Report from Chris Smith

Pick of the pack

By Jim Gilchrist in the Scotsman, 27 th December 2003

'Thanks to centuries of demonisation and unremitting extermination, the wolf's lonely cry echoes only in our collective imagination, amid a bestiary of slavering predators'

The only wolves in Scotland today are bred in captivity, but supporters of green tourism say there's a strong economic argument for reintroducing them to the wild.

As I came through the slochd by east the hill there, I foregathered with the beast. My long-dog there turned him. I buckled wi him, and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig, and brought away his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious creatures

To the modern, eco-conscious reader, there is an ironic ambiguity in the hunter MacQueen's laconic description - chronicled for posterity by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder - of how he killed and beheaded the last wolf in Scotland in 1743. He decapitated the beast just to make sure, because, as he put it, they were very precarious creatures.

As a species, the wolf was precarious all right. Today in Scotland, thanks to centuries of demonisation and unremitting extermination, its lonely cry echoes only in our collective imagination, amid a bestiary of slavering predators, child-eaters (not to mention granny-gobblers) and eldritch lycanthropes.

If it can be hard to separate fact from folklore when it comes to Canis lupus, it can be hard, too, to ascertain just how much truth there is in the claim that Scotland's last wolf was indeed slain by the formidable MacQueen, near the River Findhorn. In On the Trail of the Last Wolf, on Radio Scotland on Monday, presenter Mark Stephen joins naturalists and authors who test the basis of MacQueen's alleged exploit.

Among them is Ian Nimmo, former editor of this paper's sister publication, the Evening News, who spent part of his childhood between Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, an area with its own fair share of "last wolf" traditions. It was to the wooded slopes of Athole that Mary, Queen of Scots, came, with 2,000 Highland beaters, for what may have been the biggest deer hunt ever in Scotland. The haul included five wolves.

Nimmo, who now lives in the Border country, recalls a tale from his childhood, "that the last wolf had been killed on Craig Vinean, at the back of Dunkeld".

He and the programme's producer, historian Louise Yeoman, were sceptical of the MacQueen tale: "Simply because he almost certainly would have spoken Gaelic, and that is such a well-turned phrase in Scots. Of course, the words were written by Lauder. But there's nothing like going to the spot and digging around."

They came across another account, written in 1770, 27 years after the slaying. References in this were backed up by place names on old maps, which gave the tale of MacQueen's exploit much more veracity.

Scotland, of course, has had no shortage of "last wolves". As late as 1756 Lord Morton, president of the Royal Society, claimed that wolves still existed in Scotland,and in his novel Alba, The Last Wolf, the late David Stephen, esteemed nature columnist on this newspaper and a man who kept wolves on his wildlife park near Cumbernauld, had the last family of wolves survive until 1746, only to be killed by Redcoats, a metaphor for the post-Culloden death of Highland Scotland.

Of course, as Nimmo points out, there is a distinction to be made between the last wolf to be killed and the last wolf to die, unrecorded. "The last wolf in Scotland probably died in a snowdrift on Rannoch or Sutherland, or somewhere like that," says Nimmo.

Nature writer Jim Crumley agrees with him: "So much of the written evidence about wolves in Scotland in the 18th century was written later by Victorians, and with so much anti-wolf bile, I just don't think these accounts are in any way reliable. There does seem to be sporadic evidence of quite a few animals in Sutherland, for example, around the beginning of the 19th century."

Basically, Crumley prefers to believe that "the last wolf in Scotland hasn't been born yet" - which brings us to the controversy over whether or not this former indigenous species should be reintroduced to Scotland. Nimmo is just back from a working trip to Mongolia, where he says, in the low hills outside Ulan Bator, "there are wolf hunts going on all the time. My interpreter's father has a wee farm there and the wolves keep coming down and taking his stock."

Basically he feels wolves are incompatible with livestock in Scotland. "It's a nice idea, but I don't think it will ever happen here. We're too small an island."

Crumley, however, doesn't accept what is basically an economic argument against reintroducing Scotland's largest predator. "There must be more to conservation than cultivating only that which we are comfortable with, he says. "There are an awful lot of parts of the country where money is being spent subsidising sheep that nobody really wants. We just need to set aside an area of land."

Crumley has visited Norway, where the wolf has reintroduced itself, crossing the border from Sweden. "Sure, there are incidents - and these are very widely reported - where they do prey on sheep, but the huge preponderance of their prey is reindeer, and where there is reindeer - that's where they tend to eat."

And he points to Scotland's vast - and in some areas problematical - red deer population. "According to serious studies of the wolf in the 20th century, there's a lot of evidence to support the argument that if you establish a dominant prey species within their territory, they stay with that."

He also brings up the wolf's "green tourism" potential: "I was in Alaska a few years ago, and there they have 'howlers' who go out and howl, and the wolves respond to them. I think people would love to come and hear that in Glen Affric or Rannoch or wherever."

Whether or not wolves ever run wild on Highland hills again, as the programme's closing cacophony of eerie howling suggests, the call of the wolf is still a sound to raise the wee hairs on the back of your neck, even when listening by the radio, in centrally heated surburbia.

On the Trail of the Last Wolf is on BBC Radio Scotland, 4:30pm on Monday, repeated on Tuesday at 10:30pm.