248 Mr. J. Hardy on the Wild Cat in the Border Districts. 



a very few moments, and away from the place as fast as I 

 could trot. My dread was of the mother cat ; but I did not 

 see her. It was an old crow's nest, and she had made use 

 of it for her kittens, reaching the branches of the tree from 

 the top of the precipice. At Branxton I told in the evening 

 what I had seen ; and as an enmity that knew no mercy 

 was vowed against all Wild Cats, some of the men took 

 their guns and dogs, and going to the top of the rock so as 

 the old cat might not escape if she was in the tree, fired 

 shots through the nest repeatedly, and killed her in it, and 

 also her poor young ones. One of them made a cap of her 

 skin." 



In Switzerland, the Wild Cat " passes the day stretched 

 out upon a branch, ready to pounce on whatever prey may 

 may come within reach of its spring."* With us, it not 

 unfrequently occupied the sea-caverns, dwelt in the crevices 

 of rocks, or seized upon the deserted den of a fox or badger. 

 About the head of the Monynut Burn, at a locality called 

 " The Sting," on Upper Monynut, in the Lammermoors, a 

 place far from human resort, and almost unvisited except 

 by the shepherd and his wandering charge, there was above 

 forty years ago a colony of wild cats. They inhabited holes 

 in the banks. A wild sort of being nicknamed " Tin Tarn," 

 for he was a tinsmith, who helped to eke out his livelihood 

 by carjturing badgers to send to innkeepers in towns to be 

 baited with dogs, carried off the last " decking" of the cats, 

 mother and all, and thus extinguished the breed. An ac- 

 quaintance, however, tells me that since then he, in his 

 boyhood saw what he took for a Wild Cat — and he knows 

 the real Wild Cat — in Belton wood ; perhaps a straggler from 

 the Highlands may have prowled thus far. Cat-eraig, now 

 quarried away for lime, on the coast east from Dunbar, may 

 be a reminiscence of this animal. 



John Purves, whose father was tenant at Fallow-knowe, 

 on the edge of Coldingham Moor, Berwickshire, states, that 

 when a boy herding the cows near the Press woods, which 

 were then a haunt of the Wild Cat, one of the cats " lap at 

 him " and his dog. 



" Like mountain-cat who guards her young, 

 Full at Fitz- James's throat he sprung." 

 But the best account of a fight with a Wild Cat, is that 



* Bonney's "Alpine Regions of Switzerland," p. 170. 



