4 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE GROUSE 



recognised ; but that circumstance only led to its 

 increased pursuit in the days when Englishmen killed 

 the ' pootes ' as well as the parent bird in the nesting 

 season. Happily those evil days have well-nigh passed 

 into oblivion. For us moderns the name of grouse 

 has a fragrance of its own. Its bare mention suffices 

 to set us dreaming of the fresh, breezy hillside, with 

 its varied animal life and endless expanse of purple 

 heather. Considering how widely the term grouse 

 circulates, there is a certain quaintness in the fact 

 that the word is not a British one at all, but only an 

 addition to our language and of doubtful origin. 

 Our forefathers borrowed the word from abroad, 

 apparently from an old French adjective griesche, 

 signifying grey or speckled. From this originated a 

 plural word grice, printed thus in 1611 by Cotgrave, 

 who used it to denote the ' moor-henne,' the female, 

 as he tells us, of the ' mooregame.' The grouse was 

 originally the moor-fowl, moor-game, moor-cock, or 

 muir-fowl, and preserves these titles at the present 

 day in many districts of both England and Scotland. 

 Willughby called it the red game, and very properly. 

 But the plural word grice was early modified into the 

 singular grows. Professor Newton has shown that this 

 title was first applied to the blackcock, notably in an 

 ordinance for the household of Henry VIII., dated 



