The Last Wolf (21 page)

There is a theory of mine at work here. It is that whenever I have reached a vantage point of any description in wild country without disturbing anything on the way, and if I have been more or
less still and more or less silent for quite a while, then that time spent being still and silent is an investment that gathers interest as it lengthens, because I have succeeded in becoming a
fragment of the landscape, and it is in that guise that nature is most inclined to come to me, to see what I’m up to. If you have the capacity for stillness that is willing to sacrifice most
things for the reward of having nature come to you (I do – I take no credit it for it, but it is in me, perhaps a throwback inheritance from God knows what ancient member of the tribe), then
sooner or later a mountaintop, for example, is likely to grow generous with its secrets.

Sit.

Be still.

Attune.

Let time pass.

Live for this moment alone in the very now where you find yourself, and if the mountain lays bare one of its secrets, be ready.

A noise over my left shoulder.

Damn.

I don’t want noises. Mountaintop noises usually mean other people. I don’t want other people, not here, not now. The noise again, a small scuffle, a throaty croak like a frog, but
not a frog, not at 3,000 feet in July.

Of course! I know that croak.

I turned my head left, inch by inch, until the croaking one came into view, a cock ptarmigan, ten yards away, walking towards me. I neither saw nor heard the flight or the landing. How far did
he walk to get here?

He advanced, turned left, walked towards the edge, stopped a foot away from where the mountain ended and the gulf of blue air began, and still ten yards away from me.

Then he sat.

Now I could watch him without straining over my shoulder. I saw him close his eyes briefly, a long, slow, sunlit blink. He had become what I hope for myself in this situation, a fragment of the
landscape. He was a small rock. I usually aim to be a small boulder. I remembered Margiad Evans, an English nature writer, as I so often do in circumstances like these.

I took the sentiment to heart years ago as a kind of gospel. It taught me, among other things, to pack a notebook and pencil and sharpener (pencil doesn’t blot in the rain) in the top of
my rucksack so that whenever I stop it comes out first and is ready. So I tried to write him down there and then while he sat and blinked his slow, sunlit blink, reminding myself of advice handed
down by an American teacher of writing, Donald M. Murray – ‘Never be embarrassed by crap first drafts.’

I read it back: ‘ . . .
the wolf shades . . .
’

The ptarmigan’s genius, like the wolf’s, is to remain unseen until it declares itself, the ptarmigan to outwit its predators, the wolf to outwit its prey. Many, many times, in the
north of the world, a wolf walks the high, stony places like this one where ptarmigan nest. The sitting bird can fly, of course, if she sees or hears the wolf coming, but that betrays the nest. She
knows the wolf’s way, because their tribes have evolved together for uncounted millennia. She knows the wolf knows she is there, or at least she knows she cannot rely on the wolf failing to
notice her rock-stillness for what it is. But she knows too that the wolf often declines easy prey if that prey opts for stillness. It’s as true for her as it is for the deer, the elk, the
caribou, the moose, the buffalo . . . the big beasts all across the northern hemisphere that will sustain the whole wolf pack for days. The one with the courage to stand and face the wolf usually
lives to tell the tale. It’s almost as if stillness baffles the wolf, as if it’s not in nature’s script. The wolf likes its prey on the move.

So I wonder about that ptarmigan whose high-mountain terrain I shared for a few minutes, now that we are both natives of a wolf-less land; that ptarmigan that walked to within a few yards of me
then sat and drowsed for ten minutes, my presence either unrecognised for what it was or undetected. And what I wonder is this: has the absence of the wolf these last 200-or-so years blunted the
land-wariness of a creature like this whose principal predator now in a wolf-less landscape is the golden eagle? Out-of-control hillwalkers’ dogs and the occasional forays of the hill fox up
onto the high ground doubtless take a small toll (and neither of these have scruples about stillness), but the presence of the wolf is as a sharpening tool for the vigilance of all its prey species
and all its fellow travellers. Does its long absence from its old territories, therefore, blunt that old vigilance? Do the prey species un-evolve to something less than their full potential?

Far down the mountain I saw white movement. In that light, even at a distance of over a mile, the tiny whiteness was a vivid intrusion on the natural order of the day. No
ptarmigan would have sat beside such a shade. I put the binoculars on it, and it proved to be a white teeshirt with someone inside it, one of a small group of less conspicuous hillwalkers who had
just turned uphill from Glen Ample into Coire Fuadaraich. Every eye on the mountain would see that shirt.

In all the time that I had been sitting high on the mountain I had not lifted the binoculars until that moment. I had not, for example, scoured the
bealach
or the corries on either side
of it for signs of life – Coire Fuadaraich to the north-west, the Dubh Chorein to the south-east. I had been content with lunch, with the warm mountain stillness, with the random nature of my
thoughts, with writing down the ptarmigan. Now, as I lowered the glasses and let my eyes wander over the lower slopes, the floor of the corrie began to move.

My first reaction was that such movement could only be achieved by a trick of the light infused by the heat haze, a kind of mirage. My second was to discount the first and focus the binoculars.
All across the steeply-sloping floor of Coire Fuadaraich, hundreds of red deer were getting to their feet. There is no question in my mind that they had been disturbed by the white teeshirt. For as
long as they had held their nerve, their heat-of-the-day stillness had served them well, so that even the herd’s huge presence lay as undetected as a rock-still ptarmigan. But now they were
restlessly on their feet, and unease went through the herd as an upstart breeze troubles the surface of a still pool. And for those few moments when that unease sought purpose and direction, their
chaos of small movements was as eye-catching as a white teeshirt. Then the herd galvanised itself, all indecision done, purpose and direction determined. It chose flight and it chose to climb.

The corrie is tall and narrow. At its base was the source of unease and the deer sought distance from it, which meant not only the steep climb up to the
bealach
, but also a steadily
narrowing climb. The highest deer turned to face uphill and began. The others, as widely scattered below them as the corrie allowed, crammed together behind them so that the whole mass of deer
formed the shape of an inverted funnel that poured uphill. The lowest, furthest deer were almost stationary, but they had formed up like an army, waiting, while the first wave began to climb at the
double.

The higher they climbed, the narrower and steeper the terrain, so the first wave grew slimmer and those compelled to fall back from its edges formed up immediately behind the leaders and the
herd massing below made way for them, all of this forming and reforming at a steep uphill gallop. Then I heard them.

I sat directly above the
bealach
. That downward view now filled with a stampeding river of deer that flowed uphill. And as it flowed and the frontrunners strained up the last steep slopes
below the
bealach
, it thundered. I had never heard such a sound before. It rose on thermals of warm air like distant muted drumming, hundreds of drums. I guessed five hundred head of deer,
two thousand hooves, two thousand drums. Their sound gathered and rose, a ragged concerto of drumming that climbed the mountain by its airspace, that seemed to arrive in my ears by way of my spine,
so that I felt myself straighten my back in response.

The herd changed colour as it climbed. Far down in the corrie where the back markers had only just begun to jostle uphill, the bright flood of haze painted an orangey-yellow layer across their
summer-red backs and flanks, and in the growing heat, their hides shone. But up at the head of the corrie where the walls of the two mountains leaned closest and the air was bluer and patched with
broken shadow, the deer darkened to woodier shades.

The front of the column reached the
bealach
and crossed it no more than five abreast. I wondered if they might pause there to reassess the threat of the white teeshirt, but the momentum
of the massed ranks at their back was irresistible, and they charged across the level ground headlong down into the Dubh Chorein without breaking stride. And as they crossed and the hordes
followed, the thunder of hooves climbed not just the airspace but throbbed up through the very rock of the mountain, and because I sat on the mountain’s uppermost rocks, through me too, and I
shivered at its thrill.

As the front third raced downhill, the middle third hit the
bealach,
and the final third charged up through the narrows, the whole stretched out herd took on the air of a single creature
with a pliable spine, a colossal snake, say, but a snake that thundered as it slithered. Then the last of them was over the
bealach
and not one paused to look back, and the sound dwindled
away and the sun lit the backs of the last few, and the sound of them was replaced by the scent of them, for that too had climbed the airspace on the thermals and lay as a cloud about the summit
rocks. Then silence rushed in and two hillwalkers appeared by the summit cairn. One waved and pointed, and called out, ‘Did you see the deer?’

I waved back and smiled and nodded, but the thing was done and no words came. The walkers headed off for the further cairn along the mountain’s short summit ridge. I picked up my notebook
and pencil and wrote down the first words that came into my head, even though they were not my words:

High up on Suilven or high up on Ben Vorlich, it is surely one of the great truths of all good, true and loving earth writing.

The white teeshirt and its muted companions did not climb the mountain. Their expedition seemed to stall when they mobilised the deer. When I finally left the high ground I saw them retreating
far down the glen, the unwitting originators of what I still consider to be one of the more extraordinary hours of my life. Whatever they may have seen and heard from below, it was surely beyond
their comprehension to envisage how the flight of the deer herd looked and sounded and smelled from above.

I will remember it forever.

A little while after the event, I made an interesting discovery about the corrie. Fuadaraich – it is a very unusual name. Many corries have simple names that recur all across the landscape
– Gaelic words meaning rough, for example, or rocky, or a particular colour, or a species of tree, or a place where deer calve, that kind of thing, practical names that describe the landscape
perfectly. But I never came across another Coire Fuadaraich. One day I went in search of its meaning. I am no Gaelic scholar, and I have that little learning of the language that is a dangerous
thing. But it has named most of my preferred landscapes and so it intrigues me. And although I have found no reference to the precise spelling of
fuadaraich
, Gaelic spelling on OS maps made
in Southampton was ever an inexact science. In fact the spelling of all written Gaelic of a certain age is alarmingly flexible.
Fuadaraich
is close enough to
fuaraich
to be worth
considering, and
fuaraich
is a verb meaning to cool or to become cool, and
fuarachadh
(the same sound with the addition of an inconsequential final ‘uh’ syllable) is a
noun meaning the act of cooling, relief from heat. And I thought then how in the heat of that early afternoon all the deer were lying down in a corrie named for the act of cooling, of relief from
heat, and it could not fit the circumstances more perfectly.