used to traverse the country from one sheep farm to another, and 

 days were organised for attacks upon special cairns in which foxes 

 were known to be. The fox hunter himself kept a strong, varmint 

 breed of terrier, and the shepherds and keepers on each estate did 

 the same, so that when an onslaught was organised upon Reynard 

 the stiffest and hardest duty fell to the terriers, for they were 

 expected to go into the cairns and tackle the inmates single handed, 

 deep in the bowels of the rocks, where no man, and indeed no 

 other dog, could enter because of the narrowness of the passages. 

 The terrier generally selected for this stern conflict was not the 

 white one, who was regarded as weaker than his brethren with more 

 colour in their coats— though we think that in this his breeders did 

 him an injustice." 



In those days sandy and brindled dogs were looked upon as 

 the hardier, but one or two families in the Isle of Skye made a 

 habit of preserving the white or sandy and destroying the brindles. 

 Among these were the Macleods, Lairds of Drynoch. As a daughter 

 of Norman Macleod, born in 1800, was wont to declare that her 

 father and grandfather kept terriers of this colour, we are taken 

 back into the early part of the Eighteenth century. This seems 

 conclusive, but so much conflicting evidence has been brought 

 forward during the last two or three years that it is difficult to 

 unravel the truth from amid the tangled threads of controversy. 

 Probably most of the modern dogs are largely indebted to terriers 



