The Last Wolf (5 page)

Shelters called spittals were built here and there in the Highlands as refuges for travellers. One historic source suggests apertures were let into the walls so that the traveller could spy the
land for wolves. They were called loup-holes and from them the language acquired a new word, loophole, a means of evasion. That part at least could be true. The rest is a grotesque blanket of gross
exaggeration draped over a handful of grains of truth.

Yes, there were some extensive natural forests, but Scotland never grew ‘impassable’ forests. The Scots pine was the dominant tree in most of those forests, and by its very nature it
creates spacious forests. Yes, there were wolves, and certainly until Christianity became widespread perhaps a thousand years ago and medieval kings established hunting parks in both Scotland and
England, conditions were more or less perfect for them. There were many red deer, and these are forest animals at heart and were only banished to the open hills by the Victorians. The forest red
deer is perhaps a third larger than the animals we see on bare Highland hills today, and it was the preferred prey species of Scotland’s wolves, and if we reintroduced the wolf today it still
would be. There were moose and reindeer too, and wild goats and wild boar. There were more predators too, including lynx and the European brown bear. And the people, of course, constantly refining
their weapons and their hunting strategies, as they do to this day.

Until the industrial revolution, much of Scotland’s human population lived on the land. Wealth was reckoned in cattle which they moved through the hills to the markets in the south, and
which one clan routinely stole from another and hid in quiet corries, and that too was very much to the wolf’s liking. So yes, the people suffered from the presence of the wolves, and
‘the wolf at the door’ was not a threat to the people inside the door but to their herds outside it, and therefore to the economic survival of the people. And so yes, there would have
been a time when more or less every available wolf territory was occupied and the howl of the wolf was a familiar anthem to the native humans. People who live with wolves now, and who are descended
from unbroken millennia of people who lived and evolved with wolves, will tell you of the power of that sound, especially when you cannot see the wolves that are howling (for the howl of a wolf can
travel five miles in still weather). Perhaps that is the root of the terror in the breast of Highland travellers in the days of wolf plenty: it was not that they were physically terrorised by the
wolves themselves, but rather what their imagination did with the raised voices of a wolf pack they never saw, quite possibly because it was five miles away. They would not know – and they
would not believe if they were told – that wolves hunt in silence, that howling is nothing more sinister than wolf-to-wolf communication.

The medieval period seemed to have been something of a watershed in the fortunes of the wolf. In Scotland and in England, kings formalised their love of hunting by creating royal parks inside
endless miles of fencing. Predators were eliminated inside the parks, and deer stocks decimated by over-hunting were topped up from elsewhere in the realm, and within a few generations the native
deer stock was almost obliterated. Yet there remained a stubborn Europe-wide belief among hunting kings that if they killed off the wolves the deer stocks would increase. Yes, but only if they
learned to moderate their hunting habits, which they never did.

Edward I of England took that philosophy to its illogical conclusion when in 1281 he commissioned hunters to eliminate the wolf from the land. His project was so ruthless and so efficient that
the wolf was gone within a decade. Without the perceived threat of the wolf in the wild places of England, hunting burgeoned as never before, and soon the roe deer was extinct.

From that day to this, land managers driven by self-interest and oblivious to the self-evident truths of conservation and bio-diversity have knee-jerked their way from one quick fix to the next.
In nineteenth-century Scandinavia, farmers decided to try and eliminate the elk so that there was less competition for their own grazing herds of cattle and sheep. But the elk was the wolf’s
main prey species, and in its absence they turned to the next best thing – the very sheep and cattle the farmers wanted to have all the grass. Thousands of peasants were dragooned into an
almost military operation to kill the wolves. So a chain reaction began, and within a generation it had wrecked an ecosystem that had evolved for millennia. In time, of course, they had to
reintroduce the elk and the wolf simply walked back when no-one was looking. In the twenty-first century, elk-hunters and sheep farmers want to drive out the wolf from parts of Scandanavia
again.

And in the Abruzzi mountains in Italy in the 1970s, wolf biologist Erik Zimen found that wolves were feeding off mountain villagers’ refuse at night. When he investigated the problem he
discovered that the local deer population had been exterminated by hunters, so he initiated a deer reintroduction programme and the wolves reverted to type and vanished from the village streets. He
had simply put back a missing link in the chain. But it seems the lesson still has to be learned again and again.

And yet, and yet, even throughout the many centuries of wolf persecution, even as they were being hunted to extinction in many regions of America and Europe, a passionate reverence for wolves
has co-existed alongside the loathing, almost exclusively among human enclaves where the relationship with wolves is ancient and unbroken. From the Indians of the great plains to the Inuit of
northmost America and Canada to the Laplanders of northmost Europe to the mountain villages of Mediterranean lands, wolves never lost their revered status at the heart of tribal society. They were
invoked in rituals of death, fertility, and hunting, admired for their strength, resilience, hunting skills, the social cohesion of the pack, the determined independence of the lone wolf. Nomadic
tribes saw themselves in the wolves’ endurance as tireless travellers. Inevitably, such an intimate relationship between man and beast produced extraordinary legend-making, none of it more
extraordinary than the phenomenon of ‘wolf children’. It is biologically impossible for wolves to suckle children, but the imagery is created out of a view of the wolf as a wholly
benevolent presence.

There is no more celebrated piece of pro-wolf propaganda in history than the story of Romulus and Remus. It was widespread 2,000 years ago throughout Mediterranean Europe, and the possibility
that it originated many centuries earlier on Crete rather than in Italy has done nothing to inhibit its durability or its fame as the founding myth of the Italian nation. Romulus and Remus were
twin brothers, the fruit of an unlikely union between Mars, who was the Roman god of war, and a princess variously called Ilia, Rhea, Silvia or Rhea Silvia. Mars, being a god with a 24/7 lifestyle,
seems to have abandoned his mistress to the role of single parent. This state of affairs left her vulnerable to the evil intentions of her uncle Amulius, who had the twins banished to the
wilderness where he was confident they would die a pitiable death. Unluckily for him, but luckily for legend-making, they sheltered in a cave where they were found by a she-wolf, who suckled them
and kept them alive, until a peasant called Faustulus stumbled across them and took them home. He and his wife Acca Larenia raised them as their own children. They obviously had enlightened
parenting skills, for Romulus went on to found the city of Rome, which he modestly named after himself, in the suspiciously precise year of 753
BC
.

Somewhere along the way the twins fell out. Whatever the source of the dispute, Romulus killed his brother. Perhaps Remus wanted Roma to be called Rema, who knows? But by then the twins’
fame and their apparent powers of persuasion had achieved reconciliation between the Romans and the neighbouring warmongering Sabines. The twins had become symbolic of the union of the two races
within Rome’s embrace, and at a stroke the wolf became the emblematic figurehead of the Roman Empire: it had, after all, nurtured the founder of Rome, and it had long been an object of
worship in the Sabines’ animist religion.

The survival of some tattered remnants of traditions born in the heyday of the Sabines may still explain the tolerance shown to the wolf even today along Europe’s Mediterranean edge. But
in the far north of Europe, human attitudes towards the wolf – and particularly those of the Laplanders – are shaped by the inevitable ambivalence that characterises a race of reindeer
herders who were also historically hunters. The Lapps, or Sammi, had developed a technique of chasing down wolves with broad skis on deep new snow across the open
field
, and those who did
not own guns had developed ski-sticks with a stabbing point, two more examples of the man’s ingenuity in his endless war on wolves. Erik Zimen’s 1981 book
The Wolf
reveals some
of the consequences in cold statistics:

I wonder about those numbers. As we will see, the nineteenth century was probably the nadir of the relationship between man and wolf, its propaganda the vilest, its contribution to wolf history
the most unreliable. It is all too easy to look at something 150 years old and treat it as wise simply because it is old. I have learned to treat every statistic I have seen about wolves with
outright hostility – guilty until proved innocent. Killing wolves at the rate of 500 a year in a country the size of Sweden sounds like an overestimate of around 450. It’s so easy to
slip an extra zero into the figures over 150 years. But the point is made: the wolf was systematically driven out of all but the wildest landscapes. New roads, aircraft, and the snowmobile with
what Zimen called ‘its ecologically devastating effects’ took new tolls even in deepest wilderness.

The Swedish nature conservation office conducted an inquiry into the distribution and numbers of the four big predators – the wolf, the lynx, the wolverine and the bear
– between 1960–64. They found that the wolf was gravely endangered. The few survivors travelled great distances, no doubt an adaptation to the perpetual hunting. The result of the
inquiry was public debate on whether the wolf should be protected. Surprisingly enough, many Laplanders came out on the wolf’s side. In spite of the traditional hostility to the wolf, they
must have felt respect and admiration for it.

But as long as there are wolves in reindeer areas, there are bound to be conflicts with the interest of the Laplanders, and revival of the wolf in this region therefore seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, the increasingly understanding and tolerant attitude of the Laplanders towards their hereditary enemy gives some reason for hope.

Catherine Feher-Elston’s
Wolf Song
found an unusual source that might explain the ancient foundation of that hope, an abundance of amber:

Such ideas do not sit well with contemporary science, but in a world driven by the global economy it never does any harm to be reminded that many human attitudes to nature were founded among
isolated tribes, and that bonds forged with nature in isolation are infinitely more durable than global deals that recognise billions of dollars as their only yardstick. The invention of the
snowmobile does not cancel out the historical truths that people are capable of extraordinary acts of faith, that in the countless eras of the Lapps’ evolution before the snowmobile was
invented, they lived their lives at nature’s bidding, and they would find sacred things in the wolf as well as inconvenience to their reindeer-dependent economy.

Catherine Feher-Elston uncovered an even more surprising man-wolf relationship in her own country among the Navajo, one that the twenty-first-century European sheep farmer is not going to like
one bit:

We have grown so accustomed to the idea of the wolf as an adversary in so many parts of the northern hemisphere (and nowhere more so than in my own country, where we obliterated it more than 200
years ago) that the possibility of the wolf as a benevolent presence in our midst takes us aback. Yet it is every bit as widespread. And not all of it is rooted in the distant past. In 1998 I
travelled to Alaska to make two radio programmes for the BBC, and there I met an independent wolf researcher called Gordon Haber. He was a man whose reputation had gone before him. He had studied
with the great Adolph Murie, whose book
The Wolves of Mount McKinley
was one of a handful of seminal works that spawned the now flourishing literature that is American nature writing. Gordon
Haber is comfortably the most uncompromising pro-wolf naturalist I have come across, and for many people uncomfortably the most uncompromising. But I like my champions of nature uncompromising. The
good intentions of thousands of professional conservationists across the world are hamstrung by bureaucratic quests to ‘achieve a balance’ or to ‘reconcile all the competing
interests’, a doomed philosophy that produces a political swamp and calls it wildness. Such people distrust the Gordon Habers of this world, distrust their certainty, their conviction, their
single-minded belief that nature is a better manager of wild country than people, and in the particular case of Gordon Haber, that the wolf is the heartbeat of all of it. I liked him. I sensed a
kindred spirit.