I A Gossip on a Sutherland Hill-side 225 



sooner the better, for of all snarling, ill-conditioned, 

 game-destroying brutes in the world, the wild-cat .is 

 the worst ; and no one can hear their demoniacal 

 caterwaulings at nighi, without being seized with an 

 instant and intense desire to extirpate the race there 

 and then. The wolves were the pest of Sutherland 

 down to the end of the seventeenth century, the last 

 one having been destroyed about 1700. One 

 Timothy Pont, who travelled through Sutherland 

 about 1650, speaks of it thus in his MSS. in the 

 Advocates' Library : — 



' It is exceedinglie weel stored with fishes, both 

 from the sea and its own rivers, as also dear, roe, 

 and dyvers kinds of wild beasts, specially heir never 

 lack wolves, more than are expedictit ; it is weel stored 

 with wood also.' 



I am in the habit of taking something readable 

 with me to the hill, to pass away the time when I 

 am waiting for the deer to rise, — a habit strongly 

 reprobated by Donald, who assures me that some 

 day a scart of wind will snatch the paper out of my 

 hand, and ' birl it o'er the hill like a ghaist,' to the 

 terrification of all the deer ; but still I do it ; and 

 having by chance the account of the destruction of the 

 last wolves in Scotland in my pocket, you shall hear 

 it, though you may have heard it before. Mine 

 is, I assure you, taken from the original MSS., and 

 I would not alter a word for the world, for it is evi- 

 dently taken direct from the Gaelic by the author : — 



' There is a solitary moorland lake near the 



Q 



