— 
ANIMAL LIFE OF NORTH-EAST SCOTLAND 21 
post-glacial period, the most impressive of the migrants—for there is no 
indication that the mammoth or the giant fallow-deer ever reached these 
northern parts—included reindeer (of which we recently found fragments 
of more than goo antlers in a cave in Sutherland), the elk, largest of 
existing deer, the huge ancestors of modern red deer, and the great 
extinct ox, Bos primigenius. By these routes passed the lemming and 
the mountain hare, and the beaver may have found its way to the river 
Ness ; thus came the bear, the lynx, the arctic fox and the wolf, hard on 
the track of the grass-eaters. 
Most of these early explorers of northern Scotland have long since 
disappeared ; we know of their presence only from bones recovered 
from the peat-mosses or from the kitchen middens of early human settle- 
ments, rarely from vaguetradition. But it is characteristic of the wildness 
of the district that some of them lingered on long after they had become 
extinct in the south. In the underground ‘ eird-houses ’ at Kildrummy 
on Donside have been found the bones of a small horse, a reminder 
that ‘ wild horses ’ once roamed the forests, for even in 1507 it is recorded 
that a herd inhabited the Forest of Birse, though the chances are that 
they were the wild progeny of a primitive domesticated breed. Wolves 
were the last of the great carnivores to be exterminated. In r1o10 
King Malcolm III, on his return from the victory at Mortlach in Moray, 
is said to have been attacked by an enormous wolf in the Forest of Stocket, 
the site of which is now within the north-western boundary of Aberdeen 
city. Ata much later date the plaint of John Taylor, the Water Poet of 
London, gives a vivid impression of the wildness of the country and its 
tenants, when in 1618, during a visit to ‘ the goode Lord Erskine ’ at the 
“ Brea of Marr’ (Braemar), he relates: ‘ I was the space of twelve days 
before I saw either house, corn-field, or habitation for any creature, but 
deer, wild horses, wolves, and such like creatures, which made me doubt 
that I should never have seen a house again.’ Before the seventeenth 
century had closed, however, the wolves had all but disappeared : in the 
north-east one was slain in Kirkmichael Parish in Banffshire in 1644 ; 
but persistent tradition relates that so late as 1743 the final survivor of 
the wolves of Great Britain was tracked and destroyed, after it had killed 
two children, in the wild hills between the rivers Findhorn and Spey. 
The disappearance of the wolves is symptomatic of many, but not of 
all the changes which have made the present-day fauna of the district 
what it is ; and an analysis of the changes may afford a better understanding 
of the composition of the animal life of the district than could a catalogue 
of species. 
SECULAR CHANGES AND A ReLicT Fauna.—During the millennia which 
have passed since the ice-covering of the Glacial Age disappeared, the 
climate has been constantly changing. Its vagaries are revealed in any 
deep peat-bog, where successive layers of peat show, in the composition 
of their plant remains, the alternation of drier and moister periods, and 
from the oldest layers to the most recent, an amelioration of climate 
from Arctic and sub-Arctic to the temperate conditions of to-day. ‘The 
Arctic period had a fauna of its own, of which Aberdeenshire contains 
some marine relics in its glacial clays, but although the Arctic fauna 
