THE WOLF. 125 



end of the sixteentli century, and among the efforts to get rid'^i 

 them, was the burning of the beautiful forests of the bonnie land. 

 Mr. James Hay Allan, in a note appended to his poem, entitled 

 " The last deer of Beann Doran," pubhshed in 1822, writes upon 

 this subject, " Almost every district of the Highlands bears the 

 traces of the vast forests with which at no very distant period the 

 hills and heaths were covered. Some have decayed with age, but^ 

 large tracts were purposely destroyed in the latter end of the six- 

 teenth century. On the south side of Beann Nevis, a large pine- 

 forest, which extended from the western braes of Lochabar to the 

 black water and the mosses of Eanach, was burned to expel the 

 wolves. In the neighbourhood of Loch Sloi, a tract of woods, 

 nearly twenty miles in extent, was consumed for the same 

 purpose.*' 



The last wolf killed in Scotland, according to the opinion of 

 numerous writers, was an animal slain by Sir Ewan Cameron, of 

 Lochiel, in 1680. 



This date, however, does not appear to be correct, and has 

 been copied probably from Pennant's " Tour in Scotland." The 

 wolf killed by Sir Ewan Cameron in 1660, in Loch-Aber, was the 

 last in ihat district, not of its species in Scotland, for Messrs. 

 Stuart, ill an article on the " Extinct Animals of Scotland/' which 

 forms one of the notes to " The Lays of the Deer Forestj" mention 

 several as having been killed at a later date. According to the 

 account here given, the last, there was then every reason to believe, 

 was killed in the district of the Findhorn, in the ancient forest of 

 Tarnaway, in Morayshire, at a place between Fi-Guithas and Pall- 

 a-chi-ocain, according to popular chronology no longer ago than 

 1743, by MacQueen of the latter place. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, 

 in his " Account of the Moray Floods of August, 1829," describes 

 this incidentj and as it refers to the last wolf of Scotland, 

 whose death made the species extinct, the story is interesting. 

 " Immediately within the pass (of Eanack), and on the right-hand 

 bank (of the Findhorn) stand the ruins of the interesting httle 

 mansion-house of Pollochock. MacQueen, the laird of this little 

 property;, is said to have been nearer seven than six feet high, 

 proportionately built, and active as a roebuck. Though he was 



