Crumley The Last Wolf

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-85790-520-8
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

In 1743, according to legend, the last wolf in Scotland was killed by a huntsman near Inverness. Long regarded in folk takes and history as a slayer of babies, a robber of graves, a devourer of battlefield dead, its extinction was widely celebrated. But since then, deer have multiplied, destroying the vegetation on which an array of wildlife depends, and it is clear that the entire Highland ecosystem has been thrown off balance by the elimination of a top predator. Jim Crumley believes the old stories are pure fiction - a distortion of reality which prevents people from thinking rationally about the huge benefits wolves could bring. With reference to wolves in other cultures and places, from the south-west of England to Scandinavia and North America, this is a passionate polemic which argues for the return of the wolf to heal the damaged land.

Jim Crumley was born and grew up in Dundee, and now lives in Stirlingshire. He has written over twenty books including The Great Wood and The Winter Whale, and has made documentaries for BBC Radio 4, Radio Scotland and Wildlife on One.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Crumley, Jim

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

False Wolves and True

– Douglas W. Smith and Gary Ferguson, (2005)

I MET A MAN in Norway who told me this true story: ‘A friend calls me one Saturday morning . . . he has sled dogs, and in the night these dogs had been very upset and made much noises. He was going out to shout at the dogs, and he doesn’t have nothing on him, and it was winter. And he was standing there shouting at the dogs and then they were quiet. And when they were quiet he heard a concert from wolves 200 metres from his house. And he was standing there pure naked. Can you imagine that feeling? Nothing on you!’

I said, ‘That’s got to be the ultimate wilderness experience.’

My Norwegian friend said, ‘Yeah, he thought so too!’

Ah, but then the story grew legs, became what the Norwegians call ‘a walking story’. My friend heard it again two weeks later from a completely different source. The ‘concert from wolves’ at 200 metres had become a slavering pack that confronted the man and threatened him so that he had to drive them off, and was lucky to escape with his life.

‘That was in 14 days,’ he said. ‘What about 140 days? Or 140 years?’

The process of wolf-legend-making is far from extinct, but that is what happens with some people and wolves. The truth is never enough for them. The man who told me this story is a wildlife photographer and film-maker. He and a friend had just completed a TV film about a pack of wolves that had taken eight years to make. That particular pack’s territory is around 1,000 square miles. They find the wolves by tracking them in the winter when the pack uses frozen rivers and lakes as highways and the wolves write their story in the snow. The film-makers read other clues, such as the behaviour of ravens; ravens are forever leading them to wolf kills.

‘Tell Jim how many ravens you saw on one wolf-killed moose,’ one Norwegian film-maker urged the other.

‘Seventy,’ he said, and to make sure I had understood his heavily-accented English he elaborated: ‘Seven times ten.’

Both men were openly hostile towards biologists who fit radio collars and transmitters to wolves after first firing tranquilliser darts into them from planes or helicopters so the collars and transmitters can be fitted. They raged against the stress the darting causes the wolves. One said: ‘The uncollared wolves are the real wild wolves. These people who use the radio collaring . . . it seems to be the wolves are only things. It’s like a computer game.’

I smiled and told them of Aldo Leopold’s observation in his timeless landmark in the literature of the natural world, : ‘Most books of nature writing never mention the wind because they are written behind stoves.’

They smiled back. ‘It’s the same thing! And it’s very exciting to not know everything. If you know everything, it’s not exciting.’

The Norwegian Government permits four wolf packs in the country. When I met the film-makers, three out of the four packs, and all the packs in neighbouring Sweden, were collared and tracked by computer. The film-makers were fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the Koppang pack, the one they had filmed. They spoke about the need to allow the wolf to retain its mysteries. Their language surprised me, because, historically, Scandinavians have not made the wolf welcome, and here they were using the kind of language I associate with indigenous North Americans. I liked them because they spoke my language too, and because historically, Scots did not make the wolf welcome either.

I mention all this because in any exploration of the wolf in Scotland, sooner or later someone somewhere will ask you to believe that the last wolf in Scotland – in all Britain, for that matter – was killed in the valley of the River Findhorn south-east of Inverness, around 1743. You will also be asked to believe that the history-making wolf-slayer was a MacQueen, a stalker and a man of giant stature. He would be. Wolf legend is no place for Davids, only Goliaths.

He was six feet seven inches. There’s a coincidence – the same height as Scotland’s greatest historical hero, William Wallace, or at least the same height as William Wallace’s legend has grown to in the 700 years since he died. Like Wallace, MacQueen was possessed of extraordinary powers of strength and courage; and in addition he had ‘the best deer hounds in the country’. Well, he would have. You would expect nothing less. The wolf he killed (with his dirk and his bare hands) was huge and black. Well, it would be, you would expect nothing less. And it had killed two children as they crossed the hills accompanied only by their mother. What, only two? When the story was first published in 1830, the Victorians swallowed it whole, in the grand tradition of wolf stories.

And here’s another coincidence. At the same time, the Victorians were high on a heady cocktail of Scottish history and Sir Walter Scott, and in that frame of mind, were in the throes of building an extraordinary national monument to one of the greatest figures in any rational assessment of Scottish history – William Wallace. His monument stands on a hilltop on the edge of Stirling within sight of the scene of his finest hour, the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. The coat of arms of the old royal burgh of Stirling was a wolf.

The Victorians loved the story of MacQueen as much as they loathed anything with claws, teeth and hooked beaks. Killing nature’s creatures (and often stuffing the results and displaying them in glass cases or on the walls of castles and great houses) was a national pastime among the gun-toting classes. It occurred to no-one that the last wolf in Scotland might not have been killed by a man; nor that it might have died old and alone in a cave, perhaps in the vast wild embrace of Rannoch Moor in the Central Highlands, or in the empty Flow Country of the far north, and many years after any human being last saw a wolf. No-one challenged the evidence on which the story of MacQueen and his casual heroics was hung and presented as fact. But that is what you are up against when you consider the place of the wolf in my country, and for that matter, in so many other countries. That is what I am up against in this book. But first, here is a glimpse of the animal we are talking about: not a supposed-to-be wolf but a real wolf.

She was known as number 14 and her mate was Old Blue. Even if it does sound like the first line of a bad country and western song, it was a match made in heaven, or at least in Yellowstone, which in wolf terms is much the same thing. Biologists like Douglas Smith who are deeply embedded in the project to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the northern United States give wolves numbers or, very occasionally, names, to help keep track of them. Number 14 and Old Blue were two remarkable animals, even by the rarefied standards of the tribe of wild wolves. The average lifespan of a Yellowstone wolf is three to four years. Old Blue was almost 12 when he died, at which point Number 14 had to be at least eight years younger. She learned prodigiously from such a seen-it-all-before wolf as Old Blue, so that when he died, she was equipped for anything that the North American wilderness could throw at her. But first she did something astonishing.

In the last few months of his life, Old Blue and number 14 mated one last time. But when he died, number 14 took off, leaving behind her pups and yearling wolves, leaving the territory of the pack. Alpha female wolves don’t take off when they have pups, don’t abandon their families. It doesn’t happen. But 14 took off alone into deep snow, into a landscape that according to Smith, was ‘so inhospitable it contained not a single track of another animal’.

She was eventually found by a spotting plane, gave it a single cold stare, then simply continued travelling until all efforts at tracking her failed. She vanished.

She was gone for a week. Then quite suddenly she turned up again, rejoined her family and the rest of the pack. Smith wrote: ‘Though no-one wanted to say 14 travelled alone so far because she was mourning the loss of her mate, some of us privately wondered.’

Travel is the wolf’s natural habitat. With no alpha male, but possessed of all the experience and survival skills of Old Blue, number 14 waited for the elk migration to come down from the high ground, then led her pack away, following the elk. Their travels took them into the neighbouring wolf pack territory and into a battle. They killed the resident alpha male and some of the others fled; two died in a snow avalanche. These were found the following summer, ‘their skeletons at the foot of a small waterfall, shrouded in the lavender blooms of harebell’.

Number 14’s audacious move shook up the established order in that part of Yellowstone, and her pack acquired a huge territory with a single battle, no casualties and no alpha male. But the new territory was harsh in winter, the elk all but vanished, and the pack would have to rely on the formidable prey of...