The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  In the fifth place, I have an instinctive idea, quite unsubstantiated by any shred of evidence, that the last of our wolves died old and alone on Rannoch Moor. I have learned to trust such instincts, the ones that have been honed by the long years of wandering the land and sitting still with the land and watching. In an earlier book, Brother Nature, I wrote about interviewing the late Don MacCaskill, one time head forester of Strathyre Forest in Perthshire, an exceptional wildlife photographer and an enlightened naturalist. The occasion was a radio programme about reintroducing lost mammals and the subject of the interview was the beaver:

  So we stood on the wetland shore of Lochan Buidhe, a reedy little watersheet to the north of Loch Lubnaig frequented by otters and herons and wintering whooper swans, and an occasional resort of the mute swans from the loch. There were four of us that spring morning, Don and I, BBC producer Dave Batchelor, and a man who had worked with beavers in France, and I interviewed my old friend. It was he who had brought us to the shore of Lochan Buidhe.

  Here, he said, was where we should introduce beavers.

  Why here? I asked. I expected a naturalist’s assessment of habitat, food supply, lack of disturbance, that kind of thing. And perhaps a photographer’s assessment too, for he lived nearby and would have loved to be involved in such a project. But instead he said: ‘I had a dream they were here.’

  At which point the man from France smiled and nodded vigorously and said: ‘I am impressed. Do you know, this is so like the landscape in France where we reintroduced beavers.’ He nodded again. ‘So like it.’

  I go often to Lochan Buidhe, and almost as often I think about Don’s simple conviction that his dream validated the idea of beavers here. And the more I think about it the more it impresses me too. Because there would have been a time – even among these very hills – when the assistance of dream or second sight or some knowledge acquired intuitively from some realm beyond reason would have informed decisions and determined the course of events. Seers and sages, sung and unsung, are part of the history of such places.

  North American Indian and Inuit cultures are rich in such traditions, and we often know more about them because they stayed closer to nature for much longer than we did (and in some places they still do), and because America’s admirable tradition of nature writing has written them down and found a market place in modern popular culture. Don lived his life in nature’s company . . . and if you spend your life working with nature on nature’s terms, determined to live as close to it as is humanly possible today, it is far from fanciful to suppose that nature in return might trust you and use you to further its cause, and insinuate its purpose into a dream.

  And if you take that philosophy and present it to such a body as, say, Scottish Natural Heritage, or the petitions committee of the Scottish Parliament, and suggest that it is a more appropriate basis for action on behalf of wildlife than their ponderous bureaucracies, how far do you think you would get?

  And yet consider this. The dream was simple and specific – a particular species in a particular landscape. The pedigree of the dreamer was impeccable. His knowledge of nature was gathered in nature’s company, much of it in the landscape of the dream. On the basis of that knowledge, he was permitted to design forestry plantations and change the ecology of mountainsides. He was accustomed to thinking deeply about reintroducing species, especially those that inhabited a treed environment. I had heard him discuss the notion many times. If that substantial store of intimate knowledge and careful reason was then infiltrated by a simple and vivid dream, why would you not be justified in trusting it utterly as a thing of profound significance and defining purpose?

  I dare them.

  I dare the ponderous ones at SNH and the occasionally surprising ones at the Scottish Parliament to act on Don MacCaskill’s dream. Let them have their scientific trial by all means, radio-collar and ear-tag their beavers if they must, and follow their every waking, sleeping moment and cull them if they get out of hand or if the project takes cold feet, make their scientific appraisals and chunky reports and collect their salaries. But allow the dream too. Allow beavers to be wild here at Lochan Buidhe, untagged, uncollared, and allow nature to make the decisions, and leave those of us who still believe in the natural order to watch and wonder at what unfolds, at the revealed purpose of nature in choosing a man like Don MacCaskill to be the seedbed of a dream.

  The example of people like Don is relevant to the reintroduction of wolves. If he had been a tribesman in the Oglala Sioux, his belief endorsed by Black Elk, he would have been a tribal legend. But he was born in Kilmartin, Argyll, and he worked for the Forestry Commission where his concerns for the natural environment at the expense of commercial expediency frequently fell foul of the system. He had faith in his instincts and these were invariably informed by knowledge gleaned at nature’s beck and call. He raged against a proposal to plant the upper reaches of a nearby glen where golden eagles nest, arguing that it would wreck a crucial part of the eagles’ hunting territory. He was overruled by headquarters, and eventually designed the planting programme himself. A few years after his death, when it became clear that he had been right, the trees were removed.

  So when I go to Rannoch Moor with wolves on my mind and feel the rightness of the place and the power of the instincts that have led me there, I remember the example of Don and I trust it. I did not dream it, exactly, but the conviction grew in me over time, and in the American tradition of nature writing I admire so much, I wrote it down. It seems to me now that the time is right for Scotland to make a leap of faith on nature’s behalf. We have created two national parks – the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs – and by any rational assessment of the service they have rendered to nature they have failed utterly. So now we know what not to do. But the parks exist, they have been set aside as different, they are allocated state resources, and if only the philosophy of these two parks can be swayed towards protection of native habitats and wildlife, and if the parks can be joined by a third park with Rannoch Moor at its centre and dedicated to re-establishing something like wilderness, then the opportunity exists to let the influence of the wilderness core seep south-west into the northmost part of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, and north-east into the southern reaches of the Cairngorms National Park. This third Heartland National Park will stretch from Glen Dochart and Loch Tay in the south to the Monadhliath in the north, which by Scottish standards is vast, and it will cement in place a wedge of Highland landscape, a threefold national park dedicated to the wellbeing of nature. The core of this is the place to reintroduce wolves so that once they establish themselves they can spread out into other landscapes set aside for the principal purpose of nature conservation, and as we have already seen, they will transform the landscape as they go. So that is why Rannoch Moor, that is why I returned here to watch it on a cold bright day of early spring, 2009, and to dream my wolf dream.

  As I drove north towards Rannoch, I caught myself rehearsing old arguments, cross-examining myself, and ultimately wondering if Scotland will ever have the courage to put wolves back, wild wolves, into a landscape set aside specifically for the purpose, and strictly on the wolves’ terms, rather than on ours. The European Union Species and Habitats Directive of 1992 obliged the British government to consider the possibilities of reintroducing extinct species, including the wolf. The Scottish government assumed that responsibility in 1999, but has done little towards fulfilling that obligation. It is also safe to assume that situation will not change unless European law acquires bigger teeth, a bit more bite.

  Or perhaps something unforeseen will happen to galvanise public opinion. Meanwhile there are straws in the wind. There is a pro-wolf organisation, the Wolf Trust, that campaigns for their reintroduction. More mainstream conservation organisations discuss the notion more readily than even ten years ago, and watch the slow shift of wolf populations in western Europe with interest. And Yellowstone has become a catalyst for wolf-related endeavour eve
rywhere, even here. When Yellowstone biologist John Varley remarked that they had had no idea that the wolf could feed so many other mouths, providing ‘food for the masses’, he may not have realised that the example of Yellowstone in turn feeds the hunger of so many frustrated wolf enthusiasts all across the northern hemisphere

  There are wolves in Scotland today, of course, in zoos and wildlife parks, notably at the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig in Strathspey and a kind of Highland campus for Edinburgh Zoo. By definition, they are wolves inside a fence, and a wolf inside a fence and on display to hundreds of paying customers every day is a poor creature compared to the wolf that might run wild across Rannoch Moor, that patrols a thousand square miles of a Norwegian mountain forest, that leaves a pack in Yellowstone and heads out alone into a landscape ‘so inhospitable that it contained not a single track of another animal’, apparently to mourn her dead mate, then returns to lead her pack alone on a mission to overpower a neighbouring pack and claim a new territory, that walks 500 miles alone to wind up dead on Interstate 70. Wolves inside a fence are denied – every day of their lives – the right to exercise the imagination wild wolves bring to bear – every day of their lives – on the constantly changing circumstances and challenges of wilderness.

  That is a truth apparently lost on Paul Lister, businessman, self-publicist, and – crucially – Highland landowner, whose idea is to fence off 50,000 acres, recreate areas of native woodland inside the fence and reintroduce Scotland’s lost mammals, including wolves. The fence is 10 feet high and electric, so there goes anyone’s definition of wilderness.

  Is it better than a zoo? No.

  Is it better than a small zoo? Yes.

  Is it still a zoo, nevertheless? Yes.

  Would it be possible to get the sense of wolves in a wild landscape from inside the fence? No. A fence, however long, imposes restrictions, and the only thing that a wild wolf permits to impose restrictions on its life is another wolf.

  Is it reasonable, or even practicable to expect a wolf pack’s idea of its own territory to coincide with Paul Lister’s imposed idea? No.

  Other questions:

  Is there such a thing as a wolf-proof fence? Probably not.

  Will the gates in the fence be staffed by marksmen?

  If his wolves outsmart his security and escape, will he shoot them?

  And is this the only way that wolves will ever come back into Scotland, inside a fence so that there will be no livestock to be harried and no isolated townships living in fear of the sound of a wolf howl, or a glimpse of a shadow moving among shadows at the edge of the trees? So that no-one and no wolf will ever have the opportunity to challenge the medieval character assassination of the wolf that still lives here and there in Europe, and yes, in Britain, in Scotland, in the Highlands?

  Is Paul Lister’s vision the only socially and politically acceptable solution to the dilemma posed by the very idea of putting wolves back into my native landscape?

  No. No, it is emphatically not.

  Of all the mountain summits that crowd down on the Glencoe road between Buachaille Etive Mor in the east and Sgurr na Ciche above Loch Leven in the west, none is as unprepossessing, unsung and unloved as Beinn a’Chrulaiste. Its near neighbour across the road is perhaps the most photographed mountain in Scotland, Buachaille Etive Mor, a mountain that so rivets the eye from any direction as to eclipse anything and everything that has the misfortune to fall within its shadow. I am far from immune to its spell myself.

  Buachaille (Shepherd)

  And at my feet the flotsam

  of the moor: the bog triptych

  – cotton, myrtle, asphodel –

  tormentil, sundew, bluebell,

  still-thickening grass, heather, lichen, moss,

  unfinished fragrance of orchids.

  And glaring down from within

  the upgathered robes of Etive

  the Shepherd sees my pencil hand

  measure a sundew with a thumbnail,

  then raise the same thumb

  at arm’s length to measure

  the whole Shepherd from robe-hem

  to mountainous brow.

  And in the evening the Shepherd

  enfolds all that grows within

  his sight, and the quiet deer,

  eagle, raven, owl, lost wolf howl;

  but I remain beyond,

  unfolded, and must go on

  or coldly wait the dawn.

  Besides, Beinn a’Chrulaiste is a mountainous slump, a shrug of a thing, and if you notice it at all, it gives the impression of turning its back on the stupendous pyramidal sculpture of the Shepherd and the serried ridgey glories of Glencoe beyond. But the shrugging one has hidden charms, not the least of which is that you leave behind the Munro-bagging, rock-climbing hordes that torment the Buachaille every day of every year, and the madness of the West Highland Way that plods between the Shrug and the Shepherd, and it is an invariably solitary furrow that you plod up onto the mountain’s one thrusting gesture, the outcrop imaginatively called Stob Beinn a’Chrulaiste. It is at this point, a thousand feet above the Glencoe road, that you turn and discover you are looking straight into the Shepherd’s navel. The view of Buachaille Etive Mor from high on Beinn a’Chrulaiste, usually seen against the sunlight (unless you are up there very early in the morning) so that Coire na Tulaich and the prow of Stob Dearg are shrouded in the blackest of shadows, confers an alpine glory on the mountain that is not apparent from the road.

  Beinn a’Chrulaiste has another distinction in that company, which is a plateau summit. You find yourself drawn to that mountain’s way of thinking, and on that airy pedestal, you too turn your back on the Buachaille and the west crammed with mountain ridges, and you sit among ptarmigan and saxifrages and you find yourself facing east, and there at your feet is the whole unfettered miles-wide scope of that magic carpet that is Rannoch Moor, tawny and pale and still winter-weary, grey and blue among the uncounted lochs and lochans and pools and puddles, gold where spotlights of sun fire up the waking land, white where the distant tops are still liberally patched with old snow, the whole thing made mobile by cloud shadows on a southwesterly breeze and the on-off sun that chases in among them. I have been lucky enough to live among the close-gathered mountains and narrow glens of the southmost Highlands for a dozen years now, but sometimes I need something else. I was born and brought up on the east coast at Dundee, with huge skies and sea going horizons uninterrupted by islands and mountains. Sometimes I go back for that sense of space, to breathe in the salt air I was raised on and to touch old stones and hear the speech of the natives. But sometimes I seek out a different kind of space and I go to Rannoch instead, to the lonely plateau of Beinn a’Chrulaiste that turns its back on Glencoe and stares at the rounded sky and the expansive tracts of Rannoch Moor. It’s a freer landscape whose foundation is space, and its air tastes not of North Sea salt but of moor-sweetness. And its speech is not the tongues of the east that I hear in my own head when I go back there, but the gutturals of ptarmigan and red deer and the ragged spring concerto of golden plover and curlew and greenshank, and the once-in-a-while terrier yap of a golden eagle. From any direction you have to climb up onto the moor, for it lies between the 1,000 and 1,500 feet contours and seems to have the muscle to elbow the mountains back in every direction.

  My mind is liberated there, and wanders off on new explorations like a Yellowstone wolf hell-bent on the new world of Colorado. So I have returned to the high bright edge of Rannoch Moor, climbed the shrugging mountain, navel-gazed the Buachaille, then climbed onto the plateau where the suddenly revealed moorland sea washes away and away to where Schiehallion stands blue in the east. (From the top of Schiehallion, on the right kind of day, you can see Beinn a’Chrulaiste in the west and Dundee Law in the east. I like to make that kind of connection sometimes, just so that I know I’m standing on solid ground.) I have wolves on my mind, of course, and I remember a famous photograph of a white wolf leaping from an ice-floe, t
he arc of its leap perfectly reflected in steely water. It must have been reproduced a million times. You can probably buy posters of it everywhere from Alaska to Australia. But my mind is stealing the image and transposing it onto that lochan down there, the one that is roughly the shape of a crab with one claw. But unlike the poster wolf that is frozen forever in mid-air, my Rannoch wolf has hit the ground running, and the slow string of red deer hinds half a mile away is suddenly galvanised. Wolves are running from four different directions, and they turn the deer, and they run alongside them assessing the likeliest target, then they split it from the rest and one wolf leaps for its throat . . .

  I remember again the sudden awareness that came my way watching grizzly bears at 20 yards on Kodiak Island, Alaska, a new awareness for me: my species is not the one in charge of this situation. You might imagine – if you have never encountered that awareness before – that it would induce fear. It did no such thing. Instead it was liberating. For the first time in my life (and in my mid-50s, which had been a long time to wait!) I was one creature among countless others with strengths and weaknesses and I shared their landscape, shared their awareness which comes with the proximity of such bears.

  If you write about nature for a living, you inevitably strive – and yearn – for an ever greater closeness with your subject, but thousands of years of evolution get in the way, and mostly nature fears your presence in its landscape. It produces a sense of loneliness, at least it does in me, and a powerful and sometimes overbearing sense of regret, redeemed only by extraordinary and isolated moments you have gathered among all the landscapes of your life when some creature takes you at face value and leans towards you. Perhaps an eagle dips a wing and comes to stand on the air 30 feet above you, looking down, making eye contact, assessing you with his dark gold eagle eyes, his wolf-coloured eagle eyes. Perhaps an otter rummages among shoreline rocks, finds you there, and instead of bolting for the safety of the sea, curls up in the sun and watches you watching her. Or a boar badger takes an unexpected turn in his normal route away from the sett and advances along a worn path the width of a single badger through wild hyacinths and wild garlic towards the tree where you stand in shadow imagining yourself to be invisible, and he so disapproves of your scent that he pauses to pee on your boots and ambles off like a wee bear into the dusk. Or you park your car among quiet lochside pines and a chaffinch flies 50 yards to perch on the door mirror of your car and sits there while you lower the window, with a single thought in his head: gimme! And more memorable in my mind than all these, the wild mute swan pen on a Highland loch that sought me out at a low point in her wild life and for ten minutes she slept in my shadow.