THE RED DEER 
THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN DEER-STALKING 
Deer- stalking as a modern sport may be said to have originated in 
the high forests of Athole and the Black Mount, and to a certain extent 
dates from the publication of Scrope’s famous book (1838). The direct 
impetus that was given to the sport was also in a great measure due to 
the clearance which followed the rise of the mountain sheep industry and 
Its commercial success. This more than any other cause was also the 
reason for the expulsion of crofters, the destruction of the woods and the 
extinction of the old breeds of black cattle. With the removal of the great 
woods the Highland stag, which had for the most part existed in haunts 
similar to those of its congeners in the Carpathians and the Caucasus, 
became an open mountain dweller, and the fact was soon apparent 
that deer could thrive and multiply on the bare hills as well as 
sheep. Thus at the word of Scrope and other early writers the Imagina- 
tion of the sport-loving Englishman, searching for fresh adventure, 
was inflamed, and deer -stalking on the open hills soon became extremely 
popular. 
No less powerful than the pen of Scrope to Influence the mind was the 
brush of Sir Edwin Landseer, and in a lesser degree those of Charles 
Jones and Richard Ansdell. Landseer may be said to have created a new 
atmosphere in sport, for it cannot be denied that the most potent part of 
its charm lay in its fascinating mise en scene. He focussed for the first time 
the wondrous beauty of the Highland hills and cloudland, the romance 
and mystery of ten thousand changes, the rush and roar of the torrent, 
the freedom and unconventionality of the wild moorlands, the mystery of 
the hidden tarn, and most of all those intense bursts of sunshine that alight 
the panorama like the peeps of happiness that force themselves amidst 
the grey clouds of life itself. Landseer’s art, like Scottish deer -stalking, can 
be criticized severely. You can say all sorts of hard things about it, often, 
alas! with perfect truth. Even his stags are not the stags of to-day or of 
his own time, but ideal monarchs of his own charming imagination, yet 
for all that there is an indefinable something about his pictures which 
even now grip the imagination as do no other representations of the 
mountain and its wild life. This is so, perhaps, because in this intensely 
realistic age we soon learn to hate what is photographically exact and to 
love the ideal. The sportsman of the right kind never becomes old in thought 
80 long as he learns the paradoxical axiom that romance is truth and 
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