The Last Wolf (4 page)

So I came in low light to the hillside above Trumpan. Bearing in mind that Seton Gordon had said that the wolf traps were ‘now almost filled in, but their shape can be seen at a
glance’, and bearing in mind that was 80 or 90 years ago and finding anything would be the most outrageous fluke, I then stumbled across an outrageous fluke. There was . . . something . . .
on the hillside, a faint depression, a rectangle that ran parallel to the slope of the hill as he had described but both shorter and wider than his measurements, and looking in all honesty like
nothing at all. And if I had gone there without reading Seton Gordon’s book I would not have given it a second glance, or even a first one . . . except that there was another, fainter but
similar depression nearby.

It was all but dark by now, and I needed the last of the light to get down to the road so that I could walk back to my temporary accommodation without getting lost. Besides, there seemed no
point in lingering. There was nothing to look at other than two more or less discernible rectangles on the surface of the moor, and these could have been anything or nothing, or, tottering on the
edge of improbability, they could have been wolf traps four hundred years ago.

I would go back some time later to look at them in good light. I would scour that same patch of hillside for an hour and I would find nothing at all, no hint that they had ever been. And such is
the elusive nature of the wolf in the pages of our history; such is the elusive nature of the wolf wherever he still lives on the face of the earth, sometimes a shadow moving at the edge of things,
sometimes nothing at all.

THERE CAN BE no reliable history of the wolf. Histories, after all, are only ever written by people, and there is no species less qualified and less entitled than yours and mine
to write that particular history. Our relationship with the wolf has lurched between reverence and revulsion depending on time and geography and religion and a few other variables and human
failings less easy to pin down, and it is shot through with the most profound misunderstanding and questionable behaviour. For example: when the Pleistocene was in its pomp, sometime between 1.8
million and 10,000 years ago, and the wolf was the most widespread mammal in the northern hemisphere, it also became the first mammal we ever domesticated, long before we were tempted by either
cattle or horses. That fact alone must mean that the wolf had qualities that impressed those distant ancestors. You don’t invite a monster into your home. All our dogs are descended from that
one source, fashioned to our specific needs by selective breeding, so ‘all our dogs’ must include the wolfhounds we eventually learned to breed specifically to kill wolves.

What happened? How did we progress from a relationship with wolves that had admiration at its core to one in which we have marshalled all the forces of human ingenuity to indulge an unslakeable
thirst for killing wolves? That obsession’s most gruesome manifestation is also the most recent – shooting them from aircraft. So what follows must be an unreliable history, which is
the only kind I am qualified to write.

People have exaggerated everything about wolves forever, but especially their size. The presumption is that they are hefty and huge, and they are neither. The average weight of a mature European
wolf is around 85lbs, slightly more than in North America. The largest animals will weigh over 100lbs, but very rarely over 120. (One famous Alaskan wolf killed in 1939 weighed 175lbs, but that was
a creature rarer than a seven-foot-tall human. Nevertheless, many people who read that single statistic will tell you for the rest of their lives that wolves weigh 175lbs, and I have met others who
will round it up to 200lbs if only because it confirms our age-old misconception.) The average size from nose to tip of tail is around five-and-a-half feet, occasionally as long as six feet, the
height at the shoulder around 30 inches. Most people’s reaction to their first sight of a wolf is that it is smaller than they imagined, its legs are longer, and its feet are huge. First
responses almost never mention teeth.

The grey wolf,
canis lupus
, evolved out of sundry North American ancestors early in the Pleistocene, and established itself in Russia and Northern Europe by way of a land bridge left high
and dry by falling sea levels where the Bering Strait now separates Alaska and Siberia. That land bridge was fundamental to the wolf’s story, for it evolved into rich grassland, and it
tempted some of the teeming, wandering herds of the North American plains and forests to travel into the vast Eurasian landmass beyond. Among other things, Eurasia acquired the horse that way.

Predators followed the herds, especially a great traveller like the wolf. This spectacular era of plenty prompted the wolf to expand its ambitions and its horizons, colonising the Arctic
fringes, mountains, and even deserts as it travelled. But eras of plenty are notoriously finite, and that one ended with a prolonged climate upheaval we now call the Wisconsin period, 8,000 years
of colossal natural turmoil. Many species vanished from the earth, and incredible as it sounds now, the horse vanished from North America, although because it had crossed the land bridge into
Europe, it could – and did – eventually wander back again by the same route.

The Wisconsin period ended with the end of the last ice age, and two species in particular emerged from it in positions of strength by virtue of their adaptability and resourcefulness.
Canis
lupus
was one, and
Homo sapiens
was the other. When the one had first become aware of the other, both species were hunters, and the wolf was rather better at it. Wherever in the world a
thoughtful relationship between man and wolf still remains, there is ample evidence – carved, painted, written and word-of-mouth – of an ancient and inherited respect for the wolf as a
teacher. It is one of the great ironies of the evolution of our species that long before we began to think in terms of exterminating the wolf we spent a great many centuries learning to be more
wolf-like, learning not just how to hunt more efficiently but also how to live better lives, by inclining towards a society based on the family unit that was both independent and interdependent,
but also permitted the wanderers, the loners, the ones that never quite fitted in with the family structure. Today we are still apt to refer to such people as ‘a bit of a lone wolf’,
and that may be truer than we think; it may be all that has survived from that ancient era when our forefathers watched the wolf and saw a role model there.

The change began when we started to consider the possibilities of a settled rather than a nomadic existence. The moment that we thought of harnessing sheep, cattle and horses to do our bidding
was surely preceded by the moment we realised we could shape the world around us at our bidding too. Perhaps it began when someone saw a great tree felled by a storm, and began to wonder how to
fell many trees. Perhaps it was lightning that felled the great tree and someone began to wonder how to make lightning to fell trees, and stumbled on the notion of using fire as a tool. With fire
at his disposal, man learned that he could make meadows where he wanted them to be rather than where he came across them, and instead of wandering from place to place, he could corral his animals
into one place, and that would be the place where he lived. And that was the place where the wolf he had so long admired became his sworn enemy, because in the eyes of the wolf a gathering of
animals in one place was where it hunted, and in the eyes of the man, the gathering of animals in one place had suddenly become his livelihood and the wolf had suddenly become a threat to it.

The changed relationship did not happen everywhere and it did not happen all at once, but it seeped like a slow tide through Europe and Russia, and in time it would be carried by white settlers
to the New World. By then, of course, religion in general and Christianity in particular had transformed our ideas about our relationship with the natural world. Suddenly a jealous God had given us
dominion over all the other creatures. Suddenly the Son of God was the Good Shepherd who gave his life for the flock, and everyone knew that the flock’s number one enemy was the wolf. So if
Christ was the Good Shepherd, the wolf was demonised as the agent of the Devil. An illustration in the
Book of Kells
shows a wolf with the Devil’s tail instead of a wolf tail, a
character assassination worthy of Gerald Scarfe. Christianity has always made exceptions in its doctrine of compassion and turning the other cheek.

The further back you go, you find religious ideas that were deeper and deeper embedded in the natural world. The very seasons of the year were marked by rituals. The harvest thanksgiving is
perhaps the oldest religious idea in the mind of settled man. All that has changed is the recipient of the thanks. But it was the notion of a ‘spirit’ that marked the beginnings of his
religious journeys, and that was one he extended to the animals. In the earliest hunting cultures, man felt the need to appease the spirit world. Deer, elk, reindeer, buffalo, bison, beaver, bear,
boar, salmon . . . whatever the quarry, they all had spirits, and the hunter implored them for a kind of forgiveness before he hunted. The most potent spirits like raven, eagle, wolf, whale, had a
power to influence the lives of people we can only guess at now, but you find echoes of them in the literature and the folklore of, for example, the Native American tribes, Inuit people from Alaska
to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, and many European races from the reindeer-herding Laplanders in the north to the ancient Greeks in the south. However and wherever and whatever you hunted,
when you hunted for a living you worked with a mindset that was common to much of the northern hemisphere of the world. You invoked the protection of the spirits of the animal world and you
employed animal cunning, animal techniques, animal strategies, for you were animal yourself and you saw some animals as your equal. But you saw the wolf as a teacher.

You hunted wolves too, not to eat them but to wear them. I met a man in Alaska who ran a dog-sled business. He showed me the parkas and mitts he wore and provided for his clients. The hood trim
and the mitts were wolf skin. I asked why that was necessary, given that there were so many man-made alternatives today. Yes, he agreed, and as one who admired wolves he had tried them all.

‘But nothing else gets close to wolf skin,’ he said. ‘It’s why wolves wear it.’

He said he had never yet met a new client who was indifferent to the fact that they had just learned they would be wearing wolf skin on their sled-dog trips.

‘Many of them are hunters and already have their own, but if they don’t they mostly leave here swearing they’re going to buy it. And it’s not just about the overwhelming
efficiency of wolf skin as a material. They appear to feel something else, a connection. They don’t all own up to it, and those that do can’t always articulate it, and it always takes
them by surprise.’

What they are giving voice to is something very, very old. Hunters in many ancient northern cultures disguised themselves in wolf skins, sometimes a complete skin, sometimes a cape with the wolf
head for a hood, and they believed they borrowed from the wolf when they wore it. It is a short step from that to the elevated mythological status of the wolf in countless rituals of fertility and
death, and another short step from that to the place of the wolf in the hierarchy of the Gods (Apollo’s mother appeared as a wolf, Odin’s reign was ended by a wolf), and from that to
the idea of the hunter who parts with his soul in exchange for extraordinary powers, wolf-like powers for example.

That way lies the extreme perversion of werewolves that haunted Europe in the Middle Ages, a cult that believed that a sacrificed human would wander the world as a wild beast. The lone wolf had
become something very sinister indeed.

Nothing captures the spirit of that era more succinctly than the story of Red Riding Hood, surely the world’s most famous blackening of the wolf’s character, a story that has
probably never been out of print since it was first written down in France in the late seventeenth century, but which is much older than that. The hooded cape was a symbol of witchcraft, and
wolf-worship sects were just one more unhealthy product of the age. Red Riding Hood’s origins may lie in a conflict between two occult sects that didn’t get on, one male and one female.
The story lives on as a salutary warning to children not to engage with strangers, but draws no moral from the idea that the child is incapable of telling the difference between her grandmother and
a wolf wearing a bonnet. I blame the parents. But then logic has never played a very prominent part in our relationship with the wolf.

As a Scottish nature writer living and working in my native land, I am surrounded by landscapes that are famed around the world for their beauty, but which are, nevertheless, impoverished by the
fact that they have been wolf-less for at least 200 years. I am surrounded too by the fall-out from 2,000 demonising years – dense and all-but-impenetrable thickets of superstition,
ignorance, accidental and deliberate disinformation and downright lies, all of it designed to keep the wolf where it belongs – in other people’s countries. The unreliable history of
wolves is nowhere more unreliable than on my own doorstep.

At the heart of it is the idea much promulgated in several centuries of literature that Scotland was a place made fearful by impassable forests populated by all manner of ferocious creatures so
that the few travellers moved through the country in fear of their lives. And what they feared most, of course, was the wolf. Those early writers would have us believe that the forests were overrun
with wolves.