The Last Wolf (2 page)

I mention all this because in any exploration of the wolf in Scotland, sooner or later someone somewhere will ask you to believe that the last wolf in Scotland – in all Britain, for that
matter – was killed in the valley of the River Findhorn south-east of Inverness, around 1743. You will also be asked to believe that the history-making wolf-slayer was a MacQueen, a stalker
and a man of giant stature. He would be. Wolf legend is no place for Davids, only Goliaths.

He was six feet seven inches. There’s a coincidence – the same height as Scotland’s greatest historical hero, William Wallace, or at least the same height as William
Wallace’s legend has grown to in the 700 years since he died. Like Wallace, MacQueen was possessed of extraordinary powers of strength and courage; and in addition he had ‘the best deer
hounds in the country’. Well, he would have. You would expect nothing less. The wolf he killed (with his dirk and his bare hands) was huge and black. Well, it would be, you would expect
nothing less. And it had killed two children as they crossed the hills accompanied only by their mother. What, only two? When the story was first published in 1830, the Victorians swallowed it
whole, in the grand tradition of wolf stories.

And here’s another coincidence. At the same time, the Victorians were high on a heady cocktail of Scottish history and Sir Walter Scott, and in that frame of mind, were in the throes of
building an extraordinary national monument to one of the greatest figures in any rational assessment of Scottish history – William Wallace. His monument stands on a hilltop on the edge of
Stirling within sight of the scene of his finest hour, the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. The coat of arms of the old royal burgh of Stirling was a wolf.

The Victorians loved the story of MacQueen as much as they loathed anything with claws, teeth and hooked beaks. Killing nature’s creatures (and often stuffing the results and displaying
them in glass cases or on the walls of castles and great houses) was a national pastime among the gun-toting classes. It occurred to no-one that the last wolf in Scotland might not have been killed
by a man; nor that it might have died old and alone in a cave, perhaps in the vast wild embrace of Rannoch Moor in the Central Highlands, or in the empty Flow Country of the far north, and many
years after any human being last saw a wolf. No-one challenged the evidence on which the story of MacQueen and his casual heroics was hung and presented as fact. But that is what you are up against
when you consider the place of the wolf in my country, and for that matter, in so many other countries. That is what I am up against in this book. But first, here is a glimpse of the animal we are
talking about: not a supposed-to-be wolf but a real wolf.

She was known as number 14 and her mate was Old Blue. Even if it does sound like the first line of a bad country and western song, it was a match made in heaven, or at least in
Yellowstone, which in wolf terms is much the same thing. Biologists like Douglas Smith who are deeply embedded in the project to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the northern United
States give wolves numbers or, very occasionally, names, to help keep track of them. Number 14 and Old Blue were two remarkable animals, even by the rarefied standards of the tribe of wild wolves.
The average lifespan of a Yellowstone wolf is three to four years. Old Blue was almost 12 when he died, at which point Number 14 had to be at least eight years younger. She learned prodigiously
from such a seen-it-all-before wolf as Old Blue, so that when he died, she was equipped for anything that the North American wilderness could throw at her. But first she did something
astonishing.

In the last few months of his life, Old Blue and number 14 mated one last time. But when he died, number 14 took off, leaving behind her pups and yearling wolves, leaving the territory of the
pack. Alpha female wolves don’t take off when they have pups, don’t abandon their families. It doesn’t happen. But 14 took off alone into deep snow, into a landscape that
according to Smith, was ‘so inhospitable it contained not a single track of another animal’.

She was eventually found by a spotting plane, gave it a single cold stare, then simply continued travelling until all efforts at tracking her failed. She vanished.

She was gone for a week. Then quite suddenly she turned up again, rejoined her family and the rest of the pack. Smith wrote: ‘Though no-one wanted to say 14 travelled alone so far because
she was mourning the loss of her mate, some of us privately wondered.’

Travel is the wolf’s natural habitat. With no alpha male, but possessed of all the experience and survival skills of Old Blue, number 14 waited for the elk migration to come down from the
high ground, then led her pack away, following the elk. Their travels took them into the neighbouring wolf pack territory and into a battle. They killed the resident alpha male and some of the
others fled; two died in a snow avalanche. These were found the following summer, ‘their skeletons at the foot of a small waterfall, shrouded in the lavender blooms of harebell’.

Number 14’s audacious move shook up the established order in that part of Yellowstone, and her pack acquired a huge territory with a single battle, no casualties and no alpha male. But the
new territory was harsh in winter, the elk all but vanished, and the pack would have to rely on the formidable prey of bison. At first they travelled further into the National Elk Refuge, but then,
and for reasons no-one understood, she led the way back to her hard-won heartland and stayed there, as uncompromising in the life she chose to lead as the territory she won for her pack.

Number 14 was found dead at the age of six, but even her death had something of an aura about it. When national park staff found her, there was a golden eagle on her carcase, and if you like
your appreciation of nature well garnished with symbolism, what more do you need than that? The carcase of a moose lay nearby. It seems that an epic encounter had killed both prey and predator.
Later observation of the spot revealed a grizzly bear covering her carcase as if it was the bear’s own kill. There are no memorials to wolves like these, no epitaphs or eulogies. They live
and die at the cutting edge of nature. The death of Number 14 was attended by golden eagle and grizzly bear, and it may be she was mourned by her own kind. Nature marked her passing in a way that
honoured her astounding life.

The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in 1995 after an absence of 70 years has been well documented; the lives of many individual wolves have sprung into sharp focus, and their stories
have travelled the world. Yet despite these years of precious discovery, despite the sum of accumulated knowledge of earlier wolf biologists and nature writers, and despite the best of
twenty-first-century technology, wolves are forever baffling and outwitting our own species. We simply don’t know why they do certain things. ‘Clearly,’ wrote Smith and Ferguson
in
Decade of the Wolf,
‘this is an animal less likely to offer scientists irrefutable facts than to lure us on a long and crooked journey of constant learning.’

Number 14 baffled Yellowstone’s professional staff more than most, and appears to have got under the skin of Doug Smith. The summer after her death, he rode out on horseback ‘to find
what was left of her. Not surprisingly, little was waiting for me but bone and hide. I found too the dead moose she’d been battling with, also entirely consumed by scavengers. I knelt one
last time by her tattered carcase, feeling the quiet of this extraordinary spot in the Yellowstone back-country. A slight breeze came up, fingering the tall summer grass. Looking around, all in all
it seemed a beautiful place to come to rest.’

The entire Yellowstone reintroduction project was only possible because of the Nez Perce tribe and its particular relationship with wolves. The first wolves were released onto the Nez Perce
reservation; the tribe offered them a home at a time when state authorities refused to handle wolf management programmes. Wolf reintroduction was political dynamite, and politics prevailed over
wolves. Only eighty years before, the US government initiated a policy of wolf extermination, a state of affairs that lasted until 1973 when President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species
Act. The wolf was the first animal to be listed as endangered.

Few people would have blamed the Nez Perces if they had declined to assist the United States government in the resettlement of Canadian wolves into Yellowstone. Historically, no tribe was
treated more brutally by white America than the Nez Perces, but as the head of the recovery programme Ed Bangs put it, ‘The Nez Perces revere wolves: they have a different way of looking at animals.’

Catherine Feher-Elston, an archaeologist and historian who has worked with many indigenous peoples across the world, wrote of the Nez Perce relationship with wolves in her 2004 book
Wolfsong
:

Remember these things whenever you encounter stories of the wolf’s savagery, stories of the wolf as a wilful slaughterer of innocent children, a terroriser of isolated
human communities, a despoiler of human graves, a devourer of battlefield corpses; whenever you encounter the wolf cast in the Devil’s clothes, remember too that where people have always
lived closely with wolves and still do, they are often protective of the relationship and sometimes pray for them.

SOMETIMES YOU just have to walk the landscape to see what rubs off. You go with no more than half an idea in your head: something happened here once, you tell yourself, or
someone else has told you and you at least half-believe it. And you want to know if the landscape itself still holds the scent or the sense of it. It is a nature writer’s way of looking at
the landscape. You go with your senses open to anything and everything, looking for the cold spoor of what it was that passed this way. Even a cold spoor is better than no spoor at all. Perhaps
there will be a whiff of something on the wind. Perhaps the long absence of wolves will drop hints of their old presence the way something suggestive of what unfurled and died and vanished there
forever seems to occur when you walk the battlefield of Culloden. When the naturalist and nature writer David Stephen wrote a novel about Scotland’s last wolf he called the wolf Alba, the
Gaelic word for Scotland. His was a symbolic wolf that died on 16 April 1746, the date of Culloden. Scotland died, he was saying, with Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil, and the wolf
died with it. It is certainly unarguable that both events impoverished Scotland immeasurably.

Yet Culloden is a known historical event with a known outcome. There were eyewitnesses and survivors. As a species, we write down our own story. But in the matter of Scotland’s wolves,
there are almost no certainties at all. The more I explored our old wolf stories, the more elusive the truth became. The few historical accounts of wolf-related events are rich in distortion and
quite bereft of what we now know in the twenty-first century about wolf biology. Yet the wolf has not changed. The wolf the Yellowstone Wolf Project began to reintroduce in 1995 (the project
proceeds apace as I write) is the same wolf that storytellers from the Middle Ages to the Victorians crossed swords with, the same wolf that appears in the lens of a Norwegian wildlife cameraman in
the twenty-first century. Yet it has become clear to me in the course of writing this book that almost nothing in so-called historical records about the wolf in Scotland is reliable, almost nothing
at all.

So part of my response has been to walk the landscape to see what rubs off. Perhaps the old rocks, the oldest trees will speak to me more directly and with more honesty than the ghosts of the
old people. So I travel, hoping against hope that perhaps just being there will flush out some extra awareness that lives on in that landscape, a connection that illuminates the past and makes it
relevant to what the poet Kathleen Raine called ‘this very here and now of clouds moving across a still sky’.

I began with the north-leaning peninsula of Waternish on the island of Skye in search of the scent or the sense of its wolves. The particular half-an-idea that directed my feet there had been
implanted by Seton Gordon, an old sage of both Skye and nature writing. His long life (he died in 1977 at the age of 90) and his fascination for both wildlife and the handed-down word-of-mouth
history of the landscape and its people gave him a reach far back beyond the range of most writers of his time. And he had written in
The Charm of Skye
(1928) about wolf pits on a Waternish
hillside. And Skye has a place in my heart not easily explained considering I am an east-coast mainlander from Dundee, and the slightest excuse to return has always been fine with me.