THE HIGHLANDS IN WINTER 57 



are accustomed to regard red deer as beasts of the 

 mountain, like chamois and ibex, but naturally they 

 prefer the woodland and vale. Greedy man has 

 grasped all the fat places of the earth, so deer 

 have been driven to the high grounds, and have 

 deteriorated greatly in consequence. Highland 

 antlers, even the best of them, are puny affairs 

 compared with those produced in German forests 

 or in Windsor Park. The immense horns which 

 are dug out of lowland mosses and estuaries show 

 what magnificent heads were produced in Scotland 

 when the deer were free to roam where they listed. 

 As long, however, as a stag can get a dry bed, 

 he can endure a very low temperature, and a hard 

 winter like this tells with less severity on a red deer 

 than a wet one. 



There is news from Rannoch, the bleakest tract 

 of moorland in Scotland, of the heaviest snowfall 

 within living memory. It will be hardly credible 

 to those who know the red deer only when the 

 stags are in 'pride of grease' in August and 

 September, when they are the wariest of all beasts 

 of the chase, that the poor things have been so 

 humbled by starvation, that it is with difficulty 

 they can be kept out of the forester's and farmer's 



