Authors: Jim Crumley
The Last Wolf (7 page)
And after a passage that considered the climatic changes following the early Bronze Age and their consequences for the native forest, Smout, MacDonald and Watson write:
In these circumstances, we would have greatly to reduce any estimates of woodland cover 5,000 years ago, perhaps by one-half, to arrive at a figure for 2,000 years ago. For
a quarter of the land surface to have been wooded then would seem a possible figure. The present woodland cover of Scotland stands at 17 per cent, most of it plantation, and it is frequently
urged upon us that the percentage should become much higher. There are many good arguments for planting trees in Scotland – to maintain employment, to give pleasure, to help carbon
sequestration and to assist nature conservation. But it seems there may be fewer arguments from history than usually assumed, and none for restoring the fantastical Great Wood of Caledon.
Even if the figure for 2000 years ago was as much as a third of the land surface – so twice the extent of today’s tree cover – it was quite unlike Harting’s much-quoted
portrait. It was not jungle, it was an airy northern forest flayed by Atlantic and Arctic winds. A restored national forest covering a third of the landscape is a sublime ambition for
twenty-first-century Scotland, but only if it is a good forest with much-reduced commercial plantation, only if we recruit the wolf to manage the deer in the forest and beyond it.
But myths die hard once the folk mind has embraced them. Generations of writers regurgitated Harting (and therefore the Sobieski-Stuarts) and called it research. Only in the last few years has a
more rigorous questioning of old sources begun. My own interest in such questioning is that a search for a new and more enlightened path through the impassable forests and the rabid droves will
surely create a climate in which a fair hearing for the wolf is possible at last, and that as a result the wolf will be restored to its rightful place in the Scottish landscape.
It is also clear that Harting and many of his adherents wrote about the wolf and its Scottish habitat from a distance and in profound ignorance, a state of affairs that has contributed to
myth-making and misunderstanding across almost every aspect of Scottish history. Harting quotes an earlier historian:
Camden, whose
Britannia
was published in 1586, asserts that wolves at that date were common in many parts of Scotland, and particularly refers to Strathnavern.
‘The county,’ he says, ‘hath little cause to brag of its fertility. By the reason of the sharpness of the air it is very thinly inhabited, and thereupon extremely infested
with the fiercest of Wolves, which to the great damage of the county, not only furiously set upon cattle, but even upon the owners themselves, to the manifest danger of their lives.’
Thus Harting compounds the worst of felonies for a historian, or for that matter, a nature writer. Anyone who knows anything at all about the history of Strathnaver in Sutherland will realise at
once that neither Harting nor Camden had ever set foot in the place. A writer like David Craig, on the other hand, knows Strathnaver intimately, and paints a very different kind of landscape in his
book
On the Crofters’ Trail
(1990), the most powerful, vivid and compassionate reading of the Highland Clearances. The Clearances, to adapt Camden’s wildly misdirected fiction,
set upon the owners of those cattle nowhere more furiously than in Strathnaver. David Craig found lists of the evictees from Strathnaver in 1819, and there were 1,288 people on those lists, and
that was the
second
clearing of Strathnaver. He unearthed the testimony of Angus Mackay, who had been cleared ‘at the first burning in 1814’, to the Napier Commission 70 years
later. He said they had been ‘reasonably comfortable’ in their old home.
‘You would see a mile or half a mile between every town; there were four or five families in each of these towns, and bonnie haughs between the towns, and hill
pasture for miles, as far as they could wish to go. The people had plenty of flocks of goats, sheep, horses and cattle, and they were living happy . . . with flesh and fish and butter and
cheese and fowl and potatoes and kail and milk too. There was no want of anything with them; and they had the Gospel preached to them at both ends of the strath . . . and in several other towns
the elders and those who were taking to themselves to be following the means of grace were keeping a meeting once a fortnight – a prayer meeting amongst themselves – and there were
plenty gathering, so that the houses would be full.’
David Craig continues:
If anyone is inclined to dismiss this kind of thing as rose-tinted nostalgia, consider that the Sutherland estate itself reported that the ‘general level of
welfare’ in Strathnaver was good.
What you realise as you walk all over the cleared lands of Scotland is that they were emptied because they were good places: that is, fit for the new large flocks of big
southern sheep to feed on even in winter. Their greenness stands out today as though lit by some unfailing sunray among the brown heather moors. They are also picked out by pale blazes of the
sheep, which still choose to browse there because ground that has once been cleared of stones, trenched for drainage, puddled by the hooves of animals, delved and fertilised over generations,
maintains almost indefinitely its power to raise dense, juicy grass. If you stroke it, it feels tender. If you were blind, you would feel its resilience under your feet, as against the
squelching or lumpy texture of the unimproved land round about – which also could have been improved by now, like the Yorkshire Dales or the Dolomite Alps, if crofting life had been
allowed to go on evolving.
Strathnaver has been settled and made increasingly fertile at least since the broch builders, which is to say between 2,000 and 3,000 years.
So consider again Camden’s assessment: ‘The county hath little cause to brag of its fertility . . . it is very thinly inhabited and thereupon extremely infested with the fiercest of
wolves, which to the great damage of the county not only furiously set upon cattle but even upon the owners themselves, to the manifest danger of their lives.’ Consider the willingness with
which Harting seized on it because it so suited his purpose of demonising the wolf, but not one word of it was true. If Harting paused once to consider how true it might or might not be, he kept
his thoughts to himself. They were, of course, neither the first nor the last to misrepresent the Highlands in print from the twin blind spots of ignorance and distance. Some of the others, you
might think, should have known better. As David Craig points out, when the Duchess of Sutherland married the Marquis of Stafford in 1785, ‘at first they thought they had only 3,000 tenants
– actually there were 15,000.’
The truth is that the Highland Clearances could never have happened if the land had not first been cleared of wolves. Flooding the glens with big, slow, dim-witted southern sheep would not have
been such a realistic business proposition if the Highlands had still been infested with the rabid droves. So arguably the worst humanitarian disaster ever inflicted on the Highland people could
never have been effected without first imposing unarguably its worst ecological disaster.
From the moment the last wolf died, nature in the Highlands – in all Scotland, all Britain – lurched out of control. It still is out of control, and it will remain out of control
until the day the wild wolf is put back. In a northern hemisphere country like this, if the wolf is in place everything in nature makes sense, but in the absence of wolves nothing in nature makes
sense. In Scotland, instead of a top predator with the power to influence ecosystems, there are only eagles and a critically dwindling population of wild cats.
In the rest of Britain even these are absent, and there is nothing more predatory on the face of the land than a badger boar and a stroppy roebuck. Instead, your species and mine has persuaded
itself that it can do the wolf’s job, be the top predator and influence ecosystems. But we have added the un-wolf-like characteristic of trying to bully nature into submissive compliance.
Nature resists, of course, but in an island country like ours, it has not yet invented a way to reintroduce the wolf. The next land-bridge to mainland Europe is still a few geological upheavals in
the future, so it falls to us to put the wolf back, then be prepared to have it show us where we have gone wrong, how we might right those wrongs, and how to paint our mountains.
Meanwhile, Harting had been supping with the Sobieski-Stuarts again.
Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, large tracts of forests in the Highlands were purposely cut down or burned, as the only means
of expelling the Wolves which there abounded.
If that was true, if large tracts of Highland forest were being cut down or burned, it is highly unlikely that the wolves which there abounded would have considered themselves expelled. Wolves
don’t need forests. They exist everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, from Alaska to New Mexico, and in every conceivable habitat that such a geographical spread implies.
Destroying a forest that held a wolf pack’s entire territory would probably have made no bigger impact than to persuade the pack to redraw the boundaries of its territory, possibly to
challenge a neighbouring pack, or to move to an area where there were no wolves. Bearing in mind that in the early seventeenth century the wolf was less than 200 years from extinction and had
already suffered at least 500 years of hefty persecution, there would be plenty of wolfless country available to a disturbed pack.
If that was true . . .
The Sobieski-Stuarts, quoted by Harting, had written:
On the south side of Ben Nevis, a large pine forest, which extended from the western braes of Lochaber to the Black Water and the mosses of Rannach, was burned to expel the
Wolves. In the neighbourhood of Loch Sloi, a tract of woods nearly twenty miles in extent was consumed for the same purpose.
Making generous allowance, his Lochaber-Rannoch claim might amount to four or five hundred square miles, which in turn might just amount to the territory of a single pack. The brothers’
‘Loch Sloi’ is a mystery, unless they meant tiny Loch Sloy near the north end of Loch Lomond, though it was hardly a nineteenth-century landmark. Yet that was enough for Harting to
pronounce the demise of ‘large tracts of forests in the Highlands’.
If that was true . . .
But what was really happening in the Highlands at the turn of the seventeenth century? Smout, MacDonald and Watson write in
The Native Woodlands of Scotland
that in 1503 the Scottish
Parliament announced that the country’s timber supply was utterly destroyed:
. . . probably reflecting at least the King’s vexation in not being able to get his hands on the supplies he needed for his castles and ships. The tone of legislation
in the next two centuries was consistently anxiety-ridden. Acts of 1535, 1607 and 1661 enjoined the planting and protection of timber . . . and Parliament in 1609, while stating that large
woods had recently been discovered in the North was anxious that their value should not be frittered away.
So the presumption of King and Parliament was specifically against destroying more woodland, and would hardly have been likely to put the discomfort of the lieges at the sound of a howling wolf
before the needs of the State.
As soon as you start to scratch the surface of what has passed for received wisdom about wolves throughout Scotland for at least the last 500 years, it cracks open, crumbles, and dematerialises
into clouds of useless dust. Harting, alas, is the only one who collected some of its source material. It could have done with a more rigorous historian. Perhaps the most vivid evidence of just how
lightly he scrutinised his sources emerges from Wales, and the story of the death of a wolf in the reign of King John, so the early part of the thirteenth century. He prefaces the story with the
words, ‘it is not at all unlikely that it is founded on fact.’ Without further explanation he unleashes the following on his gullible readership:
Llewellyn, who was Prince of Wales in the reign of King John, resided at the foot of Snowdon, and, amongst a number of hounds which he possessed, had one of rare excellence
which had been given to him by the King. [You get the sense already that it is not going to go well for the hound of rare excellence.] On one occasion, during the absence of the family, a Wolf
entered the house; and Llewellyn, who first returned, was met at the door by his favourite dog, who came out, covered with blood, to greet his master. The prince, alarmed, ran into the house,
to find his child’s cradle overturned, and the ground flowing with blood. In a moment of terror, imagining the dog had killed the child, he plunged his sword into his body, and laid him
dead on the spot. But, on turning up the cradle, he found his boy alive and sleeping by the side of the dead Wolf. The circumstance had such an effect on the mind of the prince, that he erected
a tomb over the faithful dog’s grave.
Where do you start with such a story? The Prince of Wales left a baby alone in the house with a hound for a guardian? He had no staff in his house? And if he had, they failed to hear a fight to
the death between a hound and a wolf? And they let the hound answer the door to their returning master?
All of this presupposes, of course, that the wolf did indeed enter the house. The door of the house with the unguarded child was left open? Perhaps the wolf jumped onto the roof and went down
the chimney? Then it walked through the many rooms until it found the one it wanted – the nursery with the cradle and the sleeping, unguarded child. It was about to clamp its jaws around the
throat of the infant when the hound of rare excellence, the King’s gift, chanced on the scene and – of course – killed the wolf.