PTARMIGAN-SHOOTING. 103 



boot, many an enthusiastic sportsman may return without 

 having stumbled on a single bird all day. 



Certainly it is not mere love of shooting that can give ex- 

 citement or piquancy to a wearisome West Highland ptarmigan 

 range. Strip it of its scenery, labour, difficulty, and it is 

 nothing ; but a few brace of ptarmigan, with these adjuncts 

 thrown into the scale, would outweigh, with every true lover 

 of Highland shooting, the heaviest game-bag gathered with 

 little trouble, sometimes even with little fatigue. 



To sally forth alone on a distant and toilsome ptarmigan 

 expedition had a peculiar charm for me. One could thus 

 realise a modicum of the self-reliant independence, nay, 

 even some of the endurance of hardship, at once the unfail- 

 ing characteristic and the boast of the rovers among the 

 American backwoods. 



Even a successful day at white grouse on the West High- 

 land districts never produces an inconveniently heavy game- 

 bag. An attendant, therefore, is little needed, except to give 

 advice, which a man who knows the nature and habits of 

 this bird, has a quick and keen eye, and a brace of steady 

 dogs used to the sport, is far better without. 



In the year 1862 grouse had bred badly (owing to late 

 snows) on the Kuron, the wild stretch of moorland I have 

 just sketched, and which forms the principal range of the 

 Glenfalloch shootings. My second son and I had good sport, 

 however, on the two smaller beats, averaging from twenty to 

 thirty brace a day during August and the first weeks of Sep- 

 tember. The weather also had been very propitious till then, 

 when it broke, and a fair day was a rarity. Wishing to spare 

 the Kuron, and having shot down the full complement that the 

 other moors would bear, I had for a fortnight been looking 

 wistfully towards the ptarmigan hills. Each morning they 

 were enclosed with fogs, and the weather itself was aptly 

 described by an old Highland " kimmer " as " shoory, shoory, 

 shoory, an' rain between." 



