The Last Wolf (15 page)

So she came down through the rocks and she was sure of her way, guided by the discernible path worn by uncounted years of wolves. She was not led there nor was she pointed there, and she had
never been there before, but she knew at once that it was a wolf place. And a wolf place does not stop being a wolf place just because the land runs out of wolves. For there is no such thing as the
last wolf, no end to the pageant of wolves.

She had the knowledge to find the way without faltering. The place had not changed, not stopped being suitable. She saw the face in the rocks that welcomed her: this is your place for as long
as you need it. The face is Nature in the guise of Wolf. It is her own face and it is the face of all the wolves of the pageant.

She came alone. She had travelled alone constantly for a year, but unlike many lone wolves she did not choose solitude. Rather she had survived alone the killing of her pack in Strathspey,
far to the north-east of Rannoch Moor. She had a lowly status in a pack of seven. The lower-ranking pack members are often acutely resourceful because they enjoy none of the privileges of rank and
eke out their livings from scraps and leftovers and a talent for compromise. When the hunters began killing, the pack had scattered, but six of the seven were tracked down relentlessly. She
survived, not by running but by lying on the bed of a shallow river, submerged all bar the tip of her nose. The water masked her scent and she was the colour and stillness of rocks. The hunting
hounds did not have her knowledge. No wolf taught her to lie that way, but the knowledge was in her.

Since then she had followed a ragged route south-west, searching for other wolves. She had found none. The old wolf places she knew were cold. Wherever she crossed or followed the paths of
her ancestors she sensed only their absence. Finally she reached the northernmost edge of the Moor of Rannoch, and although she had never seen it before, she knew what it was, that hope lay out
there among the rocky, peaty, watery, heathery waves of that moorland sea. She crossed it easily in a night, and came in among the first trees of the Black Wood. She homed in on a solitary pine
tree and saw at last the dark hint of the hollow beneath. She sidled deftly between two rocks, then leapt over a blockage – a third rock – and found the entrance. The chamber beyond
smelled cool and dry and woody. She paused and scented everything near and far. In the chamber there had been no wolf, no fox, no wildcat for a long time. She stepped at last deep into its shadow,
made a tight furred curve of herself, and pulled her tail across her muzzle. She sighed and closed her eyes on her solitude.

THE RADIO ASSIGNMENT that had taken me to Devon then took me to Norway, where wolves had reintroduced themselves to old heartlands more than a hundred years after a sustained
cull had wiped out their forebears. Norway’s wolves simply walked home. A pair crossed the border from Finland into the northmost corner of Norway, rounded the northern tip of Sweden, then
began the long march down through Norway to the valley of the Gluma river in the south of the country. To human eyes it is a formidable trek, the better part of a thousand miles. But travel is what
a wolf does best, and wolves seeking new territories have made distance-no-object journeys forever. Now Norway is home to four packs, which is the most the Norwegian government allows. If this
number were to be exceeded, I was told that they would take action to limit the number of packs to four, which is a polite way of saying they would initiate a cull, which is another polite way of
saying they would start killing wolves again. But thus far, Norway has mostly been an accommodating host to its homecoming wolves.

The radio project was to pursue an idea called
The Real Wolf
(as opposed to all the other kinds that fester in the darkest recesses of historical prejudice and vested human interest all
across the northern hemisphere), but somewhere in the back of my mind, the seed for this book was already sown and I was also looking for lessons – and truths – that I could bring to
bear on my native land, where Scots had raised historical prejudice to an art form for the masses. And there, for much of the twenty-first-century population, it remains.

So somewhere between Amsterdam and Oslo and at around 30,000 feet, the thought occurred to me that what Scotland needed was a border with Finland, thus side-stepping the apparently overwhelming
difficulties of government wolf policy (there is none) and public opinion (see above) that still fankle every prospect of a thoughtful reintroduction of the wolf to Highland Scotland. Alas for the
prospect of wolves reintroducing themselves to Scotland, the land bridge with Scandinavia fell into the North Sea some time ago, and a drifting Scotland bumped into England instead, and the English
disapproved of wolves even more than the Scots.

Time passes, tides turn. Scotland is reintroducing beavers, albeit with all the conviction of Canute at high tide. It may have taken 15 years of talking and false starts, but it is a beginning,
and for that matter, a precedent: a mammal has been reintroduced. But while I contemplate the prospects for wolf reintroduction, ahead lie the massed ranks of politicians in Europe, London and
Edinburgh, landowning intransigence, farmers large and small, mountaineers and mountain bikers and hill-runners and hillwalkers and tourists, and even some unimaginative conservationists, all
worried about being eaten, or worse, being half-eaten but left alive. The wolf will return despite them all, because that tide has turned, because the wolf has begun to drift from the margins of
conservation thinking towards the mainstream. But the pace of the reintroduction will not be swift. Meanwhile, I was looking for arguments and ammunition in a country where people were growing
accustomed to living alongside wolves again, and at least some of them considered it a privilege.

Driving north out of Oslo, the view quickly filled with mountains and trees, naturally occurring trees that grew to something like a naturally occurring treeline. I saw my first moose since
Alaska five years before, standing alone and dead-still among roadside trees, a dark ebony colour, looking like a sculpture of a moose or a caricature of itself until it turned its moose-head to
follow the car’s progress. The broad beauty of the Gluma kept us company.

We stayed in a farmhouse on its east bank, built in 1797, dark timber with a turf roof from which birch saplings and other self-sown plant life sprang. They shaved it every now and then, but the
roots bound the roof together and helped to anchor it. There were otter and beaver prints in the riverbank mud nearby, and a pair of sandpipers in the garden. It was called Langodden, the long bend
in the river, which describes its situation perfectly. It belonged to Grete and Hakon Langodden who lived next door, and who took their surname from the place where they lived. They and their son
and their grand-daughter were the only four people in Norway with that name.

I warmed to them at once, warmed to their determined lifelong attachment to their place on the map. I fell in love with Norway at once and, I suspect, forever. And somewhere out there in that
endless, north-making sprawl of mountain and forest, there were wolves. I was not naïve enough to believe that I could step off a plane, wander off into the forest and watch wolves in the
handful of days at my disposal, but at the very least, I wanted to come away with the
sense
of them in their landscape, a landscape to which they had returned voluntarily after a hundred
years of absence. If I could see how it worked here, I could see how it might work back across the North Sea. One of the joys of occasionally working with an organisation like the BBC’s
Natural History Unit is the preliminary research that underpins a project like this, so that I, as the writer and presenter of the programme, arrive in the right place at the right time to meet the
right people. So the door of the 200-year-old farmhouse of Langodden opened, a voice called out a greeting, and I rose from the kitchen table to meet Bjorn and Gaire.

Bjorn and Gaire were the wildlife film-makers whose wolf programme, eight years in the making, had just aired on Norwegian television. Gaire would be the source of the walking story about the
naked man and the ‘concert from wolves at 200 metres’. Their passion not just for wolves, but for allowing them to behave like wolves unmolested by science’s determination to
follow their every movement with laptops and radio collars and spotter planes, was as blatant as it was infectious, and it was vehemently declared before we had finished our first cup of coffee. It
was expressed in ever-so-slightly fractured English and with good humour, so that we all laughed as much as I marvelled at the slowly unfurling life of the wild wolf.

‘So,’ I said, as we got ready to explore the territory of the Koppang wolf pack, ‘we have an area of about 1,000 square miles of forest and mountains, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Three or four wolves, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it’s summer, which is the worst possible time of year to try and find them, right?

‘Yes.’

‘Realistically, what are our chances of getting close to wild wolves?’

‘Well . . . maybe if we are lucky we can have a smell.’

And we piled into Bjorn’s ancient Mercedes estate car and headed for the woods, laughing. Two hours later, we pulled off the road high above a wide-bottomed valley and overlooking a small
lake where the unmistakable profile – and voice – of a great northern diver cruised the steely-blue water. If there is one sound that might be said to rival the rising howl of a wolf as
the totemic voice of wild northern places, it is surely the down-curving cry of the loon. That voice rose towards us and I thought I heard wolf kinship there. Bjorn was saying that of all the packs
in Scandinavia and all their territories, this was the place with the best chance of seeing wolves. But that’s in winter, of course, when you can track them in the snow, when they use the
rivers and the lakes as highways, when it can never get too cold for wolves, when the prey of the wolves is at its most vulnerable and grows steadily weaker as winter deepens while the wolves only
grow stronger. Besides, the film-makers use many eyes. They have a network of friends and contacts all across this part of Norway who report wolf sightings. One of them had called that morning to
Bjorn’s car phone with a sighting three days before. Should we go, I wondered.

‘Three days – could be a hundred miles away by now.’

For all that wolves love to travel, they also have favourite places within their territory and this is one of them. We broke out the coffee and something to eat and settled to watch for a while,
and Gaire, the quieter of the pair, and less confident with his English, began to paint wolf pictures:

‘Two winters ago, I was watching seven wolves here. First thing I saw was a roe deer. Then I saw some other dark patches, and thought it was just places where the sun has taken the snow
away. But then I saw these things begin to lie on their backs and I thought, “This is wolves.” First, three wolves, then I saw four more a little further out, and it was wolf tracks in
the snow all over that big area. It was . . .’ he paused, searching for the right image, ‘like playing a football match!’

‘Liverpool versus Man U,’ said Bjorn.

So I told them there was an English football team called Wolves, thinking this would be news to them.

‘Oh yes,’ said Bjorn. ‘Wolverhampton Wanderers. They play in Division One now, I think. They were my favourites when I was a boy.’

‘They play in yellow and black,’ said Gaire.

It was not what I had expected to be discussing in Norway’s wolf-wilderness. Gaire resumed his picture painting, complete with sound effects.

‘Another time, I heard the cubs at one in the morning.’

And he demonstrated the high-pitched babbling of the cubs.

‘Then the answer from the alpha male, two kilometres away.’

And as he mimicked the deep wolf voice rising then falling again in unpredictable bluesy slides and intervals, against that backdrop of the rise and fall of the valley, the lake, river, woods,
clearings, fold after fold of forested hills yielding at last to 6,000-feet mountains, something danced between my shoulder blades. And suddenly the wolf was changing in my mind. The two Norwegians
were beginning to show me a creature going about its everyday business, small in a huge landscape. The captive wolves in Devon, where the radio project had begun, were too large in a landscape too
small. It was a head-spinning moment, and head-spinning moments had been missing in Devon.

‘I heard it, then silent a long time, then it started again . . . ’

I asked him what that sound meant to him. He sighed, thought about it for a few moments, then he said this:

‘You sit there in the winter time, waiting, hoping that something will happen. You freeze a little. You take a little cup of tea. And you’re looking. And looking. At trees full of
snow. Nothing happens. Maybe you hear a little bird. And then you hear this noise. Starting very low, and you’re thinking, ‘Where is it? Where is it? You know? You can feel how your
whole body is looking for where this wolf is. It’s a very special feeling. It’s the voice of the wild.’

Bjorn said: ‘And it’s strong, very strong-loud.’

Gaire said: ‘Yes, and this voice, you bring it with you in the body, for many, many, many days.’

That silenced us all, and in that silence I wondered what he was getting at. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand him, it was just that I wondered where he went in his head when the
voice of a wolf, which he must have heard many, many, many times, lingered deep within him these many, many, many days.