The Last Wolf (6 page)
Authors: Jim Crumley
I came across his name again a few years later in a book called
The Company of Wolves
(1996) by Peter Steinhart, who was writing here about the changing nature of the relationship between
man and wolf inside Alaska’s Denali National Park (Denali is the old native name for Mount McKinley. and which has now been restored to both the mountain and the National Park):
Gordon Haber reports that as more and more backpackers visit Denali, the wolves are becoming increasingly habituated to humans. ‘It’s an everyday event for
wolves to walk up to people in the back country or campgrounds and sit down three feet from them,’ says Haber. ‘They pick up a book and walk off with it. They sniff a hand. People
will say they looked over their shoulders and there was a wolf sniffing at their heels. It’s a touching kind of relationship. The wolves are totally at ease. It’s like “I see
you as a friend.”’
I love the implication that in the right circumstances, the man-wolf relationship may be reverting to its oldest prototype, in which curiosity begat friendship and mutual admiration. That way
lies the salvation of the wild world. By and large the backpackers who trek into Denali National Park seek only the solace and sustenance of wilderness. This behaviour of wolves towards them is not
necessarily untypical in places where the wolf population is strong and confident in its landscape and the people’s presence is benevolent and unthreatening.
Haber must have found much to hearten him in a book called
Comeback Wolves – Western Writers Welcome the Wolf Home.
It is a collection of essays and poems edited by Gary Wockner,
Gregory MacNamee and SueEllen Campbell and published in 2005 to celebrate the return of wolves to the American West. It draws its inspiration from one of those inexplicable lone-wolf journeys that
punctuate our awareness of the way wolves behave and captivate the imagination of the wolf’s admirers. The book is dedicated to Wolf 293 F, whose collared body was found on a highway near
Idaho Springs, Colorado, where it had been hit by a truck. Its journey had begun in Yellowstone, 500 miles away. No-one knows why, and no-one ever will. But it offers the delicious temptation to
believe that nature was sending an ambassador back across the Rockies into one of the wolf’s historic strongholds (a stronghold from which it had been evicted by the white man) to see how the
land lies now, to see what kind of welcome it might receive. The animal’s prosaic death might have been the end of the affair, but the Yellowstone connection and the discovery of the heroic
nature of the lone wolf’s undertaking touched a nerve, and something very old and very primitive in the American West stirred into life. Many people there thought the wolf was long dead, but
it turns out it was only hibernating. Whatever it was (and it might have been an echo of the pioneering spirit that emboldened the Founding Fathers and planted the seed of the American Dream) it
touched hearts, and now the wolf is back in the West. This is from an essay in
Comeback Wolves
by Hal Clifford:
But nature is saying . . . in the tracks of a lone wolf that came sniffing through Colorado not long ago, that I am here to be reckoned with on my own terms, and that you,
Man, are part of me. You and I, we have a relationship.
We define and redefine the wolf, yet who owns the wolf? The question seems absurd, like asking who owns the wind or the river. Before the United States existed, the peoples
who inhabited the American land didn’t even recognize the idea of land ownership. The wolf existed on its own terms, for its own reasons, as all things did. That era has long gone,
though, replaced by one in which we have not only private property rights (including the right to use the wind’s power and the river’s water), but also the Clean Air Act and Clean
Water Act. And so the question must be asked and answered: All of us own the wolf, just as all of us own the air we breathe and the water we drink. We depend on air and water, of course. But we
depend on the wolf, too, and we have a need to defend the wolf as we defend the air and water – for our own good, not simply for the wolf’s.
. . . We are not wise enough to understand what in nature, if anything, is expendable. The less we understand (and we understand little), the more we must embrace the
precautionary, quasi-religious strategy of proceeding with humility. We must keep all the parts. The act of doing so is our best insurance that nature – including us first and foremost
– will thrive.
Beneath this practical argument lies a moral one: Nature is intrinsically valuable . . . We depend on life. All life depends on life.
Here and there in the world, a tide is turning back in favour of the wolf, in Yellowstone, Colorado, southern Europe, Norway. In the wilderness of Alaska and Canada and parts of Russia its
population remains buoyant enough to win new generations of admirers, and slowly those generations reared on the old dark stories are dying out. The modern chapters of the history are perhaps
growing more reliable.
But now, what of my own country? Scotland, it seems to me, is a special case, and the only one with which I am truly in a position to take issue. After 21 years of making my living writing books
and journalism about Scotland’s wild landscapes and wildlife, of looking at nature in Scotland and thinking about what Scotland can do in favour of nature to redress a huge and longstanding
imbalance, and after half a lifetime of scrutinising the evidence, it is clear to me that the wolf is at the heart of it all. One of our most durable difficulties, even as the second decade of the
twenty-first century dawns, is the way that the wolf has been handed down to us, so that beliefs and fears are still held and still felt here many years after they have been shown up in more
enlightened countries to be inventions of the Dark Ages. I have suggested that the nineteenth century was a low point in the unreliable history. I now suggest that Scotland was a landscape that
promulgated hate-filled propaganda more zealously than any other. That combination – the Scottish landscape and the Victorian mindset – was truly awful. A handful of voices in
particular compounded the countless felonies – Sir Walter Scott inevitably, one of his countless more-or-less-forgotten disciples called Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, two preposterous Jacobite
brothers called Sobieski-Stuart, and the man who assembled their wacky outpourings and made them respectable in a single academic book, Professor J.E. Harting.
HAPTER
4
The Rabid Droves
It is related that William the Conqueror left the dead bodies of the English upon the battlefield to be devoured by worms, wolves, birds and dogs. When Waltheof, the son
of Siward, with an invading Danish army arrived in the Humber in September 1069, and reinforced by the men of Northumbria, made an attack on York, it is related that 3,000 Normans fell. A
hundred of the chiefest rank were said to have fallen amongst the flames by the hand of Waltheof himself, and the Scalds of the North sang how the son of Siward gave the corpses of the
Frenchmen as a choice banquet for the Wolves of Northumberland.
– J.E. Harting,
British Mammals Extinct Within Historic Times
(1880)
PROFESSOR JAMES EDMUND HARTING, FLS., FZS, liked his bile undiluted when he dipped his pen in it. The commonest word used by the Victorian generations to describe the presence
of wolves in the landscape is ‘infest’. Harting embraced it particularly eagerly. It even has an entry in his index: ‘Wolf . . . districts formerly infested’. It is used at
its most potent in this:
In 1848 there were living in Lochaber old people who related from their predecessors, that when all the country from the Lochie to Loch Erroch [the River Lochy north of
Fort William to Loch Ericht south-west of Dalwhinnie] was covered by a continuous pine forest, the eastern tracts upon the Blackwater and the wild wilderness stretching towards Rannach [Rannoch
Moor] were so dense and infested by the rabid droves, that they were almost impassable.
You have to admit it is a powerful image. His Victorian audience would have nodded enthusiastic agreement, and it has gone unchallenged into the literature of wolves. But let’s see.
Suspending for the moment all rational thought and scrutiny of the evidence, and assuming for the sake of the argument that the last wolf really did die in 1743, the old people of Lochaber in
1848 were reaching back 105 years, so the oral testimony had lived long enough to have been mangled by three if not four generations, and as we have seen already, wolf stories do not survive the
passage of time with their credibility enhanced. Then there is the bit about Rannoch Moor and tracts of pine forest so dense and infested by the rabid droves that they were almost impassable. Frank
Fraser Darling, one of the best of the twentieth century’s scientist-naturalists, and a founder of the Nature Conservancy Council, wrote in
The Highlands and Islands
(1964), that
Rannoch Moor ‘may have been extensively wooded
as recently as Roman times
’. Darling’s implication was that the most recent era of woodland cover on the Moor was earlier
rather than later. It certainly was, at the very least, far beyond the recall of the old people of Lochaber in the mid-nineteenth century, and for that matter far beyond the reach of knowledge that
might have been handed down to them. What was handed down was a storytelling tradition, and that tradition demonised the wolf the length and breadth of the land.
Then there is the phrase ‘infested by the rabid droves’. There are two things wrong there. One is that wolves do not move around in droves. They move in packs, or they move in twos
and threes, or, as often as not, in summer, they move alone. A pack of European wolves is commonly anything between three and a dozen, exceptionally more than that, and, in summer, wolves rarely
travel in packs at all. Packs defend their territories against neighbouring packs, and in a country the size of Scotland, territories would have covered several hundred square miles at least. So
the possibility of droves of wolves does not exist, and it never did. Droves are simply not in the nature of wolves.
And then there is the implication that the only kind of droves you would encounter if you were foolish enough to attempt to force a passage through the impassable forest were rabid ones. Yes,
there could well have been rabies in Highland Scotland three or four hundred years ago when Harting’s wolves were infesting, and a rabid wolf is a serious problem for any creature unfortunate
enough to encounter one, including human creatures. But so for that matter is a rabid bunny, a rabid sheep-dog, or a rabid man. And there is no evidence to show that wolves were more susceptible to
rabies than any other species. But there were always far fewer wolves than most other mammals in their landscape (for that is the nature of top predators – you can only have an abundance of
predators when there is a superabundance of prey), so it becomes clear that Harting’s casual use of the word ‘rabid’ is but one more ill-informed insult routinely hurled at the
wolf’s head. If, however, Harting used ‘rabid’, not to indicate rabies, but to characterise the wolf as ‘furious, raging, madly violent in nature or behaviour’
(alternative dictionary definition), the charge still sticks, for that too is unforgivable distortion of the reality of wolves. Harting waded knee-deep in the careless wolf prose of his
contemporaries and his predecessors and represented it as more or less unquestionable fact.
Alas for the historical reputation of the wolf in Britain, much of the pigswill he brewed in the wolf chapters of his book (91 pages compared with 36 for wild boar, 18 for reindeer, 28 for
beaver and 22 for bear – he enjoyed himself with wolves) has gone into the language. Worse, it is still quoted today, and not just by the gamekeeping fraternity where you might expect it, but
also by elements within the conservation movement as casual with the truth as he was himself. His book is still widely available, thanks to a 1972 facsimile edition. The publishers would not have
served the cause of wolves any worse by republishing
Little Red Riding Hood
and
The Three Little Pigs
.
One of his sources for the ‘rabid droves’ extract above was an 1848 book,
Lays of the Deer Forest
, by the brothers Sobieski-Stuart, two Germans who claimed to be the grandsons
of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Victorians looked upon their claims of Jacobite aristocracy with a peculiar strain of romantic approval rather than as evidence that they might be complete fruitcakes, like most people who
claim direct descent from the prince to this day, apparently secure in their belief that a Stuart will sit once again on the throne of Scotland. Aye, and hell will have frozen over. Harting lobs
dollops of their grist into his mill without qualification or the mildest murmur of suspicion. But one of the most comprehensive and astute works on the history of Scotland’s forests and the
notion of the Great Wood of Caledon in particular, places the Sobieski-Stuarts where they belong, which is firmly in the fruitcake category.
The Native Woodlands of Scotland,
1500–2000
, by T.C. Smout, Alan R. MacDonald, and Fiona Watson (2005) observes:
The Great Wood took on an altogether new lease of life in 1848 when the main ingredients of the modern myth were supplied by the Sobieski-Stuarts in their best-selling
Lays of the Deer Forest
. . . they claimed to be experts in the Gaelic past, and devised a compilation of poetry, aristocratic and romantic hunting stories, alleged clan histories,
supposed folklore and natural history . . . They spoke of a Caledonia Silva, ‘the great primeval cloud which covered the hills and plains of Scotland before they were cleared’, and
its ‘skirt’, a great forest filled with game and wolves that had occupied the Province of Moray, much of it surviving until recent times when ruthless and greedy modern man swept it
away.
