The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  He declined to explain how he had spotted them from inside the car at 30 miles an hour. But they were old. ‘This could be from the autumn,’ he said.

  So the wolves have bears for company. Goody.

  We left the car soon after and began to climb up ever-narrowing paths through the trees, the air cooling noticeably as we climbed. We watched the path. We found wolf tracks, and although they too were old, something slid into place alongside them. It was exhilarating as a native of wolf-less Scotland to walk here, knowing that a wolf had walked this path before me, and will walk it again after me, and find my footprints there. Briefly, we have shared the same few square yards of our travelling lives. Our paths have crossed.

  We were making for the summit where an old fire-watcher’s cabin now served as a wolf-watcher’s bothy. The forest, like all good natural forests, closed in on us, then fell back and opened up grassy clearings. It also thinned out and the stature of the trees diminished as we climbed. And sightlines expanded, opening long views to the north. There were miles and miles and miles of this stuff, and big mountains beyond.

  At last we left the trees behind and half the world appeared. I looked around through 360 degrees at the sprawl of hill and forest and river valley – the mighty Gluma again. Bjorn watched me for a few moments, then said, ‘Now you see almost the whole territory of the wolf pack.’

  Almost. It’s colossal. I have heard scaremongering ‘experts’ predict that if the wolf was reintroduced into Scotland, we would end up with between 300 and 400 wolves. Yet in the whole of Norway, with so much more suitable habitat and abundant prey, there are between 20 and 30 wolves, and most Norwegians simply never see them. Scotland would do well to reach 20 wolves.

  Down there somewhere, in the closest 1,000 square miles, there were a handful of wolves, four of them, possibly five, travelling, always travelling. I heard Gaire’s voice again: ‘Where is it? Where is it? You can feel how your whole body is looking for where this wolf is.’

  And I was looking with my whole body, and we all trooped off to the summit where a peregrine falcon leapt from a rock, a grey slash across the sunset. I heard Karl’s voice again: ‘There is no room for them in the little Norway.’

  It was almost 10 p.m. Bjorn said: ‘We have the sun for one more hour. I think we will sit down and just relax, maybe take a cup of coffee.’

  A cup of coffee on a Norwegian mountaintop watching the sun set in the north has a lot to commend it. At any second a wolf might howl from the trees below, the sound curling up on the wind like a buzzard on a thermal, but the wind sang alone and grew cold.

  I had another of those ‘unsound but illuminating thoughts’ (the phrase, you may remember, was Ernest Hemingway’s) that punctuate my nature writing life and help the writing along, and it was this: ‘There’s the essence. The real wolf is not seen, not heard. It exists beyond us. It always will be beyond us. But we all carry our own picture of it with us.’

  And here’s mine. The quest of these two radio programmes had begun with a captive wolf almost at my feet in Devon. But here, on this Norwegian mountaintop that was a wolf pack’s landmark, watching the sun vanish and the deep-blue midnight descend on the forest, I had never felt closer to wildness in my life. I have been on mountains at midnight before and slept in forests, but the difference here was the possibility of wolves, the certainty of their unseen, unheard presence. The wolf matters first and foremost for its own sake. Beyond that, it is our passport back to deeper appreciation of wildness – it is as simple as that.

  We walked back down into the forest, still watchful, still hopeful.

  What was that?

  What was that? It was a sound far-off at the edge of my hearing, deep-throated and rising then lost, shredded by the wind. I turned to Bjorn.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I did not hear it.’

  ‘It was deep, something at the edge of my hearing.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a wolf.’

  But I was unwilling to claim it. If Bjorn had heard it, that would have been different. I said: ‘It was a troll.’

  ‘It could be.’

  And we walked back to the car chuckling while robins sang and cuckoos and woodcock called.

  And in the car, somewhere around 2 a.m., far down the forest road, just beyond the range of the headlights, something ran across the road and vanished into trees and it was fast and pale and the last I saw of it was the flourish of a thick tail. And what was that? It could have been, we agreed. It could have been. The wolf, always moving at the edge of things, and travelling, always travelling.

  My BBC producer Grant Sonnex and I spent part of our last day in Norway revisiting the Jugenhotte, the Canyon of the Trolls. Norwegians love their trolls, their troll stories, their troll dolls of every shape and size. Scotland’s worst tourist-trap shops sell tartan dolls by the bucket-load; Norway’s sell trolls.

  We had stopped at the canyon during our first exploration of the wolf territory with Bjorn and Gaire. Grant wanted to record its teeming, echoing ravens, and I was happy to have a bit of time to gather my thoughts and make notes sitting on the canyon rim.

  In simple geological terms, it was a glacier dam that burst, not that there is anything simple about the process or its protracted aftermath, but the result is a huge gouge out of the land. You stand on the rim peering down into its giddy depths, vertical rock walls sparsely colonised by ragged hedges of nimble-footed pines that first thrust out a speculative trunk into the airspace then turned at right angles and climbed towards the sun. The river was in shadow, and so far below that its voice was drowned out by ravens, the adults bringing in prey to lusty fledglings. The fledglings fluttered and screamed on the ledges, demanding more. Quite a place to take your first flight. It takes brave ravens to hatch out there where trolls and broken boulders conspire far, far below, and lie in wait of just one first false step before juvenile wings have grown articulate in the peculiar speech of mobile canyon air. The Jugenhotte was a natural amphitheatre for echoes, so that the uneasy impression was of hordes of ravens instead of just a few dozen.

  A long, grey glacial slash shone across the face of the mountain, like the falcon crossing the sunset: this too is a landmark on the pack’s travels. I began to wonder if their thousand square miles contained so much as a single dull acre. If it did, I didn’t see it.

  I raised my own voice in my imperfect impersonation of a raven, and heard it echo back to me, the echo spilled from a raven’s mouth. A Canadian biologist once told me that ravens had the largest animal vocabulary after human beings. I wondered what raven meaning I had just uttered, and what the raven replied, and what the rest of the canyon made of our echoed exchange.

  I spent some of the last evening on the balcony of a spotless motel room, writing in sunshine, watching swifts that nested two balconies to the south. I left the door to my balcony open all evening but no wolf howl drifted in, although a swift flew round the room in the early morning and flew out again. There are worse ways to be woken than by the flight of a swift.

  The long road south was the beginning of the end of it all. The land softened, pines and birches gave way to softer trees. Eventually there were no more mountains.

  Oslo airport is the only truly beautiful airport I have ever seen. Huge curved laminated wooden beams support a vast and airy space. It is clean and quiet, the staff welcoming and helpful. A huge sculpture adorns the entrance. It is of some Norse god or other, one arm outstretched, one drawn back as if to hurl some devastation or other – a missile or thunderbolt or the kind of god-rock that bursts glacier dams – except that the object in his hand is a paper aeroplane. An airport where you smile as you enter is unique in my experience of the species.

  It may be that Scotland will not reintroduce wolves in my lifetime, although I think it will. But if some political deity of Edinburgh or London decrees, say, a 50-year moratorium on all mammal reintroductions because, say, a reintroduced beaver felled a listed tree in Argyll, or dammed a trout stream
, then I may move to Norway.

  We flew. We landed in Amsterdam. Holland was flat with straight lines. Grant and I parted company there. He flew on to London, I to Edinburgh, where the tilt of the landing aircraft restored to me the sight of a mountain skyline – Perthshire, where a small pine-lined cottage waited for me among forested hills, among forested wolf-less hills.

  I picked up my rented car, and headed up the familiar M9 towards the familiar mountains. My mind was in a far forest.

  What was that?

  CHAPTER 11

  The First Dreams

  TWICE THE DREAMING. Twice the failure of others to respond in dreaming.

  It was as she had begun to fear: in all the wolf lands of her travels since she left the high mountain plateau and pinewoods of the north-east, no wolves to catch her dream. She knew that men had done this. She knew they were accomplished hunters. Wolves respect accomplished hunters, but she knew too, that she must avoid men. Men also made the forests of the wolf lands lie down and become tame. Wolves had not known before that the forests could be made tame, and they had not respected that aspect of men, therefore they had learned to distrust all men. Wolves do not like to live in a tamed place. They cannot understand why an accomplished hunter would want to make the forest tame, for taming a forest diminished the range and the numbers of that which can be hunted, diminished the colour, the beauty.

  She would wait. She had the patience of glaciers.

  She hunted when she was hungry, ate, returned, rested, waited.

  She would not volunteer to die alone. That is not the way of such a wolf. So she must live until all her living strength was done, and such a wolf must also live with purpose. Her purpose was to make contact with other wolves. For the moment, for some days or some weeks, her life was waiting.

  Time would change things.

  Perhaps other wolves were making for Rannoch too, from the south and the west, a refuge for the pageant again.

  If none came, she would travel again. She believed in travelling. But she also believed in the refuge of Rannoch and she would give it every chance to fulfil her purpose.

  So there was no third dream yet. The two dreams told her that there were no wolves within reach. A third dream would tell her what she knew already. When wolves pursue a quarry that moves too fast for them they stop chasing. The dreaming, for the moment, had become a quarry she could not catch. She waited instead, and perhaps the too-fast prey would meet other travelling wolves and turn and come to her.

  There had never been a time when the dreaming failed completely. She knew that wolves were fewer now, but there had been lean times before. No wilderness tribe is constant. They all ebb and flow, all rise and fall like winds, like rivers. There are low ebbs, black winds, droughts. Good springs and summers resurrect all their spirits. Wolves had recovered from hard times to hundreds before now. But more and more she found only the absence of wolves, and that absence was the only thing on Rannoch Moor that she feared.

  Night without moon, cold as starlight, a thin black wind out of the north. She interrogated the wind, discarding its old and useless scents. She explored these:

  Deer. Four hinds at a hundred yards. She heard the calf splash in the burn the hinds had cleared easily. She was not hungry, but she stared at the passage of the scent and her eyes discerned the darker black of their silhouettes.

  Fox. On the move, east to west, farther off than the deer, and more pungent, and mingled with the enticement of a grouse, travelling in the same direction at the same distance and at the same speed, so dead in the jaws of the fox. The grouse excited her, and although she was not hungry she weighed the prospect of its succulence. But a fight with a fox was usually more trouble than it was worth, and if it was the dog fox heading for a tryst with the bitch, there would be two foxes to defend the grouse. If she had even one other wolf she could prise away the grouse, draw the two foxes, baffle and outrun them, and her accomplice would have made short work of the cubs. She discarded it all.

  Eagle. Up there, beyond the burn where the deer crossed, but this side of the fox, a pair of golden eagles nested in an old pine tree. They were the beneficiaries of a hundred years of eagles, generations that had reinforced and added to the eyrie year on year so that even as the tree grew, the nest corrupted its shape as if a dark cloud had snagged in its topmost limbs. Winters usually burst apart the top of the eyrie and unpicked its foundations, but each year the damage was meticulously repaired and new walls added. Several times the whole thing had become top-heavy and its top half or its top two thirds had crashed to the woodland floor; and somewhere in its basement, the oldest timbers rotted through and the mass settled lower in the crown of the tree, redefining its own foundations. That April night the huge dark female (ebony and chestnut shades, golden nape) was sitting on two eggs; her mate, smaller (but only by golden eagle standards) and paler, roosted nearby on a taller tree. The wolf discerned their separate scents and the leftover bones of their prey. The male eagle, restlessly on watch even on such a night, and blessed with eyesight a wolf might envy, saw her clearly where she stood. Neither had any reason to trouble the other, but both had marked the passage of the fox, the grouse, and the likely presence of cubs.

  Badger. In a shaded bank by a trickle of water that made slowly for the burn the deer had just crossed a small sett that sustained a handful of badgers. Nothing troubled the badgers, not even a wolf. There was nothing more unpredictable, nothing better equipped or better spirited to fight its way out of a corner than a badger. She had no reason to pick a fight with a badger, which had no reason to pick a fight with her. She gave the sett a wide, downwind berth. Whenever she met a badger, the two eyed each other warily, with mutual respect, and passed on. She also had an inherited memory of bears, although they had been absent from her landscape for several centuries. There was enough of the bear about the badger for the wolf to be cautious and avoid its company.

  A new sound, a horse, slow on the hard track half a mile away; the rhythm of the gait told her it was being ridden. Horses on the track were usually being ridden. She knew the track now, travelled it in the dark for ease of movement, knew its horse scents and its people scents (the horse scent masked the people scent when the horse had a rider), understood its purpose. She also knew the groomed scent of a man’s horse from a wild horse of the moor, their different sounds and rhythms and spirits; and she knew and enjoyed the warmth between wolf and horse, an ancient bond that was undiminished by the horse’s harnessing with people. She decided suddenly to travel as far as the source of this slow horse sound.

  She moved at an easy trot, her huge feet padding in near silence among the pines, though the trees felt her passage. The trees relished her presence in their midst after a long absence as the tribe of wolves had thinned out all across the land. The long-lived tree generations were rooted in times of wolf plenty and tree plenty (for the trees too were a dwindling race).

  In that land of Rannoch, pinewoods and moor together were the best hope for wolves, and therefore for nature. Such compact logic was understood by all creatures except men, for on the moor they had long since become obsessed only with their own precarious survival. They had misplaced the knowledge that their salvation there lay in wild nature, and that the salvation of wild nature lay in the wolf. Pinewoods and moor together offered a place where wolves might withdraw, heal, recover, begin again, a place from which they might emerge fit to travel again. That recovery would reawaken the old knowledge in all wolves, re-establish Rannoch as a sacred place for wolves to which they would return forever.

  So the trees greeted the brush of her fur, the pad of her feet, the warmth of her presence. Tree to tree, they passed her through the darkness until she stood at the edge of the clearing that accommodated the track. The horse was travelling west and into the wind. The wolf turned that way and followed, not using the track but travelling parallel to it, keeping a screen of trees between her and the clearing so that in her mind as she travelled she could see her own sh
ape as one on the track might see it, and it was a shape made of broken shadows. For that she was grateful to the trees, and relished their presence in return, and in that spirit she closed on the horse and its rider, increasing her pace until she was level with the horse, and she fell in with the horse’s pace, watching through the trees.

  Suddenly the horse stopped and gave soft voice. The rider spoke: ‘What is it?’

  The horse stared at the trees. The wolf was a shadow among shadows. The rider stared too, but that shadowed confusion offered no explanation. Yet the rider thought something moved between the horse and the shadows, some warm air of communication that a rider might feel but not understand.

  ‘Come on lass, I’m hungry. You’re hungry, for that matter.’

  The horse moved off at once then responded to the soft command for more speed.

  The wolf had stopped when the horse stopped. She stood still now and listened to the diminishing sound, and knew that the horse possessed knowledge of her. The scent of the close-up horse and now the cooler scent of the rider lingered in her. She would know both again, the very horse, the very rider.

  CHAPTER 12

  Yellowstone

  On so many days, we humans seem insatiable, determined to cobble together a fantasy in which there’s nothing we can’t have, can’t own. But to a lot of wildlife watchers the wolf defies all that, standing as a link to the kinds of mysteries that lie well outside our pipe-dreams of manipulation and control. Seeing a wolf in the wild can feel like one of the final frontiers of nature – a frontier that can never be possessed.

  – Douglas W. Smith and Gary Ferguson, Decade of the Wolf – Returning the Wild to Yellowstone (2005)

  THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE did not end what was euphemistically known as ‘predator control’ until 1926. The great American wilderness was no such thing, because outwith Alaska, in what America calls the lower forty-eight states, the philosophy that ‘the only good wolf is a dead wolf’ was ubiquitous. The very phrase was a grimly pointed reworking of General Philip Sheridan’s immortal utterance in the winter of 1868 to the Comanche chief Tosawi, who introduced himself to the General with the words ‘Tosawi, good Indian.’ Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee noted that the General’s response was: ‘The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.’ Brown wrote: