The Last Wolf (10 page)

The Earn flows east out of Loch Earn through the comparatively douce landscapes around Comrie and Crieff, then wends a decidedly Lowland course to join the Tay east of Perth. It is a landscape I
have known more or less all my life, and not once had I come across a wolf tradition there. So I set about scouring known historical sources for signs of an infestation of wolves. None revealed
itself. Then I started to study maps of the Findhorn, a landscape with which I was relatively unfamiliar, and I found Strath Dearn. Harting or his publisher or the publisher of the
twentieth-century reprint had made a simple typo.

I decided to approach MacQueen’s country from the north, circling stealthily (like a wolf, as I fancied it) east of the River Findhorn by way of the vast spaciousness of a high moorland
B-road that climbs north out of Carrbridge and breasts the 1,300-feet contour amid a small clutch of craggy hilltops, one of which is called Creag a’Ghiuthas. It must be several miles from
there to the nearest pine tree today, but perhaps when the landscape was named, that high moorland sprawl was also a high pinewood sprawl and the pinewood known for its deer, and the whole wild
landscape of the Findhorn known for its wolves.

This is a big landscape by Scottish standards, the wild moorland miles to east and west, lower-lying woodland to the north where the land starts to dip towards the distant sea, and to the south
there are sightlines into the northern Cairngorms to put your heart in your mouth. From many compass points the distant Cairngorms fold into each other and create the deceptively unimpressive
aspect of a slabby plateau. People have died being unimpressed by their first sight of the Cairngorms. But from the high ground to the north they mass awesomely into an army of mountains, sliced
into battalions by the great troughs of Gleann Einich and the Lairg Ghru. There is no doubting their scale, no escaping their intimidating aspect. Standing on the small plateau summit of Creag
Eairaich and looking around, something fundamental changed in me. The possibility that I had so fondly entertained for so long of reintroducing wolves into my own country suddenly acquired a
ferociously practical reality.

‘Look at this place,’ I said aloud to no-one. ‘How can anyone believe that there should
not
be wolves here?’

The sheer scope and uncompromising wildness of the landscape in almost every direction imposed itself on my solitude with a quite unexpected forcefulness. It had never been on my preferred list
of wolf-reintroduction landscapes, a short list headed by Rannoch Moor, but it had just imposed itself on my list quite uninvited. Uniquely in the course of these journeys among old wolf haunts I
toyed with the notion that I had been led there. It is, of course, the most unscientific of arguments, and it was preached to a converted audience of one by the audience itself, but science is not
the only valid consideration in a phenomenon as emotive as the place of wolves in a landscape.

Science can be ponderous and myopic and blinkered by both history and politics. For example, as I write this a small group of Norwegian beavers is being released from quarantine into the wild in
Knapdale, Argyll, a timid attempt at reintroduction hamstrung with safeguards and qualifications and tags and radio-collars, a five-year study and a threat by the scheme’s partners to cull or
sterilise the beavers if things go wrong in the eyes of those influential vested interests who have opposed the scheme from the start. It has taken 15 years to get us to this point, thanks largely
to ponderous, blinkered, myopic science and less than inspirational politics. It is that long ago now since I made a radio programme on the subject, and a senior official at Scottish Natural
Heritage said on air that we would have beavers back in Scotland in two years. Science and politics had other ideas. If it has been so ponderous a process for beavers, which eat nothing more
precious to us than willow bark, it is not easy to be optimistic that science and politics will fast-track wolf reintroduction onto the agenda.

But I stood on the summit of Creag Eairaich and a peculiar sense of purpose attended the moment. Perhaps in retrospect it was not so surprising, for my life at that point was consumed in the
process of making this book, fighting the wolf’s corner, criss-crossing the country in pursuit of the elusive sense of them in my native landscapes more than 200 years after they vanished off
the face of my portion of the earth, borrowing from the experiences of other countries where the presence of the wolf is unbroken or where it has found its own way back or where it has been put
back. And I was closing in on the spoor of the most outrageous of all Scotland’s wolf traditions, the one that had been regurgitated so often over so many years that it had acquired a
specific significance as the moment when Scotland was finally rid of its wolves, and because it had a date it had become history. Yet, curiously enough, Harting of all people had paused in the face
of this landscape and made an uncharacteristically realistic assessment of it, considering the wildly extravagant use to which he was putting it, although whether he was ever here is less than
clear or likely.

And if he had added the Cairngorms into the equation, here was – and still is – an area of around 600 square miles that could have accommodated – and still could – a pack
of wolves. One pack, mind you, not an infestation.

I crossed the Findhorn at Dulsie Bridge, a spectacular example of General Wade’s bridge-building capabilities as he stamped the land with military roads in the aftermath of Culloden; the
whorls of the London government’s fingerprints were unmistakable. It was the beginning of the subjugation of the Highlands. The Clearances would be the end of the process. But for all that it
represents, Dulsie Bridge was and still is an exquisite marriage of architecture and engineering and the stonemason’s art.

I began to close in on MacQueen by way of a furtive, narrowing, deteriorating road that tiptoed through thick woodland. Suddenly the road slipped the leash of the trees and dropped to the river.
Pheasants and partridges scattered on both sides, or simply ran ahead of the car for hundreds of yards. The wolves would have loved them. Clear views of the river confirmed the map’s
diagnosis, that the next five or six upstream miles of the Findhorn were folded deep in a sinuous canyon. About halfway up and on the far side of the river was a tiny square marked Ballachrochin.
In my mind’s eye I saw a small and roofless stone ruin, walls caved in, a discernible doorway; perhaps the gables still stood, and an owl or a kestrel or a raven nested in the ghost of
chimney.

I weighed up the possibilities. Bulldozed roads climbed the far hillside, and there was an estate bridge near Drynachan Lodge. If I could walk up that road to get above the canyon, I could look
down on Ballachrochin, and scatter the bones of a 260-year-old story on the twenty-first-century landscape. I met a keeper outside his house, explained my mission, my wolf project, my interest in
MacQueen and the story in which he had the starring role, and asked if I might use the bridge and walk up the bulldozed road across the glen. It was a Sunday, and I didn’t expect there to be
anyone shooting up there.

My request was met with a quiet smile, and an assurance that I would not find many wolves at Ballachrochin. If he knew the story of MacQueen, he expressed not the slightest interest in it. He
was more concerned about where I walked.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather you stayed this side of the river. We have a great many birds up on the other side. But if you park at the end of the tarmac road you’ll
have a lovely walk up this side and you’ll see all you need to see of Ballachrochin.’

And so I did. I climbed high above the river on an easy track, then abandoned it to follow the upper edge of the canyon. Upstream, the Findhorn wound its way south-west, catching sunlight and
shadow, dodging in and out of sight, until one last far-off blue-black mountainside terminated the view. Beyond that mountainside the unseen A9 would be clattering indifferently by as it curved
round the lower reaches of Strathdearn.

At that stage, I was quietly pleased with my strategy. I had a late lunch on a high, heathery seat in the sunshine. The river uncoiled far below round a flat and grassy bowl, beyond which
patches of old birch-wood dropped hints of the old woodland character of the place. A small and derelict stone house stood in the middle of the flat green sward. I guessed it was as prone to
flooding as any house in the Highlands. Anyway, it was at least a hundred years too modern for MacQueen.

Sunlight was highlighting some strange patterns high up on the far hillside. I put the binoculars on them and found . . . fields. What on earth were they planting away up there? Then I realised
that whatever it was, its principle purpose was to provide cover for thousands and thousands of partridges and pheasants. I could imagine the neighbourhood golden eagles queuing up over such a
hillside. I could also imagine there might be a degree of hostility on this particular estate to the notion of wolves returning to the site of their legendary last stand, and perhaps that had
explained the keeper’s unenthusiastic response.

I walked on, still heading south-west, slowly unravelling the river, coil after coil, half drunk on the honeyed smell of the heather and the sun and the play of light and shadow on near and far
hillsides, and the dance of it on the water. Then I saw clusters of chimneys protruding from distant trees. But they were not decrepit chimneys, and they were not broken-down stone, and they were
not the chimneys of a small and roofless ruin. There were also rather a lot of them. The building they served was new and white and shielded from prying eyes by trees and it was very big. Whatever
may have stood there in 1743, the twenty-first-century Ballachrochin is a substantial mansion house.

I felt defeated. The estate was modern and forward-thinking and looked prosperous, and seemed utterly indifferent to its old claim to fame. Highland tourism routinely makes a meal of the
landscape’s association with historical events: not here. There is no plaque, no notice, no leaflet, no hint that a giant called MacQueen had ever set foot here, far less killed a wolf,
the
wolf, the last wolf, the very last Last Wolf. For no good reason at all now that I think about it, I had expected to find a glen like so many others in the Highlands, beleaguered by its
past, and shorn of its potential by 150 years of over-dependence on too many sheep and too many deer and too few natives. Instead there were clusters of white chimneys and thousands of partridges.
And here and there along the river, expensive four-wheel-drive this-and-thats ferried anglers out to the choice beats. From time to time the voices of the anglers, a touch too strident for my
comfort, rode the thermals up to where I sat. And suddenly nothing fitted.

What now? I had had MacQueen in my sights all the time I was travelling north, all the way from the southern Highland Edge to Carrbridge to the revelation of Creag Eairlaich, the slow drive over
the Wade bridge and through the trees. Ballachrochin was to be the gunfight at the OK Corral, the duel in the sun where I would shoot holes in MacQueen’s reputation. But Ballachrochin was
doubly shut in – by its Victorian tree planting and the river’s canyon walls. There was no-one to shoot at, and my mission seemed ludicrous. What did I expect to find – a
seven-feet-long rusting iron bedstead standing in the ruins?

But I still believed the last wolf story was fiction, like all the others, that MacQueen was just one more fictional component in a fictional story with a fictional dialogue; that he had a
walk-on part in a fake history. Yet somehow I had still thought I was going to nail him in his own backyard. But if he was a fiction he had no back yard, and Ballachrochin was only a
storyteller’s stage set. The possibility of wolves had been palpable on the summit of Creag Eairlaich. There had been that extraordinary sense of being led, of destination. There, I had been
working with reality, with a living landscape where real wolves had lived and could live again. Then I allowed myself to be distracted by the ghost of a man who may never have lived at all.

But MacQueen was still the key to disproving the last wolf story, and it was necessary to disprove it so that history would have to look again at the place of the wolf in Scotland and make a
more thoughtful assessment. And that would surely assist the cause of the wolf’s return. But how do you begin to disprove a story set in 1743, whose central character may or may not have
existed, a story whose landscape setting treats it with an indifferent shrug?

I drove to Inverness in the rain, spent several hours in a public library reading turgid local histories and old wildlife books and romanticised explorations of Highland landscapes written by
obscure hacks a hundred years ago, looking in vain for some indisputable fact or flimsy hint that would allow me to lay to rest MacQueen and his last wolf and 1743 and all that once and for all.
All I found were Harting quotes and Harting rewrites, and such a sniffy indifference from the solitary member of staff that the morning settled on me like a personal rain cloud.

I found a quiet bar and considered once again the gospel according to Harting in some detail.

I don’t know what a
carnach
is. The only meaning I can find for the word is ‘a rocky place’ which is not what Harting was looking for. The implication is that he had a
bit of a reputation ‘for an unknown period’ which is as meaningless a character reference as I have ever encountered.