THE

BADMINTON MAGazine

August 1896

6

THE GROUSE

BY ALEXANDER INNES SHAND

THEY are the Hieland hills,' said Baillie Jarvie very seriously, when he was guiding Frank Osbaldistone to keep tryst with Rob Roy. The worthy Baillie was familiar enough with the unkempt Celts who drove shaggy black cattle through the streets of Glasgow; but even he, though well friended by the Macgregor, shrank from venturing behind the dusky barrier which divided civilisation from savagery. As Macaulay remarks, no one cared for scenery in those days, and what we now admire as the grandeur of nature brought many unpleasant experiences to the adventurers. There were bridgeless rivers with perilous fords or ferries the rills turned to cataracts when the rains were on, washing away whole yards of the break-neck path into the flood which foamed in the depths of the glen. Dirk and claymore flashed out on slight provocation; and the hardships were even greater than the dangers. The castles of the chiefs stood far apart, and were by no means comfortable even when you were assured of hospitable welcome. In the shealings and wretched change-houses the wayfarer had to be content with bannocks of oats or barley, with goat's-milk cheese, and perhaps with the unwonted luxury of 'braxy' mutton, from some sheep that had come to an untimely end. There might be collops of venison, if the good man had had luck on the hill; but the fortunate

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possessor of a musket or gun seldom cared to waste powder and shot on the muir-fowl. In short, with the stranger who had rashly committed himself to the Highlands, the one consuming desire was to get safely out again.

As to the grouse, they were by no means so abundant as might be supposed. The balance of wild nature had never been disturbed, and the birds were kept down by innumerable enemies. The eagles and peregrines were left undisturbed in their eyries from generation to generation; they increased and multiplied amidst legions of the smaller hawks; the carrion crows went hunting for eggs indefatigably, and where the young broods had chipped the shell and were fluttering among the tender shoots of the heather, there were foxes and wild cats continually on the prowl. What a magical change has been wrought by roads, railroads, &c., with the preserving that followed as a natural consequence! We may cry a coronach over the departed eagles and falcons, for they leave a sad blank in the poetry of these northern scenes, but the grouse may crow merrily over their disappearance. The keeper and the bloody-minded Saxon shooter are really the best friends of the grouse. It is true the birds have to pass through a fiery ordeal in the first weeks of the season, although sometimes rains will abate or nearly quench the fury of the furnace. But when they have packed,' they are safe for the rest of the year, except from casualties to solitary birds in the black frosts, and in the moors where the system of driving has been introduced, which the grouse must resent as diabolical and unsportsmanlike.

Nowadays the flight of Southern sportsmen to the North comes off more punctually than the migrations of the swallows. Formerly the educated Englishman had a faint idea that there were such back-of-the-world districts as Lochaber, Badenoch, and Braemar. Doubtless, he would have known even less of them had he not read the story of the successive rebellions. Now the names of all the more famous moors and forests are familiar in Saxon ears as household words. You see them staring you in the face from the land-agents' placards, as you as you take your strolls in Piccadilly or Pall Mall; and sometimes they come to tantalise you sadly when detained unseasonably in town, with a waft of the peat reek or a fresh breath of the heather, though a good moor need seldom go-a-begging. In these dismal days of agricultural depression, your only safe landed investment is the mountain or the moor-if we may make a bull-the loch or the river. The crack salmon stream runs over golden sands, and the

grouse crow joyously over the heather that is far more profitable to the proprietor than wheat.

The mountain landlord has no reason to complain of his rents; yet to us the marvel seems to be that the highest are not even higher. The cost of each brace of birds to the lessor of the shootings may be anything that a statistical fancy chooses to fix it at. What is that trivial detail to a capitalist? He is not bargaining for the table in Leadenhall on his cook's behalf. The sorrow of many a South African millionaire or exotic speculator from Wall Street or Nevada-not to speak of somewhat smaller men-is that he must dine on a chop and tapioca when he could afford fricassees of pearls. It must be the best economy to take those internal complaints in time by a judicious and agreeable course of treatment. There is nothing in this world like a month on the moors, for health, happiness, and innocent exhilaration. There is nothing more certain to stave off the consultation which sends the patient on wearisome voyages round the world, or drives him to cessation of labour, and the consequent ennui which dismisses him as surely to the grave by a more circuitous route.

Some people object to the Highland climate. It certainly has not the sunny monotony of the Soudan, or even of Sicily, but really its charm is in its infinite variety. It rains a good deal, no doubt, but the rain does no one any harm so long as he keeps on the move. We confess that one may get tired of confinement to the shooting lodge when the water is plashing steadily against the windows. More especially when tantalised by a rising barometer, till tempted to take it out of doors like the Aberdonian farmer and ask it whether it winna believe its own een.' But life can never be worth the living without the alternations of fear and hope. You look implicitly forward to the ecstatic morning, when the moors will be bathed in a blaze of sunshine. We love to be out in all weathers-except when remorseless downpour has made shooting and walking alike impracticable-nor do we know what kind of weather is most likeable. Perhaps that sunny clearing up of which we have spoken, when Nature has gone in most effectually for an autumn cleaning, when the heather is steaming in the warmth, and the heat has been drawing up the mists till they hang in fringes and festoons from the waists of the mountains; when distances are so deceptive that you fancy you might see a blue hare on the new-bathed rock a couple of miles away; when each rill has swelled to a torrent, and the torrents are still coming down in speat. Indeed, the worst of