The Last Wolf (3 page)

Waternish, or Vaternish in the old maps and old books like Seton Gordon’s, is out-on-a-limb Skye. Skye is the Winged Isle of the Norseman. Of the island’s four ‘wings’,
Sleat boasts two ferry terminals and one end of the Skye Bridge, Duirinish is veined enough with roads for a stranger to need a road map, and Trotternish has a ferry connection to the Western
Isles, a ring road, a couple of hairy east-west road crossings and Portree on the doorstep. But Waternish owns only a thin string of road that runs between the crest of a long hill and the sea. It
begins with Fairy Bridge and ends with Trumpan, the one a by-passed stone bridge with a reputation for supernatural encounters and spooking horses, the other a ruined church famed for a massacre,
and for the last resting place of a notorious madwoman. And nearby is Cnoc a’ Chrochaidh, the Hanging Knoll. There is little here to mitigate Waternish’s isolation.

There is also something almost tangibly Norse at work, something more redolent of Shetland than Skye. There is a clutch of Norse-tongued names – Lustra, Halistra, Dun Hallin, Trumpan, the
offshore islands of Isay, Mingay and Clett. And Waternish feels like its own island with a land bridge to Skye, much like Ardnamurchan’s barely physical attachment to mainland Scotland, and
which makes for self-containment in a community. Some islanders elsewhere on Skye look askance at the Waternish folk, and doubtless vice versa. The landscape of Waternish is a factor in all this
too, for in terms of its blunt, raw beauty, and especially its seaward prospects, there is nothing like it, even on Skye.

Legend and historical fact (separating the two was never an easy task, especially among Gaels) have conspired to blacken the reputation of Waternish. Every legend is liberally bloodied, witches
performed black deeds in the guise of cats, the centuries-old MacLeod-MacDonald feud commemorated at Trumpan was gruesome even by their own dire standards of clan warfare, and –
wouldn’t you believe it? – the peninsula has the reputation of being Skye’s stronghold of wolves. Whether this last claim accounts for much of the darker side of Waternish lore is
nothing more than speculation of my own, but I now advance it with some confidence because it is true of almost all the reputed haunts of wolves throughout Scotland. For all the cultural
sophistication of the Gaels, they suffered from the same blind prejudice towards the wolf as most other northern European peoples, the same willingness to blacken its reputation at every
opportunity. That the Gaels willingly exterminated wolves from their realm makes them no more and no less culpable than most of the rest of Scots, Britons, and half the tribes of the northern
hemisphere. If wolves or stories of wolves have a home on Skye, here is as likely as anywhere and likelier than most.

But Waternish was still early in my explorations of the landscape of Scotland’s wolves. It seems to me now that if there ever were wolves on Skye (and hints of a tradition prove nothing,
not in the flaky depths of that malaise of Scotland’s wolf landscape I think of as ‘last wolf syndrome’, a previously undiscovered chronic medical condition that attacks the
corner of the human brain dealing in rational thought), it might have been in just such a far-flung northern outpost that they clung on longest, that they made their last stand in the face of the
relentless encroachment and wolf-hatred of the people. The coastal woods under Geary and the tumultuous alders at Waternish House suggest that, three or four hundred years ago, Waternish would have
been more wooded than it is now, and that too could have assisted their tenuous survival, although woodland has never been essential to wolves. Seton Gordon had written:

Here was my first brush with contradiction in the matter of communities and their wolf traditions. The ‘oldest inhabitant’ had no tradition of when the last wolf was trapped, yet the
‘old people’ did have a tradition about how the trap was made and baited. And then there was the truly implausible bit, as recorded by Otta Swire in her book,
Skye – The Island
and Its Legends
(1961):

Um. Typical wolf behaviour might have been either to back away from the man who had fallen in, or to scramble free itself (and if a man could do it, rest assured a wolf could do it with ease).
The one element of the story likely to have induced a hostile reaction in the wolf is the Alice-in-Wonderland-ish detail of someone else coming up behind it and grabbing its tail, an idea about as
likely in the real world as the Mad Hatter’s tea party. It is a shame that the wolf declines in real life to live up to its ancient reputation, for there would have been a delicious natural
justice if the hunter had been torn apart in his own pit by the very quarry whose death the pit had been designed to achieve.

Elsewhere on Skye, at Prince Charlie’s Cave near Elgol, Otta Swire notes that it has a claim to be where ‘one of the earlier Mackinnon chiefs, being attacked by a wolf, slew the
creature by forcing a deer bone down its throat, a feat still commemorated in the Mackinnon arms.’

Despite the Grimm-esque quality of the yarn-spinning, she is confident enough to assess Waternish’s reputation thus: ‘Was it perhaps the last hold of heathendom in Skye, as it
certainly was of wolves?’ Yet no-one has ever supplied a scrap of evidence to back up that ‘certainly’.

Back in the real world of Waternish in December, I looked out across Loch Bay where a conifer plantation ends and the cliff belt about the waist of Sgurr a Bhagh begins. Beneath it hang folds of
skirts fashioned from native trees, untrampled, ungrazed, unfelled, unburned, the natural order. I watched them grow grey and darkly purple one quiet midwinter afternoon and thought the wolves
would have loved them.

There were only two hours of usable daylight left. There was no prospect of afterglow or moonlight to steal from the long northern night, merely the certainty of a dirty afternoon, a week before
the shortest day, growing progressively dirtier. Wind had blasted rain into submission, but that was all that had submitted. It had looked an unenticing prospect when the squalls thudded through a
half-dark noon, but by one o’clock they had ceased their percussive flaying of the window where I worked, and I rose from the writing table and went out into the island. By two I was
scrambling through a little gully on the flank of Beinn na Boineide and the air was the icy breath of the Arctic. If anything else was to fall from that sky that day it would be snow.

I have long since learned to value fragments stolen from the unlikeliest days: two hours on a hillside in Waternish can amount to an energising expedition after a long morning writing. A mind
weary with word-making can be blown clean and uncluttered, and goes eagerly in pursuit of the wolf image it has made for itself. There is no long, patient stalk to consider, nothing to pack,
nothing to prepare. There is just jacket, scarf, wellies, gloves, binoculars and an afterthought apple for my pocket. Then there is just the being there.

I love the gloaming hour whatever the season, the folding away of the daylight creatures and the unfolding of night lives, the brief pause of overlapping regimes. Here an owl might contemplate
an eagle, the turning head of a wind-perched kestrel might follow a low-flying skein of whooper swans homing in on a roosting lochan. At the same hour on a December day a decade or two before
Culloden, a fox might have stepped deferentially aside from a hunting wolf.

At a little over 1,000 feet, Beinn na Boineide, the Bonnet Hill, is the head and shoulders of all Waternish. I tramped up out of the gully, breathed easier on the slopes above, saw the sea widen
and Waternish’s own shape and shade of moorland hill lengthen. With no light in the sky the moor grasses smouldered with their own dark flame. There was no bright point in all the landscape.
A slab of dark grey cloud lowered and squatted on Waternish, so I walked north keeping below it, following the line of overgrown dykes until I stumbled on the bed of an old track. A slow, downhill,
breaking wave of peat and moss and lichen had overwhelmed the bones of dykes and track, obliterated the art of the builders. If there was anything left of the old wolf traps, if I could find what
was left, if there had ever been wolf traps at all other than in a storyteller’s imagination, this was what I could expect to find . . . their grown-over ghosts.

Once I would have walked here among birch, hazel, oak, ash, rowan, alder, willow, pine, aspen maybe, an airy woodland shaped into contrary uphill waves by the sea wind. Once, the road-and-dyke
builder might have stood here among such trees and watched a wolf catch his scent on the wind, test it, and step quietly away from it. I allowed myself to believe that much, for the moment. Then a
buzzard cried close by and almost at once rounded a buttress moving sideways across the strengthening wind, led by the primary feathers of her left wing. And I was above and behind the bird, so I
crouched to be a rock on the hillside, well placed to watch her harness the wind to her bidding. When I put the glasses on her she almost filled them.

She sat on the wind rather than hovering like a kestrel. She held her wings in rigid concave arches, flexing them only briefly to make minute adjustments of her position or to drift away a yard
or two over the moor only to turn again into the wind, yellow legs dangling. Her head restlessly scanned the moor below, ahead and to either side, and to the far horizons. In perhaps ten minutes,
she was never further than 20 yards from where I had first seen her. Then she started to drift towards me, sideways and slightly backwards, conceding a few yards of airspace to the wind. As the
bird drifted, she also rose, climbing the hillside backwards. In that attitude she passed above my head, low and dark and huge. Instantly the tables were turned. Now she was above and behind me,
and I guessed that her scrutiny of the landscape was now riveted on me: the watcher watched.

Or the hunter hunted. So I thought, of course, of the hunter who fell into the wolf pit. And when the buzzard called again, she was so close that I wondered if she might take my moor-coloured
stillness at face value, mistake my hooded, hunched shape for a rock, and make a taloned perch of me. But it was only the steely downcurving edge of her voice that cleaved through me and put an
iced chill between my shoulder blades. I felt something between primitive thrill and cold electric shock, neither of them particularly comfortable.

I reasoned then that perhaps she was merely assessing my unfamiliar shape in her territory where every rock and parcel of bog was a know landmark. I would play the rock a little longer and see
what unfolded.

Absence of movement sharpens the senses. I became intensely aware of everything I could see without moving. A tiny lizard, looking ancient, flickered over a bare patch among the heather; a black
and grey boat emerged from a hidden shore; a grey horse kicked the air on a croft and a kestrel crossed its field, fast and downwind; the boat pirouetted in a bay and stopped; a vivid orange spider
the size of a small button crossed the lizard’s patch of bare earth.

Where was the buzzard?

I tried listening for her, but the wind was a thudding wail now and nothing else carried through. I began to move my head, slowly, left and right, searching as much of the land and sky as came
into my view. Nothing. But that still left all of Waternish above and behind me at the bird’s disposal. I pushed my head as far back as I could to stare up at the sky above me, the empty sky
above me. But I sensed she was still there. Finally, I conceded defeat to the freezing pounding of the wind. I stood slowly and stiffly, and turned. She was about a dozen yards away, regarding me
side-headed with one orange eye. She hung there a moment longer, then a shimmy and a dipped wing and a raising and lowering of her legs took her to a new stance on the wind below and ahead of me
again. She had enough confidence in her place on that hillside to turn her back on me and go about her business, having established to her satisfaction that I had no part to play in it.

She then revealed just what her business was. She abandoned her airy perch, thrust forward her legs, threw high both wings and landed 20 yards away, dipped her head into a small, hidden hollow,
and when she raised it again to look up at me it was bloodied. All was prosaically explained. I had put the bird up from a sheep carcase when she first drew herself to my attention. She had
lingered to see if I posed a threat to her meal. Having decided I did not have what it takes to sunder rotting sheep flesh, she returned to her meal, still watching.

I backed off to a higher rock where I could watch and leave her in peace. The new viewpoint revealed the carcase – not sheep, though, but fox. Whatever had killed the fox in the first
place, it was not the buzzard; eagle, perhaps, or gamekeeper.

The Minch was wide and wan and eerie green, and a tightly-marshalled flotilla of showers was about to flay the shore up at Trumpan. I walked north to meet them, and to look for wolf pits, and as
I walked I thought about the buzzard and how it had responded to my sudden arrival calmly and without a single threatening gesture. Just like a wolf, I thought, so confident of her place in her
territory.