A Land Fit for Wolves

Once an intrinsic part of the scottish Landscape, is it time wolves were finally retruned to their ancestral home?

- Jim Crumley

Think of them as wolf trees; the ones that remember wolves, the ones that mourn wolves, the ones that stir in me an awareness of the absence of wolves. Only trees, of all living things, hold the memory of wolves.

The oldest Scots pines, the 300–400-year olds, and the occasional truly ancient yew, know how the brush of wolf fur feels, how the soft, deep slap of their footfall on the forest floor sounds. And perhaps they hand down the sense of wolves to the wolfless generations of young trees, so that these will be ready for the wolves’ return. For the wolves will return.

All my life, I have been a restless traveller among Scotland’s wild places and an occasional traveller to the Earth’s northern places – Alaska, Iceland, Norway. I try to live close to the land, to listen to the land – whatever deepens my connection to it. And sometimes, usually among heartland tracts of the Highlands, I have become aware of an absence – I put it down to wolves. Such a tract is the Black Wood of Rannoch, and the neighbouring Black Mount woods and mountains around Loch Tulla. Such landscapes have a way of dislocating time. There is a harder-edged wildness to them, and sometimes it reaches you like a scent, or the sound of it is a threnody in your ears, for it laments its own incompleteness.

Rannoch Moor is an inland sea that breaks on mountain shores, but a sea of rock and heather and lochans and peat that lies at an altitude of 300m; a sea of red deer and red foxes, of all-but-extinct wildcats, of ravens and greenshanks and black-throated divers and golden eagles, of summer skylarks and winter swans, of wind-weary grass and the half-buried bones of dead trees. Once it was lightly wooded from shore to shore. The Black Wood still survives along the southern bank of the moor, an exquisite woodland of Scots pine, birch, rowan, aspen, willow and alder.