The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley

Author:Jim Crumley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857905208
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I can’t help wondering if they would have been watching Mr and Mrs Wolf in that cottage in the tiny Devon hamlet of Wolverston on the River Wolf, where I knocked on the door and told a delightful old woman that I was from the BBC, making a radio programme about wolves, and I understood that this was where the last wolf in England was killed.

‘That’s what they say,’ she said.

‘Do you know anything about the story?’

‘No, but my husband might. He’s down the workshop. I’ll call him.’

Her husband slid out from under a tractor and began talking at once, as if a visit from the BBC was an everyday occurrence. He told us what he knew, and my producer and I looked at each other, and I asked a couple of more questions and the old man spoke in response to the questions, and I looked at my producer again and detected an imperceptible shake of the head. We made our politest excuses and left. Grant Sonnex, the producer, lives near Bristol which is not a million miles away, and I was hoping against hope that he had understood the old boy, for my unattuned ears hadn’t understood one word in ten.

We played it back, and in truth, we couldn’t use a word of it, other than to let him begin talking and then to fade his voice under my voiceover. It was a delicious accent, and I would love to have had the time to unravel it, but it was thicker than a jar of clover honey, and as impenetrable as Flemish. If it had been television we could have used subtitles. We gleaned this: tradition said England’s last wolf died nearby, in a valley bottom below Wolverton Moor where the Wolf River runs. Was it killed? Probably. Do you know when? Or how? No, no. But that’s what they say. This was my first encounter with the twilight world that is the last resting place of the last wolf. I would re-enter it again and again, finally about 700 miles further north on the Findhorn River. Only the accent would change.

We had a folklorist, Jennifer Westwood, for company as we navigated the baffling, beautiful, mazy, hedged-in lanes of the valley of the Wolf River, an utterly different Devon from Ilfracombe and Combe Martin; but it was like looking for the secret of a magic spell inside a web, and this particular last wolf had had 500 years to cover its tracks. Harting’s assessment of the available evidence concluded:

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