Groam House Museum, Rosemarkie, 4 November 2003

BACK IN THE summer I saw Bob Pegg perform his one-man show The Last Wolf to a packed audience at Ardross. I saw it again as was part of this year’s ‘Tales at Martinmas’ Festival in Ross-shire, and found it equally enthralling.

This time out, Bob was joined on the floor – one hesitates to write stage, for there wasn’t one – by harpist Bill Taylor. The performance took place in the Groam House Museum in a chamber dedicated to the symbolic sculpture of the Picts. The wolf was, and perhaps remains, as mysterious as these distant ancestors.

The Picts would have known the wolf, of course. There were still plenty of them around then. Bob told some of the legends surrounding the demise of the wolf in the Highlands. There are several contenders for the place where the last one was killed, a contest that will never be won in my view, but one that has generated some colourful stories.

Did the last wolf fall to McQueen the mighty hunter at Darnaway? Or was it bludgeoned into extinction by a woman with a skillet in Strathglass? Or was it stabbed to death by Polson in Glen Loth?

At the start of the show Bob tapped out a rhythm and sang about primitive hunters huddling around their fire, safe in their cave, while outside in the night the wild wolves howl. He deployed some dramatic imagery here, talking of red amber eyes glowing in the firelight.

He did not let pass the irony that the wolf, like mankind, is a social animal that cares for its young. Perhaps it is this similarity as much as the danger the wolf presented that led our ancestors to see significance in the wolf. The wolf, said Bob, is a mirror in which we see some of our greatest aspirations and our greatest fears as individuals.

It has also become a symbol of mankind’s destruction of nature. Its re-introduction to the Highlands remains, however, a proposition requiring careful examination.

The 75-minute show incorporated tales and music. The former included the Norse legend of the binding of the wolf Fenrir in the magic chain Gleipnir, the fable of the wolf and the bear, and an Arthurian story from thirteenth-century Wales.

The songs included a ballad about the wolfers, the wolf hunters of the Wild West, ascribed by Bob to a writer and versifier Ernest MacArthur, and a werewolf ditty that became a rare single record in its day.

Bill Taylor provided a backing for Bob’s stirring, at times dramatic, at times humorous, presentation with appropriate music on lyre and harp. Since moving to the Highlands in the early 1990s, Bill has become a familiar figure at many cultural events. As well as making harps and teaching the instrument with Ardival Harps in Strathpeffer, he plays regularly with Coronach, with James Ross in the duo The Art of Music, and with the Belgian quartet Quadrivium.

Tales at Martinmas 2003 is part of the Merry Dancers Storytelling Project, a 3-year initiative by The Highland Council in Ross and Cromarty, supported by RACE and made possible by a generous award from the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund.

© Jim Miller, 2003