232 WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS. [cmap. 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 cat. 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- 
