The Nature of Winter by Jim Crumley

Author:Jim Crumley [Crumley, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910192863
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Over the years I refined and elaborated on my wolf reintroduction argument, in Brother Nature (Whittles, 2003), most noticeably in The Last Wolf (Birlinn, 2010), and most recently in my beaver book, Nature’s Architect (Saraband, 2015). The plan is this: a new wilderness national park extending from the Black Wood of Rannoch and Rannoch Moor to the Black Mount, Glen Orchy and Inishail, and west to the shore of Loch Etive. The national park should mean what it says – a park owned by the nation, rather than the unwieldy conglomerations of often reluctant landowners that characterise Scotland’s existing national parks. Its overwhelming priorities would be to serve the needs of nature. Its every native habitat would be enhanced, extended, restored; Rannoch Moor would return to the lightly wooded mosaic it once was. The first wolf reintroduction would be into the Black Wood and the Moor of Rannoch, and because the new national park would march with the Cairngorms National Park in the north-east and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park to the south-west, the wolves would be well served with room to expand in both directions. I think that initially at least, Scotland could accommodate three or four packs, and if numbers increased beyond that, some controlling measures could be considered. It is a model that seems to work well in Norway, where wolves re-introduced themselves by walking over the border from Sweden. In the absence of a land border with Sweden or anywhere else for that matter, we, the people, have to make the first move. We have nothing to fear. On the contrary, when the wolf’s wholly benevolent presence is revealed to us, an ancient darkness locked deep within our psyche will be banished. For the wolf is a catalyst, an enabler, a provider of unlimited opportunity for nature in all its guises, all its tribes. Like aconites and snowdrops thrusting through frozen ground to burst into flower, wolves invigorate the land with new light, new colour, a new flowering.

All the obstacles are in our minds. We misunderstand the nature of the wolf. That ancient darkness from which the old stories emanated and elaborated their distortions (a devourer of babies, a despoiler of the battlefield dead) is the product of nothing more than a very old storytelling tradition. The real wild wolf is to be found elsewhere. And despite all that biologists now know about the wolf in many countries, despite all the literature and all the television documentaries, despite the Yellowstone reintroduction making positive headlines for wolves around the world, there are still far too many of us who believe, or think we believe, that the only good wolf is a dead wolf, or better still, an extinct wolf.

Even the myths are stubborn. There was a strange story in some British newspapers on January 12th, 2017, concerning the full moon that night. It said that the first full moon of the year is known as the wolf moon. I had never heard of a wolf moon, so with years of dismantling wolf myths under my belt I was immediately suspicious.

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