Free The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley Page B

wound round his left arm, and although the maddened brute
     scrambled and twisted and strove with all her might to force herself down to the rescue of her cubs, Polson was just able with the exertion of all his strength to keep her from going forward.
     In the midst of this singular struggle, which passed in silence, his son within the cave, finding the light excluded from above asked in Gaelic, ‘Father, what is keeping the light from
     us?’ ‘If the root of the tail breaks,’ replied he, ‘you will soon know that.’
     
    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:
     
    There is no lack of such incredible stories. A celebrated German hunting writer, for instance, describes quite seriously an incident said to have happened in central Sweden
     in 1727. A minister . . . heard the howling of wolves from a wolf pit he had dug. (Just imagine trapped wolves ‘making their dreadful lonely voices heard,’ as it says in the book.)
     In trying to kill one of the six wolves that ferociously bared their teeth at him, he fell into the pit himself, but miraculously the wolves did not tear him to pieces but used his back to
     climb out of the pit and escape.
     
    Another echo of Skye.
     
    Many stories keep cropping up in different areas in a similar form. There is the story of . . . the solitary individual who is attacked by wolves on a cold winter night. He
     defends himself with his sword and succeeds in killing or wounding several of them. The rest withdraw and the man puts his sword back in its sheath. But that is a mistake, because the wolves
     attack again, and this time the bloodstained sword is frozen in the sheath, with the result that only a few remnants of the man are left, as well as the sword, of course, as evidence of the
     tragic event.
    There is a striking resemblance in stories coming from many areas. The Russian version – the troika pursued by wolves on a winter night – has been repeated a
     thousand times. Its North American counterpart has the hero alone with his dog at a campfire and he has to defend himself against attacking wolves by swinging his cudgel. All these stories
     happen on a winter night and in all of them the ammunition runs out, but the hero’s courage, resourcefulness, and strength enable him to win against all odds.
    In the course of my work with wolves I have heard or read a large number of such stories, told by aged sportsmen in the Carpathians or German ex-servicemen who fought in
     Russia. Many of them have exactly the same plot and can thus be dismissed as unimaginative reproduction of the standard repertoire of aggressive tactics attributed to the wolf. Others, though
     sometimes more imaginative, are so full of phoney details about wolf behaviour that they are incredible . . . In the great majority of these stories there is a complete lack of critical
     questioning.
     
    So the tail-pullers are simply symptomatic of a story-telling tradition that has left its spoor all over Europe. When it crossed the Atlantic with the early