The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  ‘So,’ I said, as we got ready to explore the territory of the Koppang wolf pack, ‘we have an area of about 1,000 square miles of forest and mountains, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Three or four wolves, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it’s summer, which is the worst possible time of year to try and find them, right?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Realistically, what are our chances of getting close to wild wolves?’

  ‘Well . . . maybe if we are lucky we can have a smell.’

  And we piled into Bjorn’s ancient Mercedes estate car and headed for the woods, laughing. Two hours later, we pulled off the road high above a wide-bottomed valley and overlooking a small lake where the unmistakable profile – and voice – of a great northern diver cruised the steely-blue water. If there is one sound that might be said to rival the rising howl of a wolf as the totemic voice of wild northern places, it is surely the down-curving cry of the loon. That voice rose towards us and I thought I heard wolf kinship there. Bjorn was saying that of all the packs in Scandinavia and all their territories, this was the place with the best chance of seeing wolves. But that’s in winter, of course, when you can track them in the snow, when they use the rivers and the lakes as highways, when it can never get too cold for wolves, when the prey of the wolves is at its most vulnerable and grows steadily weaker as winter deepens while the wolves only grow stronger. Besides, the film-makers use many eyes. They have a network of friends and contacts all across this part of Norway who report wolf sightings. One of them had called that morning to Bjorn’s car phone with a sighting three days before. Should we go, I wondered.

  ‘Three days – could be a hundred miles away by now.’

  For all that wolves love to travel, they also have favourite places within their territory and this is one of them. We broke out the coffee and something to eat and settled to watch for a while, and Gaire, the quieter of the pair, and less confident with his English, began to paint wolf pictures:

  ‘Two winters ago, I was watching seven wolves here. First thing I saw was a roe deer. Then I saw some other dark patches, and thought it was just places where the sun has taken the snow away. But then I saw these things begin to lie on their backs and I thought, “This is wolves.” First, three wolves, then I saw four more a little further out, and it was wolf tracks in the snow all over that big area. It was . . .’ he paused, searching for the right image, ‘like playing a football match!’

  ‘Liverpool versus Man U,’ said Bjorn.

  So I told them there was an English football team called Wolves, thinking this would be news to them.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Bjorn. ‘Wolverhampton Wanderers. They play in Division One now, I think. They were my favourites when I was a boy.’

  ‘They play in yellow and black,’ said Gaire.

  It was not what I had expected to be discussing in Norway’s wolf-wilderness. Gaire resumed his picture painting, complete with sound effects.

  ‘Another time, I heard the cubs at one in the morning.’

  And he demonstrated the high-pitched babbling of the cubs.

  ‘Then the answer from the alpha male, two kilometres away.’

  And as he mimicked the deep wolf voice rising then falling again in unpredictable bluesy slides and intervals, against that backdrop of the rise and fall of the valley, the lake, river, woods, clearings, fold after fold of forested hills yielding at last to 6,000-feet mountains, something danced between my shoulder blades. And suddenly the wolf was changing in my mind. The two Norwegians were beginning to show me a creature going about its everyday business, small in a huge landscape. The captive wolves in Devon, where the radio project had begun, were too large in a landscape too small. It was a head-spinning moment, and head-spinning moments had been missing in Devon.

  ‘I heard it, then silent a long time, then it started again . . . ’

  I asked him what that sound meant to him. He sighed, thought about it for a few moments, then he said this:

  ‘You sit there in the winter time, waiting, hoping that something will happen. You freeze a little. You take a little cup of tea. And you’re looking. And looking. At trees full of snow. Nothing happens. Maybe you hear a little bird. And then you hear this noise. Starting very low, and you’re thinking, ‘Where is it? Where is it? You know? You can feel how your whole body is looking for where this wolf is. It’s a very special feeling. It’s the voice of the wild.’

  Bjorn said: ‘And it’s strong, very strong-loud.’

  Gaire said: ‘Yes, and this voice, you bring it with you in the body, for many, many, many days.’

  That silenced us all, and in that silence I wondered what he was getting at. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand him, it was just that I wondered where he went in his head when the voice of a wolf, which he must have heard many, many, many times, lingered deep within him these many, many, many days.

  Yes, and this voice, you bring it

  with you in the body

  for many, many, many days.

  You even try to sing its

  slippery cadences;

  so many, many, many ways

  to hear, interpreting it

  as wolf-like as you dare;

  so many, many, many plays

  of light illumining it,

  with you in the body

  for many, many, many days.

  Gaire was talking again. ‘Other friend, he was living on the west side of this area. He calls me one Saturday morning, Gaire, you gotta come over. He has sled dogs, these dogs had been very upset and made much noises . . . ’

  And so he told me the story of the naked man and the concert of wolves at 200 metres, the walking story that grew legs and made a grotesque dissonance of that concert of wolves in fourteen days. That was in fourteen days. Imagine one hundred and forty days. One hundred and forty years.

  Far below us, the loon broke into our silence, a voice like a thin moan of wind; we all raised binoculars towards the sound, saw the bird swinging in slow circles the way a small boat moves on a bow anchor, and we exchanged smiles.

  ‘It’s good,’ I said, ‘but I’m not carrying it anywhere in the body.’

  And then we were laughing and putting away our flasks and wrapping uneaten sandwiches and boarding the old Mercedes. As we drove, I decided this:

  The wolf has a power. Wittingly or unwittingly – wittingly I hope, but I have no way of knowing – that power embraces the capacity to stir in other creatures an awareness of need; not the needs of wolves, but the needs of nature, the needs of the planet we call Earth. Specifically, the wolf has the power to reach us – the human species – although we comprise demonstrably the single most determined source of great suffering imposed on wolves, and for that matter on all nature, on planet Earth. But if there is ever to be a way for us to reconnect as a species with the needs of nature, if we are ever to rediscover as a species those fundamentals of nature that are part of our make-up too, but which we have chosen to discard, it will only be achieved by learning to listen again to nature’s voice. And there is only one voice of nature with that persuasive power, one voice that you bring with you in the body for many, many, many days. We must learn to live again, I told myself, with the wolf in our midst. And then I went south to Rendal to meet a sheep-farmer called Karl.

  Karl was a third-generation sheep-farmer. He was tall, strong, dignified, hospitable, eloquent and immensely likeable. And, as I soon discovered, he was also passionate about farming, about land use, and passionately against wolves. Yet as we walked around his farm, his rapport with a handful of ewes and lambs in a small field was almost childlike. It was obvious from the outset where his sympathies lay, and it was equally obvious before our conversation had progressed beyond pleasantries that he had decided I was a friend of wolves. And not once in our conversation did he raise his voice or dodge a question. He began by telling me this story:

  ‘Two years ago we had a man working in the forest. He was su
rrounded by nine wolves. They went round him in a circle, nearer and nearer, threatening him. That was a real occasion.’

  His stress on the word real was pointedly for my benefit as a friend of wolves. I asked if the man was alone.

  ‘Yes. He was very scared, and refused to work in the forest for weeks after that. People fear the wolves. Almost everybody in Rendal fears the wolves. Parents have taken to driving their children to school instead of letting them walk because they fear attacks.’

  He explained that the tradition in Norway had been to let sheep roam in the forests in the summer, but since the wolves returned in 1998 he had fenced his sheep all year round, until the year before I met him.

  ‘Last year, we tried to keep the sheep in the forest and I lost more than 100 sheep out of 350.’

  ‘Are you certain all these were killed by wolves?’

  ‘Yes. Seventy-three were killed one night. I was there but I couldn’t do anything to stop it.’

  ‘You actually saw this happening?’

  ‘Yes, I saw the sheep, the dead sheep, the wounded sheep which I had to shoot, to kill them myself. But I didn’t see the wolves.’

  ‘Did people come to verify that these were wolf kills?’

  ‘Yes, they did. Of course they were killed by wolves. I have seen it so many times myself. I was quite sure.’

  ‘How many farms have been affected round here?’

  ‘Six farms, but earlier there were more, but they quit farming because of the wolves and the bears. They have given up. It’s too hard to keep on. But I am not giving up . . .

  ‘Because . . . ?’

  ‘Because if we give up, this beautiful area will be just wolves and bears here. We want people to live here and farm and have sheep and cows. If we are to keep on farming the wolves and bears must leave or be shot.

  I don’t hate wolves. I don’t hate any animal. But I don’t like them, I don’t like them near me, in my surroundings. They belong in the wilderness and there isn’t enough wilderness here to keep wolves.’

  I said that to someone from a small country like Scotland, Norway’s tracts of mountain forest felt almost endless.

  ‘Norway is a small country,’ he said. ‘We are using the forest here. We have roads, there are cottages, we are picking berries and we are hunting, and the wolves are threatening all of these activities. So we feel we don’t have enough wilderness.’

  ‘So would you rather there were no wolves in Norway at all?’

  ‘Yes. That would be my wish.’

  ‘Do you think that’s fair on the wolves?’

  ‘I think there is enough wilderness in Russia, in Alaska, to keep the wolves. The wolves aren’t threatened from a global perspective. So I don’t think we have to keep them in the little Norway.’

  The little Norway’s lucrative hunting industry concurs. Hunters and wolves compete for moose, among other things, and attacks by wolves on hunters’ dogs are not rare. On the other hand, wolves don’t kill hunters. The last ‘documented’ attack on a hunter in Norway was in 1800, and we have already seen how reliable such documenting of wolf behaviour was in Europe back then.

  Every year, however, hunters are killed by moose, and so, indirectly are non-hunters, for moose on Norwegian roads are a regular source of road traffic accidents. But no-one wants to remove moose from the little Norway, nor do they drive their children to school rather than let them walk because moose are in the forests. The thing about a moose is that it is so useful to people; hunters love to hunt them and people love to eat them. (I’m with them there: I had a moose steak in Norway and it was sublime.) But you don’t put a wolf head on your wall and you don’t eat wolf steaks, and only in Alaska did I ever meet a man who owned up to using wolf fur for his mitts and to trim the hood of his parka.

  And although I was impressed by the Norwegian sheep-farmer, and although it would be so easy to sympathise with the logic of his arguments, I felt there was something missing, and that something left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable. His arguments were all based solely on the interests of people. And are we really willing to tolerate wilderness only if it is populated by creatures with which people can feel comfortable? Have we strayed so far from our origins as one of nature’s tribes that we cannot permit a single discordant note, a single edgy presence? No-one disputes that Norway has wilderness, but it is a restored wilderness, and it was restored by the return of the wolf. For any wilderness that has its top predator removed artificially – say by a government-sponsored cull – stops being wilderness. People can’t manage wilderness, because when they try, as they have done in Scotland for the last few hundred years, they do so by putting the interests of people first.

  I suggested something like that to Karl, and asked why it was not enough to be willing to share his place on the map with wolves knowing the government would compensate him for sheep killed by wolves. He said that his grandfather had farmed sheep here, his father had farmed sheep here, and he would farm sheep here. But feeding wolves was not why he raised sheep.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, his fellow Norwegian Gaire had said to me:

  ‘Yes, and this voice, you bring it with you in the body for many, many, many days,’ and I had felt a kind of soaring optimism for the potential for our species to reconnect with wolves. But after talking to Karl, after thinking about him and his way of life and how he saw his own place on the map and how he perceived that it was farming that made it beautiful (and although he never used the words, the unspoken implication seemed to be that that other wolf-and-bear wilderness was a kind of ugliness), I was made uneasy. I was suddenly acutely aware of the power of the phrase ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ – it is the ultimate deceit. And I had a new definition of the word ‘overkill’ – 73 sheep killed by two wolves in one night.

  The idea behind the radio project that had taken me to Norway in the first place, to get to grips with something called The Real Wolf, must surely embrace both these extremes of response to the proximity of wolves if it was to produce anything like a balanced assessment . . . but only if it was to produce anything like a balanced assessment, and I never much cared for balanced assessments or balanced writing for that matter. And mine is a nature writer’s perspective, and my nature writing is informed by the fact that I am also a journalist, and the journalist in me was taught many years ago to question every shred of received wisdom that comes my way, regardless of how sincerely it may have been offered, in case it should somehow mask or diminish my own conclusions of what I perceived to be the truth.

  I had come to Norway in the first place because I am fascinated by wolves, enthralled by the place they occupy in a northern hemisphere ecosystem when they are permitted to behave like wolves. And the truth about the wolf – one truth about the wolf – is that it can be like a bridge in all our lives, a bridge where enlightenment may cross, a bridge to a place where we don’t make all the rules and where our species is not always in charge. And if some people are disadvantaged by our willingness to allow the proximity of wolves back into our lives, people like sheep farmers and hunters, then that is simply part of the price that we pay for the privilege of a closer walk with natural forces, part of the debt that we owe for all that we have taken out of nature for far too long. We cannot rationalise every decision we ever make as a species on the basis of whether or not it will be good for the economy; sometimes the greater good of planet Earth must come first, and the wolf, as the master-manipulator of northern hemisphere ecosystems, is an agent for that greater good.

  We had planned a late night out on a mountaintop at the heart of the Koppang pack’s territory with Bjorn. But first there was a private screening at his house of the film he and Gaire had made for Norwegian television. It was beautifully done, both understated and passionate at the same time, and its characteristic motif was a constant return to sequences of long shots, the wolves tiny in a huge landscape and travelling, always travelling. Bjorn liked these long shots too for the way they symbolised the life of a handf
ul of wolves in a territory of a thousand square miles. He added: ‘I could have got closer but then I risked to scare them.’

  And there was another perspective on the relationship between people and wolves. There were the parents who decided to start driving their children to school for fear of attacks, and there was the film-maker working with wolves day after day for eight years who didn’t want to get too close in case he scared them.

  Bjorn cooked moose steaks, a moose he had shot himself, and, yes, there was a trophy head on the wall in his sitting room. I asked him where he had shot it. He led me out on to the veranda (Norwegians love verandas and balconies) with its miles-wide view over forests and hills, gestured at that expansive land as if the answer to my question was somewhere out there, and then the sweep of his arm ended by pointing down at the place on the veranda where he had told me to stand.

  ‘Right here,’ he grinned.

  ‘You shot a moose from your own balcony?’

  ‘Yes, he was standing in the edge of the trees there. Here, you don’t go to the supermarket. The supermarket comes to you.’

  The steak was served with mushrooms and onions and roast potatoes and it was as good as any meat I have ever eaten. Then we headed out into the northern evening for the mountain, knowing it wouldn’t get dark, knowing our best ghost of a chance of the sight or the sound (I’d settle for that) of a wild wolf was up there and late in the evening. Or perhaps we would just get a smell.

  The car was pounding up unmetalled forest roads when Bjorn suddenly said: ‘Stop here, stop here, stop here!’

  We jumped out and crouched over four huge footprints in the mud. Moose tracks are everywhere in these forests, but these were not moose. Even I knew that only one animal made tracks like that – bears. Bjorn stood up and said, ‘That was very big surprise!’