32 A HIGHLAND LAIRD 



become grander and more extensive. Lochlyle, with 

 its sheltered bays and wooded islands, unfolds itself 

 in all its length beneath you, running out and in 

 among the purple hills, and losing itself from your 

 sight in land-locked little harbours. Inland you follow 

 the course of the strath, with here and there a solitary 

 house or a shepherd's shieling ; while as you ascend 

 higher still into the zones of the ptarmigan you open 

 up rocky vistas through the surrounding heights, 

 through which you get glimpses of the carse-lands in 

 the distant Lowlands. The mountain air has a per- 

 ceptible scent of the brine and the sea-weed, as well 

 it may have, for it is salt water you are looking down 

 upon in Lochlyle ; and the surge of the Atlantic is 

 breaking at the back of those splintered peaks that 

 hem in the horizon away to the westward. 



More exciting, perhaps, than the best of the grouse- 

 shooting, is a day up there among the ptarmigan in 

 the late autumn, when they are beginning to change 

 to their winter plumage. Not that the shooting them 

 is difficult, for the birds are always in extremes. At 

 first they get up wild enough, and go circling round 

 the mountain-tops high in the air like swift flights 

 of carrier-pigeons ; but when you have flushed them 

 several times they will cower down motionless among 

 the lichen-covered stones, from which their mottled 

 feathers are scarcely to be distinguished. But there 

 is a strange pleasure in the crisp keenness of the air, 

 the magnificence of the bird's-eye views over the 

 panoramas that unfold themselves around you, and 



