For a further year Greycub wandered up and down the country, always moving on, always alone. As time passed he became more and more wary of people, more and more he wanted not even to smell them. So at last he wandered up into the wilderness of Scotland, the only place in the British Isles where he could feel truly remote from human kind. There he made his home.
Greycub established a territory, a great loop in the central mountains. He lived off game and became used to his own company. As a naturally sociable animal it was a wretched life for a wolf. Greycub, who had never known that close, warm family life except for the company of his mother for a few short days, grew into a hard, aloof animal. He was a relic, in whom wolf culture had never blossomed. The society that had given his kind a way of life for so long was already extinct. He was a ghost whose narrow life had no hope of widening.
While inside his heart shrank, his body grew. Within a few years he reached his prime – a great burly wolf, his shoulders hard rolls of muscle, his long legs capable of covering miles at an easy trot.
Although Greycub had his own territory, he did not always stick to it. From time to time he wandered off, restlessly covering mile after mile, because he was tired of being alone and could not stay still any longer.
After two years in the Highlands, one such urge came over him and he found himself on the move again. This time he went west, out of the central hills, to the twisted rocks of the Scottish west coast. There he wandered north into country he had not been in for many years.
It was a frosty October day. Greycub was slowing down. He had the past day crossed human tracks four or five times and he was beginning to think of turning back and returning to his own land. He was sniffing for the scent of the small roe deer that lived on the edge of a fir plantation, when he came to a scent that stopped him in his tracks.
Greycub whined and scratched at the earth. He sniffed again and then sank to the ground, his legs taut under him. He looked around him. Then he stood up and sniffed the wind. The tip of his tail twitched with excitement.
Greycub had crossed a scent he had never expected to find again.
It was the scent of the Hunter.
13
ONCE HE HAD run out of wolves, the Hunter had travelled around the world: to Asia for tigers and the rare Indian lion, to Africa for white rhino, South America for jaguar. He had spent over a year in Java, hunting the very rare Javanese rhino, and when he got one he moved on, around the world, seeking more trophies. Homeless for a number of years and living in hotels or camps wherever his passion for killing led him, he at last wanted to establish a base for himself and his macabre collection. He finally settled on a house on the remote west coast of Scotland, a converted barn from a long disused settlement close by the shaly sea coast. In this place, far from prying eyes, he now lived in between his journeys around the world.
Most of his collection was in trunks, packed away, since even in this remote place he did not dare openly display his illegal trophies. But in one large room, with a window overlooked by a steep bank, he did have on show the products of the hunt he held closest to his heart.
That autumn he had been living in the house, only vaguely planning his next expedition. He was growing tired of globe-trotting; it seemed to him he had killed everything worth killing and he was glad of the rest. Now, he had a visitor. An old friend of his had come to stay, another hunter. The two men had eaten a good meal and now they had moved into the large well-lit room with the big window. A fire was blazing, the armchairs were deep in soft pelts. The two men were drinking whisky. By the fire, half buried under a pile of wolf skins, lay a small, crooked white dog. Jenny was still with her master.
The room was full of dead wolves – their skins, their skulls, their teeth. There were wolves’ skins eight deep on the sofa and draped over the chairs on which the men sat. There were skins heaped lavishly on the floor. There were a couple of wolves stuffed and mounted in one corner, with cubs sitting around their feet, and a wolf’s skull snarled coldly and unseeing from the mantelpiece. There were heads mounted on the wall, blind things, worse than dead, that no longer even smelled like wolf, gathering dust on their dry teeth and black gums. All the wolf skins in there shared one thing: they all had somewhere about them the pale blond fur that dusted Greycub’s flanks. There were the remains of seventy-two wolves in that room, which was the number of the total English wolf pack when the Hunter found them.
Inside the fire crackled. The Hunter had central heating in the house but in this room it was never on. The dry heat would have been bad for the skins.
‘I got that one in Hastings,’ he was saying to his friend. ‘He was a clever dog, that one! Never stayed far away from humans as soon as he knew I was on his trail. He knew I couldn’t attract attention, you see. He lived out of dustbins for a month, never left people’s gardens, but I tracked him down. I got him under Hastings pier in the end.’
The other man grunted and sipped his whisky. He was just back from a trip to Africa. He had stories of his own he wanted to boast to the Hunter about, but he had nothing to compete with this.
‘Wolves in Sussex – it doesn’t seem possible,’ he murmured. ‘I’d never have believed it from anyone else but you.’
‘They didn’t stay in Sussex long once they realised someone was onto them. That group there’ – he pointed at a heap of skins over the back of the settee – ‘they took up residence in South London. I guess they thought they’d be safe up there. But I found them.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said the other man. ‘Don’t try to tell me they knew you were onto them …?’
‘I promise you – each one was more difficult than the last. That Hastings dog was number twenty-four. Now that one’ – he pointed up to an animal with a blond and grey face – ‘number thirty-five. She was a devil. She climbed trees, would you believe that? A wolf up a tree. She got me that way a number of times. The trail just vanished. I couldn’t work out what was going on. But then one day the jays found her and started kicking up a racket. I just looked up and there she was. We looked straight at one another, just a few metres away. She knew what was coming. I took my time. I walked round the side and got her in the ear so as not to spoil her skin. Beautiful, isn’t she?’
‘They’re lovely animals. You must have killed dozens. Are they all English?’
‘Every one an English wolf.’
‘And how many are there left? Any idea?’
‘None.’
‘What? You killed them all?’
‘Every single one.’
‘Isn’t that …’
‘What?’
‘A bit of a pity, don’t you think?’
The Hunter laughed. ‘Jealous, that’s what you are. You’ll never have an English wolf hide on your wall – never. No one will, except me. Now, don’t get all sentimental on me. How many animals have you killed in your life?’
‘But I never wiped out a whole breed – are you sure there are none left?’
‘I shot them all – all bar one, that is. The very last one too. Now that was a pity – but it was only a cub, just a few weeks old. Got himself flattened on the M3. There’s none left for you, I’m afraid. I had them all.’
Out in the cold night hidden in darkness, on the slope above the house, the last wolf lay hidden in the long grass, looking down into the room full of death. Greycub saw the skins and the heads, the stuffed animals – the stuffed cubs were his own sisters but they meant nothing to him. They were no longer wolves. Their wolf smell had gone from them, washed away with chemicals used to cure the skins. Their wolf spirit had been purged so completely that to Greycub they meant less than the merest live beetle he sniffed on his nightly wanderings. But he recognised Jenny – and one of the men below him. He whined slightly and shuffled on his belly. Then he turned and crept back out of the grass away from the garden falling to a drop below him. He trotted quietly up the road, past the house. There were no signs of urgency or hurry in his manner.
Greycub fol
lowed rather less than his usual precautions, carelessly stepping off the road onto the grass verge occasionally, scratching the dirt with his paw and sniffing for food just to one side of his track. Soon he left the road and crossed a field, squeezing under a fence that lightly scratched his back, and then onto the rocky seashore. On this rocky northern coast he left no tracks at all, but further away from the sea there was some sand with tufts of marram grass, and here he left tracks. He found some mice living under an old heap of car tyres which he ate before heading off inland again.
Greycub made his way for several miles in this manner, always keeping close to the seashore, never going more than a mile inland. To all intents he was on a night-time foraging expedition, taking time to root about in areas of woodland, to investigate for fish and crabs in the shallow rock pools. After many miles he came to a place where the water had found a way past the shale ridges of the coast to form a long, still lagoon. This water lay in a basin cut off from the body of the ocean by a long series of ridges, hiding the lagoon and the land beyond for at least a mile. Further up the coast, the shale was broken by a long rocky peninsula reaching far out into the rough Atlantic.
When he reached the shale ridges, Greycub stopped his hunting and ran at a steady trot behind them until he arrived at the peninsula. Once on it, he stuck very close to the rocky cliffs that dropped over fifty feet straight down to the sea until he came to a ruined cottage. This building had long ago been abandoned as the sea, eating chunks out of the cliff face, brought the place at last dangerously close to the very edge.
The wolf made his way through the ruin, but once on the other side looped back inland for half a mile and then, keeping to the roads as much as possible, galloped as fast as he could – straight back to the Hunter’s house. And there, as dawn spread across the sky, cold and blond as the wolf’s own flanks, he did a very strange thing indeed. He walked again along the little road that passed by the garden, following his own tracks of twelve hours before, and with a single, fleet leap, cleared the fence and landed lightly in the middle of an earthy rockery. Here, he sniffed about and walked to and fro a couple of times, leaving his prints in the soft earth between the stones. Then he stepped along the rocks embedded in the earth for several metres, leaving no tracks, before jumping back over the fence and into the road. This done, he trotted back behind the house, crept into the long grass again, that gave him a hidden view of the garden, and waited.
*
The two men were already stirring. Soon smoke rose from the chimney and the smells of cooking escaped from the kitchen. Greycub waited quietly behind the wall at the back of the house, his ears pricked for any movement outdoors.
After breakfast the guest departed. The Hunter came out, and stood and waved at the end of the drive while his friend drove away. Then he walked round behind the house and opened a door. Out came Jenny – old now, grizzled and more crooked than before as her legs grew stiff and her old wounds hurt her, but with her nose as sharp as ever. Behind his wall Greycub stiffened; he did not want the little dog to find him, not yet. But the Hunter led her away to the lawn at the front of the house, away from him and his marks and scent. Jenny sniffed about the lawn while her master wandered to and fro, getting a breath of fresh air, then they both went back into the house. After an hour or so the Hunter came out again with Jenny, got into his car and drove off.
The Hunter took a walk round the garden every morning, while Jenny had her morning run. By sheer chance, that morning, and the following one, neither he nor Jenny found the tracks that Greycub had left. Greycub moved himself from the long grass to a ditch further back, where Jenny would be less likely to find him. Day and night he lay still, not daring to venture out in case his new scent obscured the one he had laid down. There was a little water in the ditch, but nothing at all to eat. The wolf swallowed down his hunger; food was not important to him at this time.
On the morning of the third day the Hunter got up late, and did not arrive in the garden with Jenny until after nine o’clock. He was growing lazy, and began to think he must take his next expedition more seriously, before he grew soft. As he walked in the cool autumn morning around his little house, he spotted some flowers, gentians, blooming on the small patch of rockery near to the road. The Hunter had neglected the plants since he moved here, gardening was not his hobby. But he was pleased to see the pretty blue and walked over to have a look. Behind him, Jenny trotted, sniffing here and there and shaking her aching limbs.
As he stood looking at the little cluster of bright flowers, the little dog sniffed around the edges of the flowerbed. The Hunter watched her. Suddenly, she became electric. She sniffed here and there, rapidly, excitedly. The Hunter felt a thrill go through him. If Jenny was excited some prey must be near. But he was puzzled at the same time. There was nothing living in these parts that called for such excitement.
‘What is it, girl?’ he called softly. ‘What have you found? Wildcat?’
Jenny looked up and whined. Then she crouched down on her belly, fawning and rolled over with her legs in the air. This was strange behaviour. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he demanded. The little dog trotted away to one side and shook her head, yipping as if to call him. The Hunter ignored her but bent down to examine the ground where she had been. He stared at the prints for seconds without understanding what they meant.
‘Wolf,’ he said, without meaning to. He stood up.
The Hunter bared his teeth. The marks, three days old, half crushed by his own shoes, were still unmistakable to him. The dry weather had preserved them perfectly. He wondered what were they doing here, in his garden? The chance was so great he thought for a second that someone was playing a trick on him. But the print was no trick. He knew for certain that an English wolf had stood on this bank recently.
In the same second that the Hunter identified the print as wolf, he recognised it as belonging to Greycub. Five years on and no longer just a cub, but he would have known Greycub’s print anywhere. He was conscious of an itching sensation on the back of his leg where he had been bitten and still had a scar to prove it. Then he went inside, cut and packed some sandwiches, cut some meat for Jenny, swung a rifle over his shoulder, some rounds of ammunition in his pack, and locked up the house. He called Jenny over and took her to the scent. ‘Track him,’ he ordered. Jenny went down on her belly again, cringing as if she did not know what was expected of her. Cursing her stupidity, the Hunter grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and made her sniff the prints, but still Jenny refused to recognise what he wanted and ran to and fro, up and down, yipping and crying. But Greycub had not been cautious, and the Hunter could see by eye that the animal had left the garden and jumped out onto the road. Here there were tracks by the roadside, but confused tracks. It seemed the wolf had gone first one way and then another. But as he examined them Jenny seemed to understand what he wanted and wagging her tail and sniffing the ground, began at last to track. Evidently the wolf was not what his forebears had been. The Hunter could have followed these tracks by eye. It would be an easy hunt.
Man and dog followed along the road and off across the field the way Greycub had gone three days before. The hunt was on.
About half an hour after they had gone, the wolf rose from his lair beyond the garden and went round the house to the road. He lay out of sight for another half an hour by the hedge, then followed behind, checking with his nose that the Hunter was on his track.
The hunt was on.
Although there were many tracks, they were old, and it proved a slower business than the Hunter expected. Jenny was past her best; but still, she seemed to be taking longer than was necessary. The Hunter began to think of her strange behaviour when she found Greycub’s tracks, and he remembered that she had actually tried to lead him away from them. He realised he had seen her act that way once before.
It was then that the Hunter linked her strange behaviour in the garden just now with her behaviour on the motorway, five years before, when Greycub had disappear
ed. Clearly, the cub had not been killed by a car. How then had he eluded Jenny’s sharp nose? He looked at the little dog, so faithful to him all these years. Had she duped him? Had she betrayed him five years ago, and lost him his most wanted prize?
Now that they were on the track, Jenny seemed to have returned to normal. She made the odd mistake, but that was only natural in tracks as old as these – about four days old, the Hunter judged. Several times, they found themselves lost, but faithful little Jenny ran busily to and fro, and picked up the track again, and so the Hunter dismissed the doubts from his mind. Such thoughts – any thoughts – took away from the pleasure and intensity of the hunt. When at this work, his whole being was concentrated in his sense of sight – the way the grass lay; had it been crushed flat some time in the past few days, did it lie close to the ground? – the soft indentation in moss on the brickwork at the end of a ditch, the way the bracken was disturbed. These tiny signs, so slight that even he would not have made anything of them, had he not known there was a wolf about, became vivid, and seemed to flash out of the hedges, jump out of the grass at him. Thought was unnecessary. He became an animal of the eye.
By nightfall they were only just at the coast. The night was clear but dark under the thinnest sliver of moon. The Hunter could have trusted to Jenny’s nose, but now that he had doubted her he decided to hunt by day and go no farther until the light returned.