wolf, inviting him in, using wolf language, the wolf apparently understanding. But it was all so far from his grand vision, which he described as ‘a British Yellowstone, somewhere in the Scottish Highlands’. The theory is that you teach a captive wolf to behave like a wild wolf; then, by learning the lost wolf language, the wolf becomes the teacher and you the pupil. Then, as time goes by, wolves born in Devon with skills learned from their parents already ingrained in them, take their place in a showpiece reintroduction scheme.

  There are two snags. One is, he freely acknowledges, it may well not happen in his lifetime, in which case, you have to wonder if it will happen at all, at least as he envisages it. He is, to say the least, a bit of a one-off. The other is that there is a limit to the number of wolves the enclosure can handle, and if there is to be an alpha female, and if she breeds successfully, the wolf pack needs lower-ranking females too, to act as nannies to the pups, for that is a role fulfilled by female wolves in a wild pack . . . unless of course he finds a female kindred spirit – a human one – willing to be insinuated into the pack to become that lower-ranking nanny.

  At this point, almost six years after my trip to Devon, I am struggling with the philosophy of the project. Is it extraordinarily visionary, or is it grotesque, self-indulgent madness? And then, even as I was writing this, Channel Five showed two TV programmes called Mr and Mrs Wolf. Shaun Ellis had found Helen Jeffs, and she had given up her house and her job as a preschool nurse and moved in with him. He was about to try to persuade her to become a wolf cub nanny in nine weeks.

  ‘She can learn the female aspect of the wolves, and I find that very difficult,’ Shaun Ellis told the cameras. By now, there were seven wolves in the enclosure, the alpha male, two other adult males, three troublesome juvenile males, and Cheyenne, a female, who had mated with the alpha male. If the mating was successful, there would be pups in nine weeks. Cue a will-she-won’t-she cliffhanger at the end of programme one, by which time we have already seen Helen Jeffs faking regurgitation of food for Cheyenne in response to Shaun Ellis’s instruction, ‘Get her to nip around your lips’, and tearfully participating in the rescue of a camerawoman from a hide inside the enclosure which the wolves had discovered. Meanwhile the never-less-than-scary sounding voice-over proclaimed, ‘Helen has gone from a human nursery nurse to an apprentice wolf nanny regurgitating offal in three weeks.’ At which point I felt like regurgitating my dinner over the television.

  Shaun, meanwhile, had come off second best in a spat with one of the males. His role in the pack is to defuse the tensions, to break up the fights, and it seems, to lose some of them. So the camera lingers on him looking morose and nursing a couple of cuts on his face. You can almost hear the director urging him to look cowed and miserable, yet from what I remember of our interview he was philosophical about rough-and-tumble injuries, of which there must inevitably be many when you put yourself on the line as the peacemaker among three or four quarrelling wolves. I was not at all sure I was ready for part two of Mr and Mrs Wolf.

  I can’t help wondering if they would have been watching Mr and Mrs Wolf in that cottage in the tiny Devon hamlet of Wolverston on the River Wolf, where I knocked on the door and told a delightful old woman that I was from the BBC, making a radio programme about wolves, and I understood that this was where the last wolf in England was killed.

  ‘That’s what they say,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know anything about the story?’

  ‘No, but my husband might. He’s down the workshop. I’ll call him.’

  Her husband slid out from under a tractor and began talking at once, as if a visit from the BBC was an everyday occurrence. He told us what he knew, and my producer and I looked at each other, and I asked a couple of more questions and the old man spoke in response to the questions, and I looked at my producer again and detected an imperceptible shake of the head. We made our politest excuses and left. Grant Sonnex, the producer, lives near Bristol which is not a million miles away, and I was hoping against hope that he had understood the old boy, for my unattuned ears hadn’t understood one word in ten.

  We played it back, and in truth, we couldn’t use a word of it, other than to let him begin talking and then to fade his voice under my voiceover. It was a delicious accent, and I would love to have had the time to unravel it, but it was thicker than a jar of clover honey, and as impenetrable as Flemish. If it had been television we could have used subtitles. We gleaned this: tradition said England’s last wolf died nearby, in a valley bottom below Wolverton Moor where the Wolf River runs. Was it killed? Probably. Do you know when? Or how? No, no. But that’s what they say. This was my first encounter with the twilight world that is the last resting place of the last wolf. I would re-enter it again and again, finally about 700 miles further north on the Findhorn River. Only the accent would change.

  We had a folklorist, Jennifer Westwood, for company as we navigated the baffling, beautiful, mazy, hedged-in lanes of the valley of the Wolf River, an utterly different Devon from Ilfracombe and Combe Martin; but it was like looking for the secret of a magic spell inside a web, and this particular last wolf had had 500 years to cover its tracks. Harting’s assessment of the available evidence concluded:

  1485–1509. Some time between these two dates, during the reign of Henry VII, it is probable that the wolf became finally extirpated in England.

  He doesn’t mention Devon, yet if you wanted a peg to hang a theory on, surely the Wolf River is as promising as 500-year-old clues come. In Highland Scotland, for example, river names are often the oldest in the landscape. Jennifer Westwood counselled caution. It was hard, she said, to say for certain that the river was named after the killing. ‘I may be unduly suspicious, but sometimes rivers are renamed.’

  We followed directions from the couple in the cottage up to an ever-so-slightly eerie tree-shrouded crossroads. The name on the signpost announced Wolverston, followed by the symbol of a cross. What more do you need – Wolverston Cross, the Crossroads of the Wolf Village, right? Or is that a dangerous assumption? I asked the expert.

  ‘Not so much dangerous as disappointing, as often as not. If this name is anything like the name Wallerton in various parts of the country . . . when you break that down the Medieval forms sound as if they’ve got the wolf word in it . . . but when you really look at the legal documents, it turns out to be people’s names.’

  So maybe Mr and Mrs Wolf lived here.

  Strange how this most reviled of creatures across much of Europe from the Middle Ages onwards was also the name of choice for so many kings, warriors, would-be kings and would-be warriors. There were among England’s Anglo-Saxon Kings an Ethelwulf (the Noble Wolf); a Berthwulf (the Illustrious Wolf); Eadwulf (the Prosperous Wolf); Ealdwulf (the Old Wolf) . . . but never a hint of a Child-Slaying Wolf or a Sheep-Devouring Wolf or a Black Wolf or a Long-Tusked Wolf. So although the handed-down reputation of the wolf was so unremittingly slanderous, the many qualities of the true wolf were not lost on warrior-kings.

  There is a further implication: if you wanted to command the loyalty of your subjects, why choose the name of a creature that legend would have us believe was universally reviled? Could it be that there were many parts of the country, many parts of Europe, where the wolf was admired by those who lived alongside it, for exactly those qualities that appealed to a dynasty of kings, and for that matter, that appealed and still does appeal to thousands of years of generations of North American Indians and Eskimos? Shaun Ellis may have found hi
s inspirational sources among the Nez Perces. But if the inclinations of Anglo-Saxon kings had survived the welter of history-warping storytellers and myth-makers, he might have found role models much nearer to home too.

  Jennifer Westwood and I were rummaging among the possibilities of wolf names on the map while we walked a stretch of narrow road between Wolverston Cross and the high edge of Wolverston Moor. We bumped into a local woman walking a posse of dogs and asked her what she knew. Oh, she knew the story, of course, but not the detail. There was an old man in the village who knew more, but he died. But if we were to walk out onto the high moor, we’d be overlooking the spot where the deed was done, England’s last wolf slain. And with a final, parting shrug she added:

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  But you never find out who ‘they’ were, nor when they said it.

  The panorama from the edge of the moor was far-flung and lovely, and the river was far below, and the maze of lanes and hedges and dark trees fused into a hidden underworld where I found it easier to believe in hobbits than wolves. I was looking for the folklorist’s perspective, some unfankling of the myth-makers’ knots. I listed a few of the options and put them to Jennifer Westwood:

  ‘We’re in a landscape full of wolf placenames, including the irresistible Wolf River, and perhaps the setting for one of the following:

  “The last place that a wolf was seen in England.”

  “The last place that a wolf was seen in Devon.”