The Last Wolf (20 page)
Authors: Jim Crumley
Science, as represented by 293F’s collar, allows you to retrace elements of her journey, and you assemble bits and pieces of it from what you know or what you guess of her route. She has
survived largely on deer, which she has killed alone. Perhaps then, some long quiet evening hour, you marvel at the revealed nature of what it is you are trying to put back. Perhaps, after all,
wolves will just walk back into Colorado uninvited in migratory pilgrimage, deftly avoid the trucks on I-70, and take the situation out of your hands.
Wolf 293F has assured herself a place among nature’s immortals in the Rocky Mountains. She also became the reason for a book.
Comeback Wolves – Western Writers Welcome the Wolf
Home
(2005) is an anthology in which, to quote its own publicity, ‘50 authors, ecologists, journalists, poets, activists and biologists gather their voices together in protest, praise,
hope, and perseverance, all in order to raise awareness of the issues, past and present, surrounding wolves’. Such is the strength of America’s enviably accomplished nature writing
tradition.
I quote from Hal Clifford’s essay in Chapter Three, but surely the most poignant page in the book is the dedication –
For Wolf 293F
. It is a wonderful excuse for such a book,
and it is a very good book. And if there are 50 people in and around Colorado who can produce such thoughtful and diverse responses to the life (and one death) of wolves and have the whole thing
published in one year, then I would urge every lone wolf in the American West looking for a place to settle to look no further than Colorado. Take care crossing I-70, but know you will be among
friends.
Two of those friends will be George Sibley and SueEllen Campbell. Sibley teaches journalism at Western State College of Colorado and Campbell teaches nature and environmental literature at
Colorado State University (I await, as yet in vain, the day a Scottish university launches a degree course in nature and environmental literature!). Both are represented in
Comeback Wolves
,
and their contributions made an impact on me for very different reasons.
Sibley’s essay, slyly titled
Never Cry 293F
, is moving and funny and thought-provoking, not least in his unique take on the collars that science fits to many wolves. (Yellowstone, I
was pleased to read, has guidelines for wolf-collaring, no more than 50 per cent of any one pack, and the wolf project declines to use ear tags. The reason is that many visitors like to see wild
wolves looking wild. ‘While we continue to place a high priority on gathering scientific information,’ writes Doug Smith, ‘so too do we need to be concerned about preserving the
aesthetics of wild nature.’) Sibley writes:
My hope – a somewhat ridiculous hope, but those are the only serious hopes – is that somehow the wolves, consciously or unconsciously, will start adapting their
capacity for intuitive communication to their radio frequencies, and will start broadcasting something that will help us know . . . something we need to know but so clearly don’t. Yes, it
is a long shot, but let’s face it: our electronic extensions may be more sensitive than our natural ones these days, and we certainly spend more time and money transcribing and
interpreting digital signals then anything else. If there were something coming through the wolf’s collar, actually from the wolf, we might find it electronically where we no longer can
empathetically.
He wondered about 293F, and whether her collar might answer some of his questions.
It’d be useful to know what she thought when she left the Swan Lake pack, her family, her world. Was she asked or told to leave because the pack had outsized its
territory? Do wolves actually have a sense of what they need to do to keep things in balance – even, or especially, to the extent of keeping themselves in balance? And even if they know
that kind of thing, what were the feelings of the rest of the pack as they watched her leave, however necessary they knew it was? They are mammals like us; they don’t just know things,
they feel.
And why would I say we need that kind of knowledge from wolves? Because it is so clear that we are far, far out of touch with any balanced relationship with the universe,
and maybe wolves are better at that than we are. Why else would we be inviting back fellow large predators that we’d earlier killed off, if not for some kind of consultation?
SueEllen Campbell’s essay is a series of episodes covering several years. One, datelined Fairbanks, Alaska, stopped me in my tracks. She and a friend were teaching at a summer course on
the University of Alaska campus:
We’ve read an essay about wolf trapping by local writer Sherry Simpson, and today she is visiting our class. Her essay is terrific – thoughtful, troubling,
provocative, and complicated – but what really gets our attention is the wolfskin she’s brought.
And why did that stop me in my tracks? Because I know that wolfskin. In fact, I know Sherry Simpson. I know that she keeps the wolfskin on the back of a rocking chair. I met her on the same
university campus three years before SueEllen Campbell did while I was researching another BBC radio programme. Her essay was shown to me by another Alaskan writer, Nancy Lord, who advised my
producer and me to make the time to interview her. We did. I wrote something of the result in a book called
Brother Nature
(2007.) She had told me she kept the wolfskin on the rocking chair
and that she like to touch it and think about it. I asked her what it made her think. She said, ‘It makes me think I could see more wolves in the wild. It’s such an incredibly difficult
thing to do. It makes me question my own values about things. I’m willing to eat things I didn’t kill. I’m willing to wear fur I didn’t trap myself, so it makes me wonder
where I do stand on a lot of these issues. It’s a great reminder of how there aren’t really borders here but membranes, and you can cross back and forward between them all the time.
That’s what wilderness is here. I can live in a city and yet I can somehow cross through that membrane and be in wilderness just like that, and that’s important to me.’
I made a symbol of her wolfskin. It became my shorthand for Alaska. Every time I fingered it in my mind I would startle at its hidden energy. I would question it and long to know more about it,
long to feel on my face that keen northwesterly bearing scents and senses of that land where there are no borders, only membranes to pass through at will between the rocking chair and the
wilderness.
The wolf enables all that, yet that is a by-product of its life, a casual but priceless consequence of the way it goes about its daily business, the business of just being a wolf. Tonight,
sitting at my desk by the window that faces west into a Highland glen as early spring darkness begins to fall and the voice of the first snipe of spring sounds beyond the window, a turned page in a
book written several thousand miles away has confronted me with the 12-year-old memory of a conversation I return to in my mind almost every time I think or write about wolves, and the name of the
person with whom I spoke. And the book just happened to be a memorial to a wolf that travelled 500 miles alone and died, and in her dying, achieved the remarkable beginning of – what was your
phrase, Mr Sibley? – some kind of consultation. If a wolf howl drifts in through this open window some spring evening as darkness falls and the first snipe calls, you will know the
consultation has borne astounding fruit.
HAPTER
13
A Dance with the Moon
SHE HAD FOLLOWED the horse and its rider softly and at some distance as far as the edge of the wood. There she sat on a small rise studded with rocks and self-seeded pines a
few inches high. She put her nose to the wind and stared out at the blue-black dusk that came in waves and lay in a miles-wide stillness all across the wild sprawl of the Moor. Its sky was
blue-white and all but cloudless and first stars hung there.
She questioned herself about horse and rider: about their unhurried presence so far out on the Moor, the easy bond between them, their complementary movements like the limbs of a single
creature. Her eyes followed them until they faded into the dusk, blue-black themselves, as if the landscape had reclaimed something of its own, as if they belonged to each other and to that place,
like wolves belonged to the pack and to the territory of the pack.
The shoulder of a mountain to the south was suddenly wreathed in gold, the first trappings of brightening moonlight. Her head swung towards it and stared. The moon heaved slowly clear of the
mountain and stood above it, a fat oval. Its presence galvanised her. She flipped onto her back and writhed and squirmed like an otter in seaweed; she paused with legs raised and bent and splayed;
she flipped onto her belly, tongue unfurled, ears cocked, eyes searching; she sprang to her feet; she snapped and chased at an imaginary quarry running in tight circles and figures of eight,
leaning into every curve; she pounced on a piece of pine bark a foot long and snatched it in her jaws; she threw it ten feet in the air with a jerk of her head and ran and leaped to catch it; she
threw it again and danced after it on two legs; she threw it again and let it fall to earth, watching as it fell and landed six feet away. The instant it hit the ground she leaped and crunched both
front paws down on it, shattering the pine bark into a dozen scraps. Then she turned her back on it.
Black eyes watched her, the eyes of a mesmerised stoat. The more she cavorted the more the stoat was emboldened by curiosity. It advanced from the shelter of rocks in small ripples, then an
abrupt two-foot stance, then more ripples. In a precise repetition of the leap that shattered the pine bark she broke the back of the stoat; then she ate it. Then she turned and walked back into
the trees.
She stepped into a shallow river where the moonlight enlivened the ripples over a bank of shingle. Halfway across she stopped dead and stared side-headed down at her front legs, ears cocked,
entranced by the moonlight on the water and the patterns that broke and glittered round her legs then reformed and resumed their skittish jig with the moon. She turned her head from one side to the
other. It was as if she were seeing something utterly new to her. It consumed her every sense and nerve-end, and for long moments only her head moved. Twice she lowered it to look back between her
legs at the water’s advance; twice she looked directly at the moon, establishing in her mind the source of the sorcery. Then she began to race around in the shallows, snatching at the ripples
with her jaws as if the lit crests of water were sinuous creatures she might catch. The game took over her life for perhaps ten minutes more, then she charged through deeper water like a bear
chasing a salmon, then crashed ashore. She shook herself mightily, sending cascades of moon-bright droplets into the air, and in the process she invented another game. So she raced back into the
water, charged ashore again, shook herself again, and this time she stopped abruptly to consider the effect of the moon on the airborne droplets. Three times more she repeated the madness, then she
tired of it, and after a particularly hefty shake of her fur she raised her muzzle, tested the wind and vanished among the trees, a soundless darkening shadow among soundless darkening
shadows.
HAPTER
14
The Absence of Wolves
There is something in my character that craves old simplicities, that goes looking for elemental things, that wonders how much my species has lost in its relationship
with nature’s other tribes, and how much of what is lost can be retrieved. When I go alone among mountains, among all wild places, I feel as if I am trying to repair an old and broken
connection, like a bridge between landscapes. We broke it when we exterminated the wolf.
Again and again, walking the wolf-less mountains, I feel their absence, or rather I feel the distant and elusive nature of their presence, for no landscape that has sustained wolves ever
loses completely the imprint of their reign.
– Jim Crumley,
Brother Nature
(2007)
BEN VORLICH, Perthshire, the summit on an afternoon of early July some old summer or other, and either the day before or the day after my birthday, I forget which. I also forget
which birthday. I remember the ptarmigan and the deer, though. The day had settled warm and still after night-into-morning rain. Banks of thin and listless blue-grey cloud, tending to white at the
edges, clung to the ridges and blurred the rims of the corries, softened and paled their hard shadows. The sun’s ambition for that day was to banish all mountain cloud and grow hot, but two
hours past midday the frail cloud still clung.
The only view in any direction was down. I was alone on the summit. I ate a late lunch, enjoying the solitude, the hill-quiet, the sun’s hazy warmth. Highland Scotland does not throw up
too many such days on its mountaintops in high summer. I had been still for the better part of an hour. I felt no urge to move. I could have gone down to the
bealach
between Ben Vorlich and
Stuc a’Chroin and scrambled up the buttress to that other mountain summit standing upright in its own blue shadow over there above the paler blue void (I thought of Norman MacCaig’s
line ‘gulfs of blue air’), but why bother? – the view wouldn’t improve. The buttress in that light looked like something temporary designed to transform the mountain’s
appearance, the way a busby transforms the guardsman beneath. I had climbed it often enough to know its subtleties, to know where to push right whenever conditions were tricky, but it’s not
technically difficult climbing. Technically difficult climbing has never been among the reasons why I like mountains. No, the day would not be improved by climbing Stuc a’Chroin. But it might
improve if I sat still. As Norman MacCaig put it (in the same verse of the same poem, ‘High Up on Suilven’):
