232 WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS. [CHAP. xxx. 



CHAPTER XXX. 



Fox-hunting in the Highlands. 



I HAVE very little to say on this most momentous of all sporting 

 subjects ; and that little will, I fear, be sadly 



" Unmusical to Melton ears, 

 And harsh in sound to Quorne." 



But what are a set of poor fellows like us to do. living here 

 amongst mountains, and ravines, and torrents, and deep water- 

 courses, and morasses, against none of which the best horse that 

 ever put foot on turf could contend for five minutes? It took 

 me, I must confess, some time before I could get over all the 

 finer tone of my Leicestershire feelings ; and I have no doubt 

 that I blushed a perfect scarlet the first time that I doubled up 

 a fox with a rifle-ball ; but now, rendered callous by use and 

 necessity, I can do execution upon him without a pang. 



In Scotland the fox holds the first place among " vermin.'' I 

 do not think that a mountain-fox would live long before a pack 

 of regular fox-hounds, but in his own country he is well able to 

 take care of himself. He is a handsome powerful fellow ; and in 

 size and strength more like a wolf than a Lowland fox, and well 

 he may be, since his food consists of mutton and lamb, grouse 

 and venison. His stronghold is under some huge cairn, or among 

 the fragments that strew the bottom of some rocky precipice, 

 perhaps three thousand feet above the sea. In those mountain 

 solitudes he does not confine his depredations to the night ; I 

 have often encountered him in broad daylight ; and through my 

 deer-glass have watched his manner of hunting the ptarmigan, 

 which is not so neat, but appears quite as successful, as the tac- 

 tics of the cut. By an unobservant eye, the track of a fox is 

 easily mistaken for that of a dog. The print is somewhat 

 rounder, but the chief difference is the superior neatness of the 

 impression, and the exactness of the steps, the hind-foot just co- 



