The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

“A story attached to an important local family.”

  “Some minor incident embroidered by local fantasy or bardic tradition.”

  What do you reckon?’

  ‘As always with local tradition, it would be lovely if there were a historical basis and you thought, “here are these people who have remembered this story for such a long time,”’ she said. ‘But so often the folklorist’s life is doomed to disappointment. Well, perhaps not disappointment exactly, but . . . it’s a floating tradition. With the right kind of landscape and place names the story will attach to that place. It’s eternally fascinating and eternally frustrating.’

  Barry Lopez had written in Of Wolves and Men about his response to reading some ancient books and the attitudes to wolves they reveal.

  You cannot examine any of these books without sensing that you have hardly touched in them the body of human ideas concerning the wolf. The wolf seems to move just beneath the pages of these volumes, loping along with that bicycling gait, through all human history, appraised by all sorts of men but uttering itself not a word.

  And I came away from the valley of the Wolf River with the same kind of feeling. It’s not the sense of the wolf that you bring away with you, but a sense of the storytellers, huddled round a winter fire, swilling firewater cider, making mischief with a beast of which they know nothing, nothing beyond the old stories they heard from their parents, their grandparents, wisps from the mists of time. They have their whisky-drinking counterparts too in far Strathglass, with their particular local invention of the stalwart hunter hanging onto the tail of the enraged she-wolf hell-bent on ripping the throat from the cub-slaying hunter inside her den; in Waternish on Skye, in the strath of the Findhorn River where a hunter built suspiciously like Scotland’s most durable warrior hero single-handedly killed the huge black wolf that had devoured two children as they crossed the winter hills with their mother. But alas for the storytellers, there were no black wolves in Europe.

  Mr and Mrs Wolf part two lived up to all my forebodings. Two hours of thoughtful prime-time television devoted to wolves could have made inroads into centuries-old prejudice. But two hours of tabloid prime-time television that preyed on its perception of the sensibilities of a Channel Five audience, replete with subliminal graphics of wolf teeth in close-up on a blood-red background, might just have set back by decades the cause of public approval of wolf reintroduction. Even now, even in the twenty-first century while wolves are steadily reclaiming old haunts in western Europe, while the European Union’s Species and Habitats Directive prods its member governments into recognition of their responsibilities in the matter of restoring indigenous wildlife species where they have been lost, while Yellowstone’s reintroduction programme blazes a trail of enlightenment whose benefits are so self-evident and so well documented that they dazzle with potential . . . even as that kind of headway is being made on both sides of the Atlantic, British television’s contribution is Mr and Mrs Wolf, two programmes not about wolves at all, but about a couple filmed in such a way as to leave an impression of two eccentric people doing something absurdly dangerous in the company of ferocious creatures. Every wolf stereotype was dropped in, not by Shaun Ellis and Helen Jeffs, but by the programme’s anonymous voice-over. Oh, the female wolf Cheyenne had her pups (a difficult birth in which the fifth pup became stuck in her birth canal, so that a vet had to be brought in, she had to be darted with a gun, operated on, and paraded in front of the cameras again still suffering from the after-effects of the ordeal and the anaesthetic) and she did eventually bring them out to the two human pack members, and there is no denying that was extraordinarily affecting, and Shaun Ellis told the camera: ‘We’ve all just been witness to the miracle that is the wolf.’

  No. The miracle that is the wolf is elsewhere, living on the move, ranging over hundreds of square miles, doing nature’s bidding, mixing it with bears, lynx, elk, eagle, and the other fellow-travellers of a northern wilderness, shaping the very ecosystem in which it lives, feeding thousands of mouths, creating opportunities for dozens of other species of mammals, birds, insects, plants, and making people aware of the debt we owe to nature in that far wolf country where people and wolves and wilderness still rub shoulders, and where nature makes the rules of engagement. For centuries we have taken from nature, and for the first time in our own evolution we are aware of the worth of conservation and we have all the information we need to restore much of that which we have taken. The wolf is the supreme agent to effect that kind of change. That is the miracle that is the wolf.

  Shaun Ellis said in the first of the two programmes, ‘To help and understand a creature you have to walk the same path.’

  Yes, but that is no wolf path his programmes walked.

  He also urged his girlfriend: ‘Don’t think like a human – think like a wolf.’

  But that is simply impossible. A wolf thinks like a wolf every minute of every day and night. The human mind can learn something of wolf behaviour and think that it understands why a wolf behaves in a particular way in particular circumstances, but it is a human appreciation of what the wolf thinks, not a wolf’s appreciation. The very instruction, ‘Don’t think like a human, think like a wolf,’ is a human thought. And the moment the two human beings start talking to each other again, they cease thinking the way they think wolves think. The wolf never stops thinking like a wolf.

  In my own work with swans, which includes watching the same Highland mute swan territory over thirty years, I convinced myself of only one thing with absolute certainty – that I do not think like a swan. And if you did ever learn to think like a wolf, you would not limit it with a fence, for that is the opposite of the way a wolf thinks, nor would you impose on the pack an alien species, for it makes no more biological sense to ask a wolf to interact with a human being as a member of its pack than with an elephant, a kangaroo, a troupe of screaming monkeys or a fake dinosaur.

  And yet Shaun Ellis has something remarkable to offer as an evangelist for the wolf. It is undeniable that he has gained insights that could prove invaluable in a genuine wolf reintroduction programme. There again, a genuine wolf reintroduction programme would not involve captive wolves but wild ones brought in from European landscapes similar to our own, landscapes where the wolf’s principal prey is deer, for it is by manipulating the deer herds that the wild wolf can begin to transform bare Highland glens and restore to them the diversity of life that belongs there. But if I had something to do with such a project, I would like to have someone on my team who could speak the lost wolf language.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Black Wood

  TREES REMEMBER WOLVES. The oldest pines, the three-and-four-hundred-year-olds, know the brush of wolf fur, the soft, deep slap of their footfall on the forest floor. They hand down the sense of wolves to the wolfless generations of young trees, and these grow older remembering the sense of wolves so that they are ready for the wolves’ return, which they know to be inevitable. The oldest tree in the Black Wood of Rannoch is a Scots pine of massive dark strength. When its seed was sown (a casual conspiracy of parent tree and crossbill and wind) it was a tree among many trees. Rannoch Moor undulates to far mountain walls at every compass point, an inland sea that breaks on mountain shores, but a sea of rock and heather and lochans and peat, of red deer and red foxes, of wildcats, of grey crows and golden eagles, of summer skylarks and winter swans, of wind-weary grass and the buried bones of dead trees. Once it was wooded from shore to shore. The Black Wood survives along the south shore of the moor. The old trees still remember the touch of wolf skin on tree skin, still long for it. Nothing else still living in the country of Rannoch has that memory.

  Beneath the oldest tree, the land is hollow. There is a difficult way in among rocks to a small cave whose entrance is hidden. It is roofed and buttressed by the tree’s roots, walled by rock, floored by cool, dry earth. The tree’s grandmother was young – perhaps 50 years old – when a singular wolf first appeared there. She came down to the cave on a
pale-green, stone-still morning of late April. She had been travelling all night, encouraged by a full moon. Just like the people, she marked time by the place of the sun and the stars in her sky, by the shape and brightness of the moon. The roundest moon was the best for hunting and travelling, the blackest, moonless, starless night was the worst, but sometimes better than daylight.

  The people made a story: the wolf howls at the moon. No. The wolf is most active under the full moon because it assists travelling. And it howls most when it is most active. But it never howls when it hunts. And it has no reason to howl at the moon.

  See her face in the rocks! Ah, but you can’t, can you? What you need to see her face in the rocks is a race memory you can tap into that spans hundreds of years. Wolves have the required memory, for they move in the ageless pageant of all wolves. And the tree has known the face in the rocks all its life, knows it for what it is, because trees remember wolves.

  Her face? Well, her eyes are pale gold, and small for the size of the face, and set in jet black ovals that thicken towards their inner edges and leak a jet black tear on each side of the muzzle. Each eye is also set in a wider circle of tan and dark grey fur and these reach up into her forehead which is mostly black but defined below her ears with a narrow echo of the same tan. Her ears are short and erect and forward-facing and rimmed in black, and the short fur there is tan and grey and white, and black again at the centre. Her muzzle is the deepest shade of tan on top, but abruptly white and pale grey on the sides and round her mouth. Her nose is small and black. She wears a ruff of bright white rimmed with dark grey and black and tan. If you could see her you might think her face beautiful.

  So she came down through the rocks and she was sure of her way, guided by the discernible path worn by uncounted years of wolves. She was not led there nor was she pointed there, and she had never been there before, but she knew at once that it was a wolf place. And a wolf place does not stop being a wolf place just because the land runs out of wolves. For there is no such thing as the last wolf, no end to the pageant of wolves.

  She had the knowledge to find the way without faltering. The place had not changed, not stopped being suitable. She saw the face in the rocks that welcomed her: this is your place for as long as you need it. The face is Nature in the guise of Wolf. It is her own face and it is the face of all the wolves of the pageant.

  She came alone. She had travelled alone constantly for a year, but unlike many lone wolves she did not choose solitude. Rather she had survived alone the killing of her pack in Strathspey, far to the north-east of Rannoch Moor. She had a lowly status in a pack of seven. The lower-ranking pack members are often acutely resourceful because they enjoy none of the privileges of rank and eke out their livings from scraps and leftovers and a talent for compromise. When the hunters began killing, the pack had scattered, but six of the seven were tracked down relentlessly. She survived, not by running but by lying on the bed of a shallow river, submerged all bar the tip of her nose. The water masked her scent and she was the colour and stillness of rocks. The hunting hounds did not have her knowledge. No wolf taught her to lie that way, but the knowledge was in her.

  Since then she had followed a ragged route south-west, searching for other wolves. She had found none. The old wolf places she knew were cold. Wherever she crossed or followed the paths of her ancestors she sensed only their absence. Finally she reached the northernmost edge of the Moor of Rannoch, and although she had never seen it before, she knew what it was, that hope lay out there among the rocky, peaty, watery, heathery waves of that moorland sea. She crossed it easily in a night, and came in among the first trees of the Black Wood. She homed in on a solitary pine tree and saw at last the dark hint of the hollow beneath. She sidled deftly between two rocks, then leapt over a blockage – a third rock – and found the entrance. The chamber beyond smelled cool and dry and woody. She paused and scented everything near and far. In the chamber there had been no wolf, no fox, no wildcat for a long time. She stepped at last deep into its shadow, made a tight furred curve of herself, and pulled her tail across her muzzle. She sighed and closed her eyes on her solitude.

  CHAPTER 10

  Norway

  THE RADIO ASSIGNMENT that had taken me to Devon then took me to Norway, where wolves had reintroduced themselves to old heartlands more than a hundred years after a sustained cull had wiped out their forebears. Norway’s wolves simply walked home. A pair crossed the border from Finland into the northmost corner of Norway, rounded the northern tip of Sweden, then began the long march down through Norway to the valley of the Gluma river in the south of the country. To human eyes it is a formidable trek, the better part of a thousand miles. But travel is what a wolf does best, and wolves seeking new territories have made distance-no-object journeys forever. Now Norway is home to four packs, which is the most the Norwegian government allows. If this number were to be exceeded, I was told that they would take action to limit the number of packs to four, which is a polite way of saying they would initiate a cull, which is another polite way of saying they would start killing wolves again. But thus far, Norway has mostly been an accommodating host to its homecoming wolves.

  The radio project was to pursue an idea called The Real Wolf (as opposed to all the other kinds that fester in the darkest recesses of historical prejudice and vested human interest all across the northern hemisphere), but somewhere in the back of my mind, the seed for this book was already sown and I was also looking for lessons – and truths – that I could bring to bear on my native land, where Scots had raised historical prejudice to an art form for the masses. And there, for much of the twenty-first-century population, it remains.

  So somewhere between Amsterdam and Oslo and at around 30,000 feet, the thought occurred to me that what Scotland needed was a border with Finland, thus side-stepping the apparently overwhelming difficulties of government wolf policy (there is none) and public opinion (see above) that still fankle every prospect of a thoughtful reintroduction of the wolf to Highland Scotland. Alas for the prospect of wolves reintroducing themselves to Scotland, the land bridge with Scandinavia fell into the North Sea some time ago, and a drifting Scotland bumped into England instead, and the English disapproved of wolves even more than the Scots.

  Time passes, tides turn. Scotland is reintroducing beavers, albeit with all the conviction of Canute at high tide. It may have taken 15 years of talking and false starts, but it is a beginning, and for that matter, a precedent: a mammal has been reintroduced. But while I contemplate the prospects for wolf reintroduction, ahead lie the massed ranks of politicians in Europe, London and Edinburgh, landowning intransigence, farmers large and small, mountaineers and mountain bikers and hill-runners and hillwalkers and tourists, and even some unimaginative conservationists, all worried about being eaten, or worse, being half-eaten but left alive. The wolf will return despite them all, because that tide has turned, because the wolf has begun to drift from the margins of conservation thinking towards the mainstream. But the pace of the reintroduction will not be swift. Meanwhile, I was looking for arguments and ammunition in a country where people were growing accustomed to living alongside wolves again, and at least some of them considered it a privilege.

  Driving north out of Oslo, the view quickly filled with mountains and trees, naturally occurring trees that grew to something like a naturally occurring treeline. I saw my first moose since Alaska five years before, standing alone and dead-still among roadside trees, a dark ebony colour, looking like a sculpture of a moose or a caricature of itself until it turned its moose-head to follow the car’s progress. The broad beauty of the Gluma kept us company.

  We stayed in a farmhouse on its east bank, built in 1797, dark timber with a turf roof from which birch saplings and other self-sown plant life sprang. They shaved it every now and then, but the roots bound the roof together and helped to anchor it. There were otter and beaver prints in the riverbank mud nearby, and a pair of sandpipers in the garden. It was called Langodden, the long
bend in the river, which describes its situation perfectly. It belonged to Grete and Hakon Langodden who lived next door, and who took their surname from the place where they lived. They and their son and their grand-daughter were the only four people in Norway with that name.

  I warmed to them at once, warmed to their determined lifelong attachment to their place on the map. I fell in love with Norway at once and, I suspect, forever. And somewhere out there in that endless, north-making sprawl of mountain and forest, there were wolves. I was not naïve enough to believe that I could step off a plane, wander off into the forest and watch wolves in the handful of days at my disposal, but at the very least, I wanted to come away with the sense of them in their landscape, a landscape to which they had returned voluntarily after a hundred years of absence. If I could see how it worked here, I could see how it might work back across the North Sea. One of the joys of occasionally working with an organisation like the BBC’s Natural History Unit is the preliminary research that underpins a project like this, so that I, as the writer and presenter of the programme, arrive in the right place at the right time to meet the right people. So the door of the 200-year-old farmhouse of Langodden opened, a voice called out a greeting, and I rose from the kitchen table to meet Bjorn and Gaire.

  Bjorn and Gaire were the wildlife film-makers whose wolf programme, eight years in the making, had just aired on Norwegian television. Gaire would be the source of the walking story about the naked man and the ‘concert from wolves at 200 metres’. Their passion not just for wolves, but for allowing them to behave like wolves unmolested by science’s determination to follow their every movement with laptops and radio collars and spotter planes, was as blatant as it was infectious, and it was vehemently declared before we had finished our first cup of coffee. It was expressed in ever-so-slightly fractured English and with good humour, so that we all laughed as much as I marvelled at the slowly unfurling life of the wild wolf.