Free The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley

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.

C HAPTER 5
Last Wolf Syndrome
    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.
     
    An example of this occurs in an account of the slaughter of a remarkable wolf killed by one of the lairds of