120 DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION OF ANIMAL LIFE 



the forest tracks to give refuge to wanderers, caught by 

 nightfall in outlying districts. The site of one of these 

 refuges is commemorated in the name of the "Spittal" of 

 Glenshee, in Perthshire. 



The direct interference of man with the Wolf in Scotland 

 failed in its object : hereditary lords and legal governors were 

 as impotent in face of the wolfish breed as were the suffering 

 country people themselves. But where direct slaughter failed, 

 indirect attack banished the Wolves from Scotland, for in 

 the end it became evident that piece-meal slaughter must 

 give way to an extensive destruction of the woodlands in 

 which the Wolves lurked and multiplied in safety. So began 

 that great burning of the forests, the memory of which is 

 still kept fresh in the traditions of many a Highland glen 

 (seep. 318). 



And now the Scottish race of Wolves was doomed. It is 

 true a few survivors lingered in woods that were left. In the 

 early years of the seventeenth century, Wolves were hunted 

 in the neighbourhood of Stirling and in Assynt, and in 

 Breadalbane each tenant had to make every year four 

 spears for wolf-hunting; in 1618, Taylor, on his "Pennyles 

 Pilgrimage," saw in the "Brea of Marr," "wolves and such 

 like creatures, which made me doubt that I should never see 

 a house again"; the "Accompt Book" of Sir Robert Gordon, 

 Tutor of Sutherland, mentions, in 1621, "sex poundis 

 threttein [thirteen] shillings four pennies gieven this year to 

 thomas gordoune for the killing of ane wolf, and that conforme 

 to the acts of the countrey," and the same diarist a few years 

 later, specifies the Wolf in his list of the wild creatures of 

 Sutherland. Yet before the end of the century, the Wolf had 

 been all but exterminated. The last Wolf in the north-eastern 

 counties was slain in Kirkmichael Parish, Banffshire, in 1644; 

 the last in the wilds of Perthshire was killed by Sir Ewen 

 Cameron of Lochiel at Killiecrankie in 1680, and about the 

 same time one was killed in Forfarshire. But they probably 

 lingered a little longer in the wilder and more wooded 

 districts, for persistent tradition records that so late as 1743 

 a Wolf, which had slain two children on the hills by the 

 Findhorn, was tracked and killed by a Highland hunter, 

 Macqueen by name. 



So the Wolf disappeared from Scottish hills, though many 



