The Last Wolf (14 page)

He doesn’t mention Devon, yet if you wanted a peg to hang a theory on, surely the Wolf River is as promising as 500-year-old clues come. In Highland Scotland, for example, river names are
often the oldest in the landscape. Jennifer Westwood counselled caution. It was hard, she said, to say for certain that the river was named after the killing. ‘I may be unduly suspicious, but
sometimes rivers are renamed.’

We followed directions from the couple in the cottage up to an ever-so-slightly eerie tree-shrouded crossroads. The name on the signpost announced Wolverston, followed by the symbol of a cross.
What more do you need – Wolverston Cross, the Crossroads of the Wolf Village, right? Or is that a dangerous assumption? I asked the expert.

‘Not so much dangerous as disappointing, as often as not. If this name is anything like the name Wallerton in various parts of the country . . . when you break that down the Medieval forms
sound as if they’ve got the wolf word in it . . . but when you really look at the legal documents, it turns out to be people’s names.’

So maybe Mr and Mrs Wolf lived here.

Strange how this most reviled of creatures across much of Europe from the Middle Ages onwards was also the name of choice for so many kings, warriors, would-be kings and would-be warriors. There
were among England’s Anglo-Saxon Kings an Ethelwulf (the Noble Wolf); a Berthwulf (the Illustrious Wolf); Eadwulf (the Prosperous Wolf); Ealdwulf (the Old Wolf) . . . but never a hint of a
Child-Slaying Wolf or a Sheep-Devouring Wolf or a Black Wolf or a Long-Tusked Wolf. So although the handed-down reputation of the wolf was so unremittingly slanderous, the many qualities of the
true wolf were not lost on warrior-kings.

There is a further implication: if you wanted to command the loyalty of your subjects, why choose the name of a creature that legend would have us believe was universally reviled? Could it be
that there were many parts of the country, many parts of Europe, where the wolf was admired by those who lived alongside it, for exactly those qualities that appealed to a dynasty of kings, and for
that matter, that appealed and still does appeal to thousands of years of generations of North American Indians and Eskimos? Shaun Ellis may have found his inspirational sources among the Nez
Perces. But if the inclinations of Anglo-Saxon kings had survived the welter of history-warping storytellers and myth-makers, he might have found role models much nearer to home too.

Jennifer Westwood and I were rummaging among the possibilities of wolf names on the map while we walked a stretch of narrow road between Wolverston Cross and the high edge of Wolverston Moor. We
bumped into a local woman walking a posse of dogs and asked her what she knew. Oh, she knew the story, of course, but not the detail. There was an old man in the village who knew more, but he died.
But if we were to walk out onto the high moor, we’d be overlooking the spot where the deed was done, England’s last wolf slain. And with a final, parting shrug she added:

‘That’s what they say.’

But you never find out who ‘they’ were, nor when they said it.

The panorama from the edge of the moor was far-flung and lovely, and the river was far below, and the maze of lanes and hedges and dark trees fused into a hidden underworld where I found it
easier to believe in hobbits than wolves. I was looking for the folklorist’s perspective, some unfankling of the myth-makers’ knots. I listed a few of the options and put them to
Jennifer Westwood:

‘We’re in a landscape full of wolf placenames, including the irresistible Wolf River, and perhaps the setting for one of the following:

“The last place that a wolf was seen in England.”

“The last place that a wolf was seen in Devon.”

“A story attached to an important local family.”

“Some minor incident embroidered by local fantasy or bardic tradition.”

What do you reckon?’

‘As always with local tradition, it would be lovely if there were a historical basis and you thought, “here are these people who have remembered this story for such a long
time,”’ she said. ‘But so often the folklorist’s life is doomed to disappointment. Well, perhaps not disappointment exactly, but . . . it’s a floating tradition. With
the right kind of landscape and place names the story will attach to that place. It’s eternally fascinating and eternally frustrating.’

Barry Lopez had written in
Of Wolves and Men
about his response to reading some ancient books and the attitudes to wolves they reveal.

And I came away from the valley of the Wolf River with the same kind of feeling. It’s not the sense of the wolf that you bring away with you, but a sense of the storytellers, huddled round
a winter fire, swilling firewater cider, making mischief with a beast of which they know nothing, nothing beyond the old stories they heard from their parents, their grandparents, wisps from the
mists of time. They have their whisky-drinking counterparts too in far Strathglass, with their particular local invention of the stalwart hunter hanging onto the tail of the enraged she-wolf
hell-bent on ripping the throat from the cub-slaying hunter inside her den; in Waternish on Skye, in the strath of the Findhorn River where a hunter built suspiciously like Scotland’s most
durable warrior hero single-handedly killed the huge black wolf that had devoured two children as they crossed the winter hills with their mother. But alas for the storytellers, there were no black
wolves in Europe.

Mr and Mrs Wolf
part two lived up to all my forebodings. Two hours of thoughtful prime-time television devoted to wolves could have made inroads into centuries-old
prejudice. But two hours of tabloid prime-time television that preyed on its perception of the sensibilities of a Channel Five audience, replete with subliminal graphics of wolf teeth in close-up
on a blood-red background, might just have set back by decades the cause of public approval of wolf reintroduction. Even now, even in the twenty-first century while wolves are steadily reclaiming
old haunts in western Europe, while the European Union’s Species and Habitats Directive prods its member governments into recognition of their responsibilities in the matter of restoring
indigenous wildlife species where they have been lost, while Yellowstone’s reintroduction programme blazes a trail of enlightenment whose benefits are so self-evident and so well documented
that they dazzle with potential . . . even as that kind of headway is being made on both sides of the Atlantic, British television’s contribution is
Mr and Mrs Wolf
, two programmes not
about wolves at all, but about a couple filmed in such a way as to leave an impression of two eccentric people doing something absurdly dangerous in the company of ferocious creatures. Every wolf
stereotype was dropped in, not by Shaun Ellis and Helen Jeffs, but by the programme’s anonymous voice-over. Oh, the female wolf Cheyenne had her pups (a difficult birth in which the fifth pup
became stuck in her birth canal, so that a vet had to be brought in, she had to be darted with a gun, operated on, and paraded in front of the cameras again still suffering from the after-effects
of the ordeal and the anaesthetic) and she did eventually bring them out to the two human pack members, and there is no denying that was extraordinarily affecting, and Shaun Ellis told the camera:
‘We’ve all just been witness to the miracle that is the wolf.’

No. The miracle that is the wolf is elsewhere, living on the move, ranging over hundreds of square miles, doing nature’s bidding, mixing it with bears, lynx, elk, eagle, and the other
fellow-travellers of a northern wilderness, shaping the very ecosystem in which it lives, feeding thousands of mouths, creating opportunities for dozens of other species of mammals, birds, insects,
plants, and making people aware of the debt we owe to nature in that far wolf country where people and wolves and wilderness still rub shoulders, and where nature makes the rules of engagement. For
centuries we have taken from nature, and for the first time in our own evolution we are aware of the worth of conservation and we have all the information we need to restore much of that which we
have taken. The wolf is the supreme agent to effect that kind of change. That is the miracle that is the wolf.

Shaun Ellis said in the first of the two programmes, ‘To help and understand a creature you have to walk the same path.’

Yes, but that is no wolf path his programmes walked.

He also urged his girlfriend: ‘Don’t think like a human – think like a wolf.’

But that is simply impossible. A wolf thinks like a wolf every minute of every day and night. The human mind can learn something of wolf behaviour and think that it understands why a wolf
behaves in a particular way in particular circumstances, but it is a human appreciation of what the wolf thinks, not a wolf’s appreciation. The very instruction, ‘Don’t think like
a human, think like a wolf,’ is a human thought. And the moment the two human beings start talking to each other again, they cease thinking the way they think wolves think. The wolf never
stops thinking like a wolf.

In my own work with swans, which includes watching the same Highland mute swan territory over thirty years, I convinced myself of only one thing with absolute certainty – that I do not
think like a swan. And if you did ever learn to think like a wolf, you would not limit it with a fence, for that is the opposite of the way a wolf thinks, nor would you impose on the pack an alien
species, for it makes no more biological sense to ask a wolf to interact with a human being as a member of its pack than with an elephant, a kangaroo, a troupe of screaming monkeys or a fake
dinosaur.

And yet Shaun Ellis has something remarkable to offer as an evangelist for the wolf. It is undeniable that he has gained insights that could prove invaluable in a genuine wolf reintroduction
programme. There again, a genuine wolf reintroduction programme would not involve captive wolves but wild ones brought in from European landscapes similar to our own, landscapes where the
wolf’s principal prey is deer, for it is by manipulating the deer herds that the wild wolf can begin to transform bare Highland glens and restore to them the diversity of life that belongs
there. But if I had something to do with such a project, I would like to have someone on my team who could speak the lost wolf language.

TREES REMEMBER WOLVES. The oldest pines, the three-and-four-hundred-year-olds, know the brush of wolf fur, the soft, deep slap of their footfall on the forest floor. They
hand down the sense of wolves to the wolfless generations of young trees, and these grow older remembering the sense of wolves so that they are ready for the wolves’ return, which they know
to be inevitable. The oldest tree in the Black Wood of Rannoch is a Scots pine of massive dark strength. When its seed was sown (a casual conspiracy of parent tree and crossbill and wind) it was a
tree among many trees. Rannoch Moor undulates to far mountain walls at every compass point, an inland sea that breaks on mountain shores, but a sea of rock and heather and lochans and peat, of red
deer and red foxes, of wildcats, of grey crows and golden eagles, of summer skylarks and winter swans, of wind-weary grass and the buried bones of dead trees. Once it was wooded from shore to
shore. The Black Wood survives along the south shore of the moor. The old trees still remember the touch of wolf skin on tree skin, still long for it. Nothing else still living in the country of
Rannoch has that memory.

Beneath the oldest tree, the land is hollow. There is a difficult way in among rocks to a small cave whose entrance is hidden. It is roofed and buttressed by the tree’s roots, walled by
rock, floored by cool, dry earth. The tree’s grandmother was young – perhaps 50 years old – when a singular wolf first appeared there. She came down to the cave on a pale-green,
stone-still morning of late April. She had been travelling all night, encouraged by a full moon. Just like the people, she marked time by the place of the sun and the stars in her sky, by the shape
and brightness of the moon. The roundest moon was the best for hunting and travelling, the blackest, moonless, starless night was the worst, but sometimes better than daylight.

The people made a story: the wolf howls at the moon. No. The wolf is most active under the full moon because it assists travelling. And it howls most when it is most active. But it never
howls when it hunts. And it has no reason to howl at the moon.

See her face in the rocks! Ah, but you can’t, can you? What you need to see her face in the rocks is a race memory you can tap into that spans hundreds of years. Wolves have the
required memory, for they move in the ageless pageant of all wolves. And the tree has known the face in the rocks all its life, knows it for what it is, because trees remember wolves.

Her face? Well, her eyes are pale gold, and small for the size of the face, and set in jet black ovals that thicken towards their inner edges and leak a jet black tear on each side of the
muzzle. Each eye is also set in a wider circle of tan and dark grey fur and these reach up into her forehead which is mostly black but defined below her ears with a narrow echo of the same tan. Her
ears are short and erect and forward-facing and rimmed in black, and the short fur there is tan and grey and white, and black again at the centre. Her muzzle is the deepest shade of tan on top, but
abruptly white and pale grey on the sides and round her mouth. Her nose is small and black. She wears a ruff of bright white rimmed with dark grey and black and tan. If you could see her you might
think her face beautiful.