The oldest pines, the three-and-four-hundred-year-olds, know the brush of wolf fur, the soft, deep slap of their footfall on the forest floor. They hand down the sense of wolves to the wolfless generations of young trees, and these grow older remembering the sense of wolves so that they are ready for the wolves’ return, which they know to be inevitable. The oldest tree in the Black Wood of Rannoch is a Scots pine of massive dark strength. When its seed was sown (a casual conspiracy of parent tree and crossbill and wind) it was a tree among many trees. Rannoch Moor undulates to far mountain walls at every compass point, an inland sea that breaks on mountain shores, but a sea of rock and heather and lochans and peat, of red deer and red foxes, of wildcats, of grey crows and golden eagles, of summer skylarks and winter swans, of wind-weary grass and the buried bones of dead trees. Once it was wooded from shore to shore. The Black Wood survives along the south shore of the moor. The old trees still remember the touch of wolf skin on tree skin, still long for it.
