THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
Buchanan. In spite of long crawls in peat -slime ditches our patience was 
always requited by seeing our stag moving away out of shot from the 
point where we had hoped a chance was possible. In the evening we moved 
up to the face of Gorrie Baa, just outside the sanctuary, and found a 
magnificent lot of stags, one of them carrying something approaching the 
finest head I had seen on Black Mount. It was 5 p.m. before we got near 
him and, the mist rising for a moment, we made out the fine-headed one 
standing on a ridge with six others about 250 yards away. The deer were 
unsettled and moving, so when the mist again descended we ran on for 
another hundred yards and could then just see their horns moving on 
the skyline but well within shot. I lay down at once to take the shot and 
wait for the curtain to lift. Presently it cleared sufficiently for a sight 
to be taken, and at the very moment of pressing the trigger there was a 
rush on the part of the deer immediately behind the one at which I had 
fired. 
“ You’ve got the wrang ane,” gloomily remarked Buchanan, as he 
snapped up his glass. Alas! it was too true. A small beast of twelve stone 
had seen us and made a plunge forward at the very moment I had fired 
and received, in the heart, the bullet I had intended for the big one. It was 
a very sad and soaked funereal procession that wended its way home. 
Three more days of continuous beating to and fro in the rain followed 
this unfortunate incident. Every day we saw plenty of stags, but they 
were practically unstalkable, unless some turn of fortune had thrown 
the game into our hands. In those three days I made eight or nine stalks 
and never once got within 250 yards of a shootable stag, for Black Mount, 
with its great “ open ” corries and flats, is not the place to achieve success 
easily when the elements are adverse. However, the fickle goddess was not 
entirely spiteful and smiled again, when Grant took me to his high beat 
on the last day and I killed a beautiful eleven-pointer after a delightful 
day of varying incident. 
It was very seldom a stalker achieved an easy stalk on Black Mount. 
Even early in October, when the stags began to break out of the Sanctuary, 
they seemed to be more alert than in any other forest in which I have 
hunted. I went one day in October with McLeish to the east face of Ben- 
au-Luss, Glenkinglass, to try for a ten-pointer that had beat even that 
cunning old fellow for many seasons. He told me that he had stalked this 
stag repeatedly, but had never even obtained a shot at him as he kept as 
sharp a look out as his own hinds. McLeish said he had known this same 
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