GROUSE SHOOTING 



could have done a detonator in the hands of the devil him- 

 self ? . . . 



' But let us off to the Moor ! Piro ! Ponto ! Basta ! to 

 your paws, and O'Bronte, unfurl your tail to heaven. Pointers ! 

 ye are a noble trio. White, O Ponto ! art thou as the foam 

 of the sea. Piro ! thou tan of all tans ! red art thou as the 

 dun-deer's hide, and fleet as he while thou rangest the mountain 

 brow, now hid in heather, and now re-appearing over the rocks. 

 Waiir hawk, Basta ! — for finest scented though be thy scarlet 

 nostrils, one bad trick alone hast thou ; and whenever that 

 grey wing glances from some pillar-stone in the wilderness, 

 headlong goest thou, O lawless negro ! But behave thyself 

 to-day, Basta ! and let the kestrel unheeded sail or sun herself 

 on the cliff. As for thee, O'Bronte ! the sable dog with the 

 star-bright breast, keep thou like a serf at our heels, and when 

 our course lies over the fens and marshes, thou mayest sweep 

 like a hairy hurricane among the flappers, and haply, to-day, 

 grip the old drake himself, and with thy fan-like tail proudly 

 spread in the wind, deposit at thy master's feet, with a smile, 

 the monstrous mallard. 



' But in what direction shall we go, callants — towards what 

 airt shall we turn our faces ? Over yonder cliffs shall we ascend, 

 and descend into Glen-Creran, where the stony regions that 

 the ptarmigan love melt away into miles of the grousey 

 heather, which, ere we near the salmon-haunted Loch so 

 beautiful, loses itself in woods that mellow all the heights of 

 Glen Ure and Fasnacloigh with silvan shades, wherein the 

 cushat coos, and the roe glides through the secret covert ? 

 Or shall we away up by Kinloch-Etive, and Melnatorran, and 

 Mealgayre, into the Solitude of Streams, that from all their 

 lofty sources down to the far distant Loch have never yet 

 brooked, nor will they ever brook, the bondage of bridges, 

 save of some huge stone flung across some chasm, or trunk of a 

 tree — none but trunks of trees there, and all dead for centuries 

 — ^that had sunk down where it grew, and spanned the flood 

 that eddies round it with a louder music ? Wild region ! yet 

 M 89 



