Post #1809208

#NowReading #NonFiction #NatureWriting #Wolf #Wolves "For you will search the oldest written texts we know and all those that followed until Scotland lost interest in its absent wolf over a hundred years ago, but you will search in vain for the real living wolf, for it is not there. Myths survive but 'only in the faintest echoes, all meaning lost, their outer shells turned into cosmic tales.' The stories - the countless stories - about how innumerable 'last wolves' met their fate are exactly that - stories. Those stories and many others that paint the wolf as a bloody-fanged disciple of the devil punctuate the face of our landscape from the northmost Scotland to southmost England. Each one is nothing more than a headstone to the passing, not of a wild animal, but of an oral tradition. The real wild wolf, that may or may not have lived around the edges of the storytellers' lives, was never allowed to put in an appearance in the stories." from The Last Wolf by #JimCrumley (Birlinn Ltd, 2010)