The Last Wolf (11 page)
Authors: Jim Crumley
Of gigantic stature, six feet seven inches in height, he was equally remarkable for his strength, courage, and celebrity as a deer-stalker, and had the best ‘long
dogs’ or deer hounds in the country.
I remembered Erik Zimen’s appraisal of so many wolf stories from Europe: ‘All these stories happen on a winter night . . . the hero’s courage, resourcefulness, and strength
enable him to win against the odds.’ I wished I had his book with me in the bar, but I did not. I only had Harting’s.
One winter’s day [Zimen noted it was almost always a winter day] he received a message from the Laird of MacIntosh that a large ‘black beast’, supposed to
be a Wolf, had appeared in the glens, and the day before killed two children, who with their mother were crossing the hills from Calder [possibly Cawdor], in consequence of which a
‘Tainchel’ or ‘gathering’ to drive the country was called to meet at a tryst above Fi-Giuthas, where MacQueen was invited to attend with his dogs. He informed himself of
the place where the children had been killed, the last tracks of the Wolf, and the conjectures of his haunt, and promised assistance.
All the ingredients of the European wolf fable are in place: it is winter, the wolf is large and black, a figure is crossing the winter landscape (the addition of two children is an adornment),
the hunter is huge and possessed of great strength and will surely prevail so that the wolf-oppressed population can rest easy in their beds again, and walk the hills alone in winter with impunity
and with their vulnerability unexploited. Harting ploughed on:
In the morning the ‘Tainchel’ has long assembled, and MacIntosh waited with impatience, but MacQueen did not arrive. His dogs and himself were, however,
auxiliaries too important to be left behind, and they continued to wait until the best of a hunter’s morning was gone, when at last he appeared, and MacIntosh received him with an
irritable expression of disappointment.
‘Ciod a a chabhag?’ (‘What was the hurry?’) said he of Pall-a-chrocain.
MacIntosh gave an indignant retort, and all present made some impatient reply.
MacQueen lifted his plaid and drew the black, bloody head of the Wolf from under his arm!
‘Sin e dhuibh!’ (‘There it is for you!’) said he, and tossed it on the grass in the midst of the surprised circle.
There then follows MacQueen’s account of the deed in his own words, complete with Harting’s helpful if approximate translations, and if you were tempted to afford the story any shred
of credibility thus far, credibility now dies with the last black, child-slaying beast of the Findhorn:
‘As I came through the slochk (i.e. ravine) by east the hill there,’ said he as if talking of some everyday occurrence, ‘I foregathered wi’ the
beast. My long dog there turned him. I buckled wi’ him and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig (i.e., cut his throat) and brought awa’ his countenance for fear he might come
alive again, for they are very precarious creatures.’
Suddenly the Gaelic-speaking MacQueen is reduced to a single word of Gaelic (Harting opts for a phonetic rendering of
slochd
, meaning a pass rather than a ravine) and starts havering away
in Lowland Scots, not just Lowland Scots but something that reads as if it was trying desperately to be a piece of dialogue from a novel by Sir Walter Scott, but not quite carrying it off.
Undemanding posterity has put the two events together – the 1743 slaying and the direct speech of MacQueen – but as Harting points out (and many subsequent writers have chosen to ignore
for it doesn’t half ruin the story) the whole thing was written down by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder in 1830 in his account of the Moray floods of the previous year.
I closed Harting’s book for the last time, hoping against hope that I would have no further use of it for a long, long time. The colossal folly of the Victorians freed them from the
reality of the natural world to such an extent that they had clasped to their collective bosom such a grotesquely mangled representation of what – if anything at all – happened here. I
sipped my beer and looked out at the rain thudding against the window of the bar in long diagonal streaks, reducing Inverness to a grey blur. And the passage of time, I thought, has reduced the
reputation of the wolf to much the same thing.
As I drove home I thought about Lauder, about whom I knew next to nothing. He was a minor Scottish writer, and like all minor Scottish writers of the time he lived in the colossal shadow of
Scott. Scott had published 21 novels between 1814 and 1828. Scotland, much of the rest of Britain, and – crucially – Queen Victoria were obsessed by him. He was a renowned manipulator
of historical events, who, among other things, had transformed Rob Roy into something he never was in real life and created a landscape called the Trossachs; both these inventions live on in the
twenty-first century. W.H. Murray, whose
Rob Roy – His Life and Times
was published in 1982, has written:
In righting the wrong done to Rob Roy’s name by Scott, and by the historians whom he and others followed, I have found Rob Roy to be of stronger character than the
early writers had imagined. Their works on Rob Roy require so much correction and refutation that few readers would wish to plough a way through the quagmire.
And then I had what Hemingway called ‘one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry’, and as it happened, at that point I was both.
It was this: MacQueen was Lauder’s Rob Roy. A few days later I was in the Scottish Library in Edinburgh.
‘Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bart., of Grange and Fountainhall, FRSE’ is the byline on his best-known book,
The Great Moray Floods of 1829
. Grange is a posh part of Edinburgh,
Fountainhall is near Haddington in East Lothian, and FRSE indicates a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sir Thomas was minor aristocracy, with roots deeply embedded in Edinburgh society,
who numbered the architect William Playfair (designer of the National Gallery of Scotland), the ubiquitous Lord Cockburn, and almost inevitably Sir Walter Scott among his acquaintances. But he
spent much of his adult life at Relugas in Forres near the Moray coast, and was there to witness the frightening floods of 1829. His life was rich and varied, and his achievements included many
commendable public works for people less fortunate than himself, but he did rather flatter himself that he could write. He was so in thrall to Scott that when he tackled a historical romance based
on the life of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, Lord of Badenoch, the son of Robert II, and the fourteenth century’s most charming Highland thug, otherwise known as the Wolf of Badenoch, he
felt compelled to issue a curious third-person disclaimer in a foreword spattered with code names for Scott:
The author has been accused of being an imitator of the Great Unknown. In his own defence he must say that he is far from being wilfully so. In truth, his greatest anxiety
has been to avoid intruding profanely into the sacred haunts of the Master Enchanter. But let it be remembered that the Mighty Spirit of the Magician has already so filled the labyrinth of
Romance that it is not easy to venture within its precincts without feeling his influence; and to say that, in exploring the intricacies of these Wizard paths, one is to be denounced for
unwittingly treading upon those flowers which have been pressed by his giant foot, amounts to a perfect prohibition of all entrance there.
By the time he started to write
The Great Moray Floods of 1829
then, he had already acknowledged the helpless nature of his thraldom to the admittedly overwhelming influence of Scott. In
Lauder’s
Wolfe of Badenoch
, that conspicuously affected final ‘e’ appears to serve no purpose other than to differentiate between his hero and the four-legged wolf that
becomes embroiled in mortal combat (and loses, of course) with one of the book’s other characters. It is educational to savour some of the language that colours his account of the fight:
He saw an enormous wolf making towards him, the oblique and sinister eyes of the animal flashing fire, his jaws extended and tongue lolling out . . .
The panting and frothy jaws and long sharp tusks of the infuriated beast . . .
The muscles of the neck of a wolf are well known to be so powerful that they enable the animal to carry off a sheep with ease . . .
Long sharp
tusks
? Ye Gods! Then, a little later in the book when Wolfe, his two-legged and tusk-less hero, loses patience with some hapless wretch:
The ferocious Wolfe could stand this no longer. His eyes flashed fire . . .
Sound familiar? Yet it is to this man that history has turned, uncritical and unquestioning, for the very words that have become the epitaph of the wolf in Scotland. When you read those words in
the relative academic calm of Harting’s book they simply strike you as ludicrous. But if Harting had read Lauder’s account of the last wolf in full, you like to think he might have
recognised whose influence was guiding the writing hand of the author and dismissed it as the witterings of the Wizard’s disciple, a poor imitation of the Great Unknown.
Curiously, it is nothing more than an aside in Lauder’s otherwise more or less factual account of the floods. As the floodwaters poured down the Findhorn laying waste to the lands around
what had been MacQueen’s domain, there is a pause in Lauder’s narrative. He summons the shade of Sir Walter to his cause, and goes into wolf-overdrive. Incidentally MacQueen is
described as a laird rather than a stalker, and Ballachrochin (Harting’s Pall-a-chrocain) becomes Pollochock. Now, fasten your seatbelts:
Immediately within the pass, and on the right bank, stand the bare ruins of the interesting little man-sion house of Pollochock. Macqueen, the laird of this little property, is
said to have been nearer seven than six feet high, proportionately built, and active as a roebuck. Though he was alive within half a century, it is said that in his youth he killed the last wolf
that infested this district. The prevailing story is this:
A poor woman, crossing the mountains with two children, was assailed by the wolf, and the infants devoured, and she escaped with difficulty to Moy Hall. The chief of
Mackintosh no sooner heard of the tragic fate of the babes, than, moved by pity and rage he despatched orders to his clan and vassals to assemble at 12 o’clock to proceed in a body to
destroy the wolf. Pollochock was one of those vassals, and being then in the vigour of youth, and possessed of gigantic strength and determined courage, his appearance was eagerly looked for to
take a lead in the enterprise. But the hour came, and all were assembled except him to whom they most trusted. Unwilling to go without him the impatient chief fretted and fumed through the
hall; till at length, about an hour after the appointed time, in stalked Pollochock dressed in his full Highland attire; ‘I am little used to wait thus for any man,’ exclaimed the
chafed chieftain, ‘and less still for thee, Pollochock, especially when such a game is afoot as we are boune after!’ ‘What sort o’ game are ye after, Mackintosh?’
said Pollochock simply and not quite understanding his allusion. ‘The wolf, sir,’ replied Mackintosh; did not my messenger instruct you?’ ‘Ou aye, that’s
true,’ answered Pollochock, with a good-humoured smile; ‘troth I had forgotten. But an that be a’,’ continued he, groping with his right hand among the ample folds of
his plaid, ‘there’s the wolf’s head!’ Exclamations of astonishment and admiration burst from the chief and clansmen as he held out the grim and bloody head of the
monster at arm’s length, for the gratification of those who crowded around him.
‘As I came through the slochk by east the hill there,’ said he, as if talking of some everyday occurrence, ‘I foregathered wi’ the beast. My long dog
there turned him. I buckled wi’ him, and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig, and brought awa’ his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious
creatures.’
‘My noble Pollochcock!’ cried the chief in ecstasy; ‘the deed was worthy of thee! In memorial of thy hardihood, I here bestow upon thee Seannachan, to
yield meal for thy good greyhound in all time coming.’
Seannachan, or the old field, is directly opposite to Pollochock. The ten acres of which it consisted were entirely destroyed by the flood . . .
Sir Thomas Dick Lauder would go on to become one of the most active members of the Scott Monument Committee that eventually heaved that colossal stone monstrosity into the airspace above Princes
Street Gardens in Edinburgh. His novels are now as extinct as Scotland’s wolves and much less likely to be reintroduced. Infestations of Scott are still widespread.
So where does that leave Scotland’s last wolf? Lauder acknowledged in a footnote:
Wolves are believed to have been extirpated in Scotland about the year 1680, but there is reason to suppose that they partially existed in remote districts considerably
after that period.
There, at least, is a rare outbreak of common sense. The last wolf known to have been killed by a man will most certainly not have been the last wolf. Everywhere in the world where wolves still
occur naturally, people who live close to them speak of how difficult it is to see them. My Norwegian friends spent eight years making a half-hour film because they wanted to film only wild wolves
being wild, wolves they found only by tracking them with their eyes and ears. Time after time they waited for hours, days, knowing there were wolves in the area, hearing them, tracking them, and
not seeing them. Although this made their job much more difficult, it was a quality they admired. And the copious American literature of wolves is replete with similar responses among many native
tribes. Lopez wrote in
Of Wolves and Men
:
