170 



THE NEW BOOK OF THE DOG. 



CH. TALISMAN by ch st. ronan s ranger- 

 bred AND OWNED BY MRS. H. ARMSTRONG. 

 Photograph by Russell. 



in the Grampians among the Picts, who 

 coveted the dog. To console them the king 

 made them a gift of a pair of his hounds, 

 but, not wholly content, they stole his 

 favourite. The thieves were pursued, and 

 a bloody battle followed, in which sixty 

 good Scots and a hundred Picts were slain, 

 before the dog was restored to his rightful 

 owner. 



From that time onward, Scottish nobles 

 cherished their strains of Deerhound, seeking 

 glorious sport in the Highland forests. In 

 Pitscottie's " History of Scotland " (1528) 

 it is said that " the King desired all gentle- 

 men that had dogges that war guid to bring 

 theme to hunt in the saides boundis quhilk 

 the most pairt of the noblemen of the High- 

 lands did, such as the Earles of Huntlie, 

 Argyle, and Athole, who brought their 

 Deerhoundes with theme and hunted with 

 his majestic" The red deer belonged by 

 inexorable law to the kings of Scotland, 

 and great drives, which often lasted for 

 several days, were made to round up the 

 herds into given neighbourhoods for the 

 pleasure of the court, as in the reign of 



-CH. CRAIGIE. 



Queen Mary. But the 

 organised coursing of 

 deer by courtiers ceased 

 during the Stuart 

 troubles, and was left 

 to servants, the pursuit 

 of men being regarded 

 as more suitable for the 

 occupation of a gentle- 

 man. 



At the time when Dr. 

 Johnson made his tour 

 in the Hebrides, deer 

 hunting was still mainly 

 in the hands of retain- 

 ers, who thus replen- 

 ished their chief's larder. 

 "The stags of the 

 mountains are less than 

 those of our parks and 

 forests," wrote Johnson, 

 with reference to sport 

 in the Isle of Skye. 

 "The deer are not 

 driven with horns and 

 hounds. A sportsman, with his gun in his 

 hand, watches the animal, and when he 

 has wounded him, traces him by the blood. 

 They have a race of brindled Greyhounds, 

 larger and stronger than those with which 

 we course hares, and these are the only dogs 

 used bv them for the chase." Boswell 

 mentions that Mr. Grant, of Glenmoriston, 

 permitted any stranger to range his forest 

 after deer, in the belief that nobody could 

 do them any injury. The stag was valued 

 only for the amount of venison it might 

 yield. The abandonment of the sport and 

 the gradual disappearance of the boar and 

 the wolf naturally caused the Deerhound to 

 decline both in number and in size and 

 strength, and by the end of the eighteenth 

 century the breed had become scarce. 



The revival of deerstalking dates back 

 hardly further than a hundred years. It 

 reached its greatest popularity in the High- 

 lands at the time when the late Queen and 

 Prince Albert were in residence at Balmoral. 

 Solomon, Hector, and Bran were among the 

 Balmoral hounds. Bran was an especially 

 fine animal — one of the best of his time, 



