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| Ben Vrackie from the theatre car park |
Winter Words Festival is one of Scotland's leading book festivals and held every January at The Festival Theatre, Pitlochry. This year two authors on the programme caught our attention - nature writer Jim Crumley talking about his new book The Last Wolf, and mountaineer Stephen Venables giving a lecture entitled In the Steps of Shackleton.
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| Pitlochry Festival Thearte - not done justice by this photograph |
The Last Wolf
Note: this is not a book review.
We are both big fans of Jim Crumley's writing and I spotted this book in Bookmark in Grantown-on-Spey last September. So while Lynne, happy that her own book was on display, chatted to the owner, I surreptitiously bought a copy of The Last Wolf for her and smuggled it out of the shop.
As Crumley said at his excellent talk last Friday, he is unashamedly 'pro-wolf', and the book essentially debunks the myths surrounding this beautiful shy creature which has, since ancient times, been the victim of horrendous black propaganda and slaughter; and he argues the case for the wolf's reintroduction to Scotland citing Yellowstone National Park and Norway as examples of what can be done, and the benefits to an eco-system which has been thrown out of balance by the extirpation of this top predator. Clearly some people will have misgivings about this idea - landowners and farmers particularly - and many are downright hostile but we, like Crumley, are 'unashamedly pro-wolf' and were so before we read his book.
According to Jim Crumley, Scotland could support three, maybe four packs at most (about 30 wolves) and if brought in from a country where their prey had been deer, then that is what they would hunt, this being transferred from generation to generation. Consequently, a healthier deer population would result with enormous benefits to the eco-system. That apart the wolf would, at last, be restored to its natural homeland.
Sadly, we think it unlikely that wolves will be re-introduced to Scotland in our lifetime, but we hope we are wrong. During 'question time', someone in the audience told how she'd had the wonderful experience of coming face to face (20 yards away) with one wolf while walking in Italy recently, and would, she said, be talking about this marvellous encounter for the rest of her life. Who wouldn't?
".......standing as a link to the kinds of mysteries that lie well outside our pipedreams of manipulation and control. Seeing a wolf in the wild can feel like one of the final frontiers of nature - a frontier that can never be possessed" Dougals W. Smith and Gary Ferguson, Decade of the Wolf - Returning the Wild to Yellowstone (2005)
In the Steps of Shackleton
For us, it's nearly a 100 mile round trip from home to the Festival Theatre, but an opportunity to listen to Stephen Venables talk about Shackleton and his own traverse of South Georgia in October 2008 was not to be missed. So, it was back up the A9 to Pitlochry on the Saturday.
The story of Shackleton's 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica via the South Pole is well known. His ship Endurance crushed by the Antarctic ice, Shackleton set off with five companions in a tiny lifeboat in search of help, leaving his crew stranded on Elephant Island. After 800 miles across the Southern Ocean they landed on the south coast of South Georgia and from here, with Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, Shackleton crossed (it was by then 1916) the unmapped mountains to finally reach the whaling station at Stromness.
Venables is an excellent, humorous storyteller. Using his own superb photographs and film footage, together with originals taken on the Shackleton expedition* he illustrated that first incredibly dangerous crossing which he has done twice, once with Reinhold Messner and Conrad Anker in the autumn of 2000 when the route was bare ice, rock and littered with open crevasses.
On his most recent trip to South Georgia in October 2008 he and his party were able to follow the route on skis, hauling and lowering their pulks - one, inevitably, finding its way into a half-concealed crevasse. Of course as Venables pointed out, neither of these trips was a fight for survival - on the first he was making a film and the second was a recreational expedition.
South Georgia is a stunning place so it's no surprise that Venables is hooked - he's off there again in November.
He's on tour with this talk so if he's coming near you, I recommend you go along and listen.
* see: Endurance - The Greatest Adventure Story Ever Told - Alfred Lansing (2001 paperback)
