The Last Wolf (23 page)

The rocks formed a corner from which the crumbled base of old walls emerged low and straight and at right angles. The bright grey of the rock showed here and there through many decades of
gathering moss and lichen: a house, another refuge of the Broken Men, the rowan deliberately planted to fend off malevolent forces, a forlorn hope on the edge of Rannoch Moor.

Then she tired of the rowan and a new mood took hold of her. She pranced on her hind legs a few paces, touched down lightly on her front paws and sprang into the air to land again on her hind
legs, a giddy dancing moment of play. She pawed at a butterfly, the first of that spring, then leapt to snap her jaws at it, but it swithered out of her reach. She stopped abruptly and looked round
to see if any watching eyes had noticed her antics, found none.

She turned uphill then and walked on, skirting the clearing, keeping to the lightly spaced trees around its edge. The trees, the fitful sunlight, their shadows, all broke up the travelling
shape of her into meaningless fragments, a shape that moved at the edge of things, a shadow among shadows, soundless as butterflies, defeating even eagle eyes.

She started to move west. She crossed the high ground of Cnoc Eoghainn and the glen beyond, skirted the conical hill of Leagag by the oakwoods of its northern slopes. Oakwood light is quite
different from pinewood light, especially in that tight-budded northern spring. The pines clothe the slopes in crowds of overlapping crowns like the feathers on furled eagle wings. But oaks insist
on their own space, clothe the slopes in far-flung branches like herds of stags. In winter and spring especially, sunlight lies on the floor of the oakwoods in dark-edged pools. She moved through
these pools and their shadowed edges and her grey and black and pale tan fur shone and then faded, shone and then faded, and she walked on, and then she left the oaks behind and was back in the
lightest of the pinewood again as the trees thinned, and then she began to catch the scents and the sense of the open moor itself.

She remembered the horse suddenly. She remembered its pale, grey-gold sturdiness, the sense of its ancient wildness that still beat as a second heart, for all that it did its rider’s
bidding. It had also been alert to her presence. She splashed into the tumbling waters of Gleann Duibhe, the Black Glen, the last westward gesture of the Black Wood before it succumbed to the big
winds that scoured the moor. She lay down in a shallow pool and lapped water and sunlight.

And then there was a darker memory. The shouts and stench of men, the high-pitched wail of the big hounds that stood taller than her by a head and ran like gusts of fast winds; the horses, a
row of advancing hooves blocking the natural line of escape. The wolves had scattered and turned, taking their chances with the hounds and the blades and clubs of the men. But she alone had run on
straight at the horses, ran straight for the hooves of the biggest horse, and even as its rider leaned at her with sword arm raised, the horse shied away from her, giving her space, and she went
through that space as a falcon moves through air. For horses work not just in partnership with people, but also with that loyalty to wildness that sustains wolves. Faced with the running wolf, the
horse adhered to that older, original loyalty.

So she had run through the horses and on into the deepest, darkest recesses of that Strathspey pine forest with no backward glance at the blood-letting of the hunt. The pack’s best
chance was to scatter widely and divide the hunt into fragments. But the hunt had chosen its time and place and strategy carefully, and turned out in force. The first encircling rush killed three,
and maimed two others. One more was pursued by three hounds, caught by the throat on the hillside and torn apart, but it killed one of the hounds in the process. Then the hunt reassembled and went
scouring the country for the possibility of survivors.

She had heard the hounds again, loud and closing. She came to a river. She jumped into a deep pool darkened by overhanging branches, and swam to a shallow ledge at its upstream edge. She
slithered onto that rocky bed and let the weight of the water press her into it, submerged her head and lay there with only the tilted tip of her muzzle above the water, breathing. She wanted to
gulp air, to pant, but stone stillness and ruthless, painful control of her breathing was her only chance to live. The water, the branches and the fluctuating light, broke up her shape, the water
killed her scent. So neither sight-hound nor scent-hound discerned her.

To be a shadow among shadows, to move at the edge of things, these were the things that gave her life meaning, and she was unusually accomplished at both. She alone survived the hunt. And
alone was how she travelled from Strathspey to Rannoch. And the memory of it all had resurfaced when she lay down full length in a shallow river pool by the edge of Rannoch Moor.

She shook off the memory of the hunt as she shook off the waters of the Abhainn Duibhe. She walked west until she had left the living trees behind, although there, out on the high, bright
edge of the Moor of Rannoch, she walked among the bleached bones of the corpses of trees that once shaded even the gaunt bareness of the Moor. She sat there for a sunset hour above herds of ambling
deer, watched the reddening sun blaze low over the heave and sprawl of the Moor, burnished by loch and lochan, grizzled by smashed rock in every imaginable form, defended by the blades and barbs of
its own wildness. She moved again in the dusk, still west, away from the memory of trees into a land as treeless as oceans. In another hour she walked side by side with her own moonshadow, with
nature at its most demanding and its most accommodating, for what was she but a mobile fragment of the one true wilderness where she walked?

I HAVE RETURNED to the high bright edge of Rannoch Moor. I have had it in my mind for a long time now that this is where to restore wolves to Scotland.

Why here?

In the first place it is wild, if not exactly wilderness. With the addition of wolves it could reincarnate as wilderness. They can do that. Rannoch Moor is more or less empty of people, and for
a while at least, it will be important that the wolves are not disturbed by people while they find their feet in the new territory, although I imagine they will recognise it at once as an old wolf
territory. Nor, I suppose, should people be disturbed by the wolves for a while, although that will change, and soon enough the people will come hundreds of miles for the remote prospect of seeing
and hearing wolves. I have heard it said again and again that you cannot reintroduce wolves without a widespread education programme, and maybe there is a certain amount that can be done to prepare
the ground, but in truth the only way to be educated about wolves is to allow them into our midst, to give them space and time, and to watch and learn from them. They owe us nothing, we owe them
everything. What we did to wolves would be called ethnic cleansing if we had done it to people.

In the second place, Rannoch Moor is high and wide-open, which means it has long, hard winters. Wolves are designed for long, hard winters and prosper while their prey species weaken. It simply
never gets too cold for a wolf.

In the third place it has food, specifically red deer. Studies in Europe and America have shown that if you reintroduce wolves from an area where their main prey species is deer or elk or moose
or buffalo, they bring that preference with them and it transfers down through subsequent generations. So we reintroduce European wolves accustomed to red deer, and having conspicuously failed in
recent years to reduce red deer populations to numbers that the land can sustain, we can watch how wolves do it.

In the fourth place, it is central. Out-on-a-limb wolf populations (especially reintroduced wolves) isolated on an island or in a coastal corner of the landscape are vulnerable to disease and
attacks from people; there will be some people who will resist the reintroduction – with wolves there always will be.

In the fifth place, I have an instinctive idea, quite unsubstantiated by any shred of evidence, that the last of our wolves died old and alone on Rannoch Moor. I have learned to trust such
instincts, the ones that have been honed by the long years of wandering the land and sitting still with the land and watching. In an earlier book,
Brother Nature
, I wrote about interviewing
the late Don MacCaskill, one time head forester of Strathyre Forest in Perthshire, an exceptional wildlife photographer and an enlightened naturalist. The occasion was a radio programme about
reintroducing lost mammals and the subject of the interview was the beaver:

The example of people like Don is relevant to the reintroduction of wolves. If he had been a tribesman in the Oglala Sioux, his belief endorsed by Black Elk, he would have been
a tribal legend. But he was born in Kilmartin, Argyll, and he worked for the Forestry Commission where his concerns for the natural environment at the expense of commercial expediency frequently
fell foul of the system. He had faith in his instincts and these were invariably informed by knowledge gleaned at nature’s beck and call. He raged against a proposal to plant the upper
reaches of a nearby glen where golden eagles nest, arguing that it would wreck a crucial part of the eagles’ hunting territory. He was overruled by headquarters, and eventually designed the
planting programme himself. A few years after his death, when it became clear that he had been right, the trees were removed.