The Sacred Texts of Last Wolf
The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley
This one seems obvious right. But I waited a long time to include this book because I like it so much, and its influence is clear. I can make it clearer still, Jim Crumley is the absolute man. He’s so good, The Last Wolf is not even my favourite book of his. That dubious honour goes to Nature’s Architect, his 2015 book on beavers, but it’s The Last Wolf that has given me the name for my website, my clothing and ultimately brought together a lot of my thoughts and ideas under one name.
First published in 2010, I didn’t get my hands on it until the paperback edition of 2016. Crumley is originally from Dundee. It is perhaps odd that I did not discover his work earlier, and odder that I arrived via a long history of mostly American nature writers. From Thoreau and Muir, to Leopold and Peacock and finally to Scottish writers; Seton Gordon, Nan Shepherd, and Jim Crumley. It took the giants of American nature writing to lead me to a guy who worked as a journalist at a paper based about 25 miles away from where I grew up. He still writes a Courier column. I’m glad he came back to it, and I absolutely put him up there with these greats.
The popular legend, well one of them anyway, says that the last wolf in Scotland was killed around the River Findhorn in 1743 by a six foot seven stalker called MacQueen armed with only a dirk and his bare hands. This was a huge black beast that had killed two children, and MacQueen took its head. This is the story I first heard, and the one that inspired me to start thinking about the last of a species within a land and whether or not it knew there was no others. The story, I think is particularly poignant to Scotland, partly due to what we now know happens to an eco-system without large predators, but also partly due to the political situation around Scotland at the time and the disaster that was to come a few years later, which was nothing short of a subjugation of an entire culture and way of life.
Of course the last wolf story is all bullshit, and called out by Crumley as early as page four. No this story is a Victorian invention, from a populous drunk on the stories of Sir Walter Scott and the thought of a tartan clad queen traipsing around the Cairngorms. Crumley pulls apart the myths surrounding the last wolf with detail. His background is journalism so you know the research is thorough, yet also with ease, because most of it is ridiculous anyway. Wolves in Scotland were neither black, nor huge. Also, speaking of size, isn’t it interesting that MacQueen is exactly the same height as William Wallace was reported to be? Fishy.
Crumley travels Scotland looking for wolf related stories and evidence from Waternish on Skye, to Strathnaver in Sutherland, south to the Findhorn valley and across Rannoch moor to Killiekrankie investigating claims and legends. This is contrasted with the story of wolves throughout the northern hemisphere, and crucially the world changing wolf reintroduction at Yellowstone. The Last Wolf is both Scottish and international.
But the most important part of it is not the fun stuff of debunking the Brothers Grimm nonsense that goes along with any talk of wolves, but what we can do about it, what we need to overcome as a society in order for these animals to eventually be ‘allowed’ back into Scotland. There is no land bridge here, they are never going to be able to just walk back as they have in parts of Scandinavia. But Crumley is confident that they will be here, and within his lifetime too.
And despite all that this book (and its author) have done for me, this book does feel frustrating. This is the nature of books like The Last Wolf, and others that deal with subjects that are long extinct; that things aren’t moving fast enough, or being taken seriously enough to do anything about it, when the benefits seem so obvious. Powers that be need to read this book, and not just people who are already sold on the idea of species reintroduction.
The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley has provided me with more than a name. It is central to the existence of Last Wolf and its influence can never be quantified. It takes its rightful place among The Sacred Texts of Last Wolf.
Live Deliberately,
Barry
Currently listening to True North by Ziggurath. Wintersynth for a cold northern winter https://unrealestaterecords.bandcamp.com/album/true-north