The Last Wolf (8 page)

‘It is not at all unlikely that it is founded on fact . . . ’

Likewise the Scalds of the North singing how the son of Siward gave the corpses of the French as a choice banquet for the wolves of Northumberland, no doubt. Two of the most durable indictments
levelled against wolves in Britain were that they scavenged battlefields (hence the quotation at the start of this chapter) and dug out corpses from their graves. I heard the battlefield one
perpetuated as recently as 2008 in the BBC’s much-praised
History of Scotland
series. Presenter Neil Oliver, so scrupulous in his debunking of the myths that have enshrouded our human
history for centuries, tossed it in as a footnote to an account of a twelfth-century battle involving a grandson of Malcolm Canmore somewhere down near the Mersey, observing that ‘the corpses
were picked over by wolves and carrion crows’. No other line in the whole series was that casual. There was no justification for it. It added nothing to the story he was telling other than
the ancient image of a wolf with blood dripping from fangs.

It reminded me of a story told by the American nature writer Barry Lopez in his book
Of Wolves and Men
(1978). It concerned a visit to a school by a wolf and its handler as part of a wolf
education programme. Before the visit the teacher had asked them to draw a wolf, with predictable results – fierce animals with big fangs. After the visit the teacher asked them to draw
another picture. ‘This time,’ wrote Lopez, ‘there were no fangs. All the pictures showed wolves with very big feet.’

It is possible that there were wolves at the aftermath of the battle. And carrion crows. And, foxes, ravens, buzzards, kites, cats, dogs . . . especially dogs, many dogs, which after all
accompany men wherever they go, whatever they do. But there is no record of any of it. An assumption is made based on the repeatedly offered mantra of the ages, not on hard evidence offered by
reliable historical record. A song composed by the Scalds of the North to honour Siward’s victory would have lauded him as a warrior hero and belittled his enemies with all the venom at their
disposal. Biologically, it would be as reliable as bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover and nightingales singing in Berkeley Square. But no-one tried to palm off those examples of the
songwriter’s craft as historical evidence. The language used by Freeman in his
Northern Conquest
and quoted by Harting is the language of the Scalds who were paid to make their
employer look good for the benefit of posterity. It was also their job to make the vanquished enemy look contemptible and unworthy of their place on the battlefield, so have them arrayed as a
choice banquet for wolves, food for the lowest form of life! But when the Scalds of the North sang their song, did they know if wolves actually even liked human flesh? And did Freeman or Harting?
And does anyone know now?

Wolves have preferences in what they eat. Scotland has never been short of deer, and for many millennia, these evolved with the wolf, and their movements and populations were shaped by wolves.
And for many centuries cattle were the principal currency of the natives. In the last few hundred years before their extinction, killing deer would have put wolves in direct conflict with hunting
kings and their royal hunting parks, and killing cattle would have put them in conflict with more or less everyone else. And before all that, the westward spread of Christianity had brought its
demonising culture with it. The work of discrediting the wolf had begun and it lasted for more or less 2,000 years. It has still not quite died out, but at least now there are reintroduction
programmes in America and Europe, reliable biological studies, hard evidence, wolf education programmes, and a growing presumption in favour of the animal as a benificent force in the land.

But some places are slower on the uptake than others, and nowhere is slower than Scotland, despite a European Union Habitats and Species Directive of 1992 compelling member governments to
consider ways of reintroducing wolves. Putting the wolf back into Scotland could be done tomorrow, or indeed, with what’s left of today, but the old lies and myths are well dug in and
stubborn. Many farmers and landowners and estate managers are still constrained by short-term thinking and self-interest, and quite unwilling to give the wolf anything like a fair hearing. The wolf
is still the devourer of children, the scavenger of battlefields, the grave-robber.

There are places all over the Highlands in particular with burial grounds on islands either in lochs or offshore – Loch Awe in Argyll, Loch Leven near Glencoe, Handa Island in Sutherland
for example – whose existence is put down to the wolf’s reputation as a grave-robber. Yet grave-robbing sounds too much like hard work to reach a source of carrion. It doesn’t
mean it never happened (and it would not have to happen often to establish the reputation – twice would have done it), if, say, the corpse was hastily buried in a shallow grave and without
any kind of coffin. But island burial grounds are more likely to have originated in communities where good grazing land was at a premium: no point in wasting it on a field of the dead. The burial
ground on Inishail in Loch Awe is still in use, incidentally, particularly by the Dukes of Argyll, more than 200 years after the last wolf died.

Both charges – the battlefield scavenger and the grave-robber – are unsubstantiated. They were levelled in a climate of wolf hatred. Such activities would have brought the wolf into
quite unnecessary close contact with the two-legged creature it routinely went out of its way to avoid, and with good reason. The charges do not stand up to close historical or biological scrutiny.
If the wolf was guilty as charged, it was the exception rather than the rule, whereas grave-robbing and battlefield scavenging was routinely practised by the species that levelled the charges
– by people. And that species is still the only one that frequently kills children – people, and their pet dogs of course.

The rest of it was down to the myth-making of the centuries, to the songs of the Scalds of the North. The notion of the Rabid Droves was a fallacy.

ONE OF THE BY-PRODUCTS of our age-old hostility towards the wolf is Last Wolf Syndrome. This phenomenon arose not simply out of a desire to cleanse the land of wolves, but also
reflected the competitive element that thrives in any hunting culture. Reputations and rewards were at stake if people could be persuaded that the wolf you killed was the very last in that country,
that county, that state, that district. In such a fevered climate, wolf hatred was heightened and Last Wolf stories began, you might say, to infest the land in droves. Last Wolf Syndrome seems to
have originated in eastern Europe and spread rapidly, like all good infestations should. It engulfed Britain and effortlessly crossed the Atlantic with the early white settlers. As the stories
spread it became clear that there were common ground rules. The wolf had to be hideously terrifying, preferably huge and black, and had to have killed someone vulnerable. The hunter had to be
preternaturally gifted and heroic. At the end of the story, it was truth that was killed, a bloodied mess on the floor of a cave, usually with its head severed. Harting waded waist-deep in the gore
of these stories.

Gasp.

So, you get the gist. It’s a run-of-the-mill example, with echoes of Skye, although I admit I did not see the stuff about the left-handed gauntlet coming. My inquiries on that particular
subject drew a total blank. Whatever the
lamhainn chruaidh
may have been, it was far from ‘characteristic of the Highlanders and Irish’. Indeed, it is far from clear what
practical purpose it might have served other than the one in question – jamming into the open jaws of a wolf that happened to be running at you with its mouth open.

And then there was Sutherland. To this day, a cairn by the side of the A9 near Helmsdale lays claim to the killing of the last wolf in Sutherland, a deed done in Glen Loth, although there are
rival claims from Assynt and Strath Halladale, all of them in the decade between 1690 and 1700. Inevitably, none died a natural or even a vaguely credible death, but if you believe in the notion of
a folk mind that gathered and articulated these stories, it finally took leave of its senses in Glen Loth. Glen Loth is a bit-part player in the pageant of east Sutherland’s mountainous
landscape. Here, all the great valleys that drain into the North Sea are straths – Strath Fleet, Strath Brora, Strath of Kildonan – and in that company, Glen Loth is a skinny and unsung
thoroughfare, unsung apart from the Pythonesque madness of its contribution to Last Wolf Syndrome. Its story is this (and see if you can spot the now familiar ingredients):

A Helmsdale man called Polson, his son, and another local lad, found a wolf’s den in a small cave with a narrow entrance. Polson sent the boys in. Bones and horns, feathers and eggshells
littered the floor. Then five or six cubs were found inside. The boys had been told what to do. Soon Polson heard the death cries of the cubs. Enter the female wolf ‘raging furiously at the
cries of her young,’ according to one of a number of graphic accounts. It goes on:

And, of course, the hunter prevailed, jamming the she-wolf into the rocks, unsheathing his knife and stabbing her so often that at last ‘she was easily dragged back and
finished’.

If you had never waded through yards of last wolf stories but encountered instead only the handful that caught the wolf by the tail, you could be forgiven for thinking there was something in it.
If on the other hand, you had done the required wading, you would be utterly convinced that there is less than nothing in it. But I went in search of greater authority, and found it in Erik
Zimen’s book,
The Wolf.
Zimen was German, grew up in Sweden, got a doctorate for his work in wolf ecology from the University of Kiel, did post-doctorate work with the famed biologist
Konrad Lorenz in Bavaria, then led a trail-blazing wolf conservation project in Italy’s Abruzzi National Park. In the throes of all that he encountered many wolf stories from many countries,
and found countless variations on the same few well-worn themes:

Another echo of Skye.