The Last Wolf (22 page)

The deer knew the corrie as a place to lie up in oppressive warm weather, and so would the shieling folk of Glen Ample who doubtless named that landscape. And so would its wolves. One effect of
the presence of wolves on the ground is to manage deer herds with the kind of relentless efficiency that we (as the only species that now manages deer) could never begin to emulate. A wolf pack is
more or less constantly on the move within its territory, and for that simple reason, deer are more or less constantly on the move too. The absence of wolves these last two centuries has made the
deer more or less sedentary.

The absence of native trees in Glen Ample is a direct consequence of the absence of wolves, and the browsing of hordes of sedentary deer. In the days of the wolf and the fewer, more mobile deer,
the glen was lightly wooded – birch, rowan, a few pines and aspen; alders on the burn are all that have survived. A fairly brutal intrusion of dense plantation spruce high on the west flank
of the glen around 30 years ago was not what nature had in mind. The map still marks ‘Coille Baile a’ Mhaoir’ a mile to the north of the lower slopes of Coire Fhuadaraich, and
coille
is the Gaelic word for a wood. No tree dignifies the place now.

Suppose, then, the half-a-dozen walkers with the white teeshirt in their midst had been a pack of as many wolves, and perhaps three hundred years ago. The wolves would have had light woodland on
their side, and in that circumstance they were all but invisible when they chose to be. The accidental effect achieved by the appearance of the walkers would be precisely the effect desired by the
wolves. But they would have come in a fan from below the deer, and the deer would have run as they ran from the walkers. But whereas the walkers provoked an orderly retreat, with the herd bunching
behind the leaders and the back-markers slowed to a trot perhaps twenty or thirty abreast, while the front of the herd galloped five abreast across the
bealach
, the wolves panicked the
back-markers and scattered them wildly, and with the deer both trying to run and hemmed in by the corrie walls, the wolves made the easiest of killings. And whereas the walkers scared the deer out
of the corrie of cooling for a few hours (after which they would wander back and resume the browsing-to-the-bone of the treeless glen) the wolves’ instinct for travel had the crucial effect
of keeping the deer herd constantly on the move.

This teaches you two things about red deer. One is that in the days of wolves, the deer were travellers too because the wolves insisted on it, so there was far less scope for the lame and the
old and the sick to survive; the herd was smaller and healthier because the wolves insisted on that too. The other is that the red deer is at least every bit as much a woodland animal as an animal
of the bare hillsides. John Buchan wrote in his famous 1924 novel of the Highland deer forest,
John Macnab
:

In those parts of mainland Europe where red deer still live mainly in forests you find stags a third bigger than the Monarch of the Glen and his kin. So by keeping deer on the move the herd is
smaller, the animals larger and healthier, and woodland flourishes to such an extent that it becomes forest and a healthy forest can sustain a healthy deer population. The agent that makes all this
possible is the wolf. It bears repeating: in a northern hemisphere wilderness, with the wolf in place everything in nature makes sense, but in the absence of wolves nothing in nature makes sense.
We have taken upon ourselves the role of the top predator, and such is our inefficiency in the job that we first eliminated nature’s genius of biodiversity in the wolf, then instructed the
landscape to evolve as a bare land overrun by deer and sheep, then – a last madness – we invented a forestry industry to grow trees nature would not have chosen and in a way that nature
would never have chosen to grow them. And then we shut the deer out from these forests.

So there was an old early July afternoon and early evening the day before or the day after my birthday and I was walking back south down Glen Ample, my head full of the deer and the sight and
the sound and the smell of them, and as I walked out to where I had left my car I was redesigning the glen in my mind so that it looked not as it once did but rather as it could look with only a
little realignment of landowning policy, a little willingness to accept the failures of past and present regimes, and the colossal miracle that will be required before your species and mine
acknowledges one essential truth: that the wolf will do the job better than you or me.

There are three small summits on the glen’s blunt western ridge, all named by the Gaelic language, all saying exactly what they mean. The northmost is Meall nan Oighreag, which is the hill
of the cloudberry, and sure enough, cloudberry grows vigorously there. The middle one is Sgiath a’Chaise;
sgiath
is a wing and
caise
is steepness and sure enough the summit is
wing-shaped and the steepest contours on that side of the glen cram around it. The third is Meall Mor, which more or less means the big lump, and, especially seen from down on Loch Lubnaig, it is
exactly that. Between the Wing and the Lump there is a crag whose name is Creag a’ Mhadaidh, which is the Wolf’s Crag, and while, as we have already seen, names on maps that insinuate
the once-upon-a-times of wolves are as biologically reliable as Aesop, there is a stronger case to be made where the surrounding landscape has been named with such precision. There is, for example,
many a Creag na h-Iolaire – the eagle crag – hereabouts where eagles still perch or nest as they must have done for centuries, many a Creag an Fhithich – Raven Crag – that
still resounds to the loud proclamations of ravens. And there can be few places in the whole of Britain further removed from the influence of Viking or Saxon than Highland Perthshire, so none
further removed from their Wolfs and Ulfs and Olafs that doom so many folklorists to disappointment when they go looking for genuine wolf place names. Nor is there a local last wolf tradition, no
historical perversions of hunter-heroism that invite ridicule like Strath Glass, Sutherland, and the Findhorn. And when you watch the deer on the run within their own landscape, watch how they use
it and watch how they are constrained and made vulnerable by it, there is, at the very least, a sense of the wolf at work in such a landscape, and the presence of a Creag a’ Mhadaidh perhaps
acquires a degree of credibility.

The glen subsided into a sultry early evening, a seductive mood of edgy, unrelaxed tranquillity, as though perhaps there was a storm under the horizon but heading this way. I had seen something
in a flock of whooper swans a few months earlier that had sown that particular seed. I had stopped to watch them from my car where they grazed in a field, the car partially screened by a skinny
hedge. The birds were relaxed and grazing, untroubled by my presence. I had been there for about half an hour when suddenly every bird stood erect, heads held high, facing west. I swivelled the
binoculars to see what might have alarmed them; anything from a dog-walking farmer to a passing white-tailed eagle might have induced such a spontaneous and unanimous response. I found nothing.
Still the disquiet flowed through the flock like a wind among fallen leaves. They called constantly for fully ten minutes before a crack of thunder and a shaft of lightning heralded a short and
ferocious storm that blackened the visible world, whitened the ground with hailstones and rocked the car with gusts. No hint of the storm had offered itself to me, but the swans had known about it
while it was still under the horizon.

In my Perthshire glen on a summer’s evening a few hundred feet below the Wolf Crag, then, I felt some unnameable disquiet, and I thought of the swans and the storm. And I had just been
handed a vivid enactment of the effect of the absence of wolves, and in the midst of it all there was a crag named for a wolf. I can’t see storms under the horizon; yet I was picking up on
something apparently still out of reach. It would take much longer than it took the swans to sniff out the storm, but in time I realised that my nature writer’s sensibilities were responding
for the first time to the crackling energy of the sense of a wolf
presence
in my own landscape. And that was what had been the root of my disquiet.

I walked out and drove home. There was no storm that night, and the morning after dawned clear as the headwaters of the Allt a’ Choire Fhuadaraich, the burn of the corrie of cooling, where
the deer sought sanctuary and relief when a midsummer midday grew uncomfortably sultry, and wolfishly edgy.

For nineteen consecutive Tuesdays of summer and early autumn a few years ago, I gave a series of talks to groups of American visitors on a ship purpose-built to cruise between
Inverness and Oban by way of the lochs and canals of the Great Glen. Each Tuesday she berthed for the evening at the top of the tumultuous series of canal locks near Fort William known as
Neptune’s Staircase. I drove from Glen Dochart, where I was living at the time, by way of the Blackmount, the edge of Rannoch Moor and Glencoe, boarded the ship, had a meal with the people
who would be my audience, did my talk about the landscape and wildlife of Highland Scotland, then drove home.

It was an agreeable and well-paid assignment, and that late-night drive home became a delightful ritual, the job done, the adrenalin of performance cooled, the landscape as remarkable as
anything you can drive through the length and breadth of the land, the roads empty. I would drive through Glencoe somewhere around midnight, and often my car was the only wakeful movement in a
still and slumberous world. I became familiar with the wheel of the stars across that portion of Highland sky, the coming and going of the moon, and on the long straights south-east and south after
the night-black pyramid of Buachaille Etive Mor, the unfailing presence all along the roadside of hundreds of red deer. They walked, stood, and often lay all over the road, and moved off
reluctantly at the approach of my car. They came down to the road at that hour to graze the lush grass of the verges and to moonbathe on the warm tarmac of the A82. (I thought of the wolf on I-70.)
Their eyes stared back weirdly at the passing headlights, but I was always aware of the shadowy shapes of the hordes just beyond the range of the lights. So I developed the habit of stopping in a
lay-by, switching off everything, opening the windows and letting the silence and the darkness rush in.

Eyes and ears take time to readjust to the demands of such drastically changed circumstances. I found eventually that it helped to sit for a couple of minutes with my eyes closed, then when I
opened them the night was a bright place. By then, too, my ears had begun to accommodate the unsilent night, the conversations of a relaxed deer herd, the yap of a fox, the moans of owls, the quiet
passage of water, the layers of pitch that make up the voice of an easy breeze.

Soon the car became a part of the landscape, albeit one that didn’t smell like it, and the deer treated it accordingly. That is, they ignored it, they walked round it, often no more than a
couple of yards away, but never closer than that. They grazed nearby, they muttered to each other. I guessed that even with the windows open the smell of the car masked the scent of the animal
within, and as long as I stayed quiet and still and inside, they were quite untroubled.

I had no wish to trouble them, it was enough to sit still among them for a few minutes, using only my night eyes to try and make them out, to distinguish size and characteristics of individuals.
Besides, I was dressed for after-dinner conversation on a cruise ship, not for the fine line the A82 treads there between the mountains of the Black Mount and the colossal night-blackness of
Rannoch Moor, where, in my own mind, Scotland’s last wolves surely worked the deer herds and for many years outwitted the outrageous determination of mankind to wipe them from the face of the
land, once and for all.

Sitting there alone with the night and surrounded by the complacent deer, I harboured the thought that yes, mankind wiped the wolf from the face of the land once, but not once and for all; that
here is surely where the wolf’s story should begin again.

Once, I wondered what effect it would have on the deer if I bought a CD of wolves howling, and if I slipped it into the car’s CD player and cranked up the volume and let that ancient
anthem of the landscape loose again through the open windows. What dim inheritance might stir in the breast of a red deer then? But I baulked at the artificial basis of the notion, and I have never
gone back to sit among the deer an hour after midnight, never bought the CD. I’ll wait for the real thing to come along, as sooner or later it surely will.

But I know that it was out there, in the careful embrace of Rannoch Moor, that a single wolf lingered, alone until age and loneliness finally defeated her, and she spent her final days trying to
make contact with others of her kin by the only means left to her when travel and howling had failed. Then I thought that they may say the last Caledonian wolf is dead, but the truth is she is not
yet born.

TREE BY TREE she travelled the morning, deeper into the Black Wood of Rannoch, higher too, for the Black Wood reached many miles to the south and west, feathered the slopes
of many hills and mountainsides with pale and dark blue-green and bottle-green plumes. She skirted a wide, boggy clearing with scattered heathery hummocks. The pines in the bog were poor and
skinny; they fared ill and died young. On the knolls they prospered in ones and twos, heftily limbed and wide-crowned. But her gaze was held by a solitary rowan. Its short, thick trunk tilted away
from a cluster of rocks about its roots. Its branchy spread was even and rounded. A thick, vivid green fur of moss that covered the rocks had spread to the lower trunk, ending in a dead-straight
diagonal across the trunk, the same angle at which the tree leaned. The tree had grown straight, then leaned in later life in response to some upheaval among the rocks, or the encroachment of the
bog.