894 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



for food and clothing; he hunted others, notably wolves, to secure 

 greater safety for himself and for his flocks. 



Even more important was the great reduction of the forests, in 

 which many of the mammals, such as beavers, pine-martens, and 

 red-deer, found shelter. The spread of agriculture and the persistent 

 reduction of wild places must also have made life too hard for some, 

 the shy types especially. We do not blame well-regulated "sport", 

 for that tends on the whole towards preservation. It is probable 

 that the fox would have followed the wolf, if it had not been for 

 fox-hunting. 



Another way of looking at the dwindling list of British mammals 

 is to ask how those that are common hold their own. The mole 

 discovered the underworld; the hedgehog is nocturnal, and rolls 

 itself up into an invulnerable ball ; the harvest mouse and the shrews 

 are elusively minute; the squirrels store for the hard months; the 

 hare is inconspicuous and full of speed and resource ; the stoat lives 

 on its nimble wits; and so one might continue through the list. One 

 must be careful not to include either of the rats as British; for the 

 black rat came about the time of the Crusades and the brown rat 

 early in the eighteenth century. According to some authorities the 

 wild rabbit is another alien, which probably came over with the 

 Conqueror. The fallow-deer was also introduced. Another important 

 point is that the only domesticated mammal that was not intro- 

 duced from elsewhere is the pig. 



It is interesting to inquire into the varied tenacity of the mammals 

 that we have lost. Thus wolves lasted much longer than their 

 associates, the lynx and the brown bear, and were indeed in the 

 sixteenth century so abundant that organised hunting was still 

 enforced by law. The heavy protection of tombs had in part a refer- 

 ence to the ravages of the wolf; and in some places the dead were 

 buried on islands to be out of the reach of the marauders. "He digs 

 the dead from out the sod, and gnaws them under the stars." Some 

 of the remote hospices, or "spittals", like the well-known Spittal 

 of Glenshee, were mainly intended to shelter belated travellers from 

 the prowling wolves. 



According to Dr. James Ritchie, who has given a careful account 

 of the matter in his masterly Animal Life in Scotland (1920), the 

 last wolf in the north-eastern counties of Scotland was slain in 

 Banffshire in 1644, and the last in Perthshire was killed at Killie- 

 crankie in 1680 by Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel. But there are 

 traditions of later dates, especially one that records how in 1743 a 

 wolf, that had killed two children on the hills by the Findhorn, was 

 tracked and destroyed by a Highland hunter, MacQueen by name. 

 It is interesting to notice the number of place-names that tell of 

 the previous presence of wolves, names like Wolfelee, Wolf-gill, 

 and Wolfstan. 



