by John Buchan
At the top of the pass was a pad of flat ground, covered thick with the leaves of cloudberries. On the right rose the Pinnacle Ridge of Sgurr Dearg, in its beginning an easy scramble which gave no hint of the awesome towers which later awaited the traveller; on the left Sgurr Mor ran up in a steep face of screes. ‘Keep doun,’ Wattie enjoined, and crawled forward to where two boulders made a kind of window for a view to the north.
The two looked down into three little corries which, like the fingers of a hand, united in the palm of a larger corrie, which was the upper glen of the Reascuill. It was a sanctuary perfectly fashioned by nature, for the big corrie was cut off from the lower glen by a line of boiler-plates like the wall of a great dam, down which the stream plunged in cascades. The whole place was loud with water – the distant roar of the main river, the ceaseless dripping of the cliffs, the chatter and babble of a myriad hidden rivulets. But the noise seemed only to deepen the secrecy. It was a world in monochrome, every detail clear as a wet pebble, but nowhere brightness or colour. Even the coats of the deer had taken on the dead grey of the slaty crags.
Never in his life had Lamancha seen so many beasts together. Each corrie was full of them, feeding on the rough pastures or among the boulders, drifting aimlessly across the spouts of screes below the high cliffs, sheltering in the rushy gullies. There were groups of hinds and calves, and knots of stags, and lone beasts on knolls or in mud-baths, and, since all were restless, the numbers in each corrie were constantly changing.
‘Ye gods, what a sight!’ Lamancha murmured, his head at Wattie’s elbow. ‘We won’t fail for lack of beasts.’
‘The trouble is,’ said Wattie, ‘that there’s ower mony.’ Then he added obscurely that ‘it might be the day o’ Pentecost.’
Lamancha was busy with his glass. Just below him, not three hundred yards off, where the ravine which ran from the Beallach opened out into the nearest corrie, there was a group of deer – three hinds, a little stag, and farther on a second stag of which only the head could be seen.
‘Wattie,’ he whispered excitedly, ‘there’s a beast down there – a shootable beast. It’s just what we’re looking for … close to the Beallach.’
‘Aye, I see it,’ was the answer. ‘And I see something mair. There’s a man ayont the big corrie – d’ye see yon rock shapit like a puddock-stool? … Na, the south side o’ the waterfall … Well, follow on frae there towards Bheinn Fhada – have ye got him?’
‘Is that a man?’ asked the surprised Lamancha.
‘Where’s your een, my lord? It’s a man wi’ grey breeks and a brown jaicket – an’ he’s smokin’ a pipe. Aye, it’s Macqueen. I ken by the lang legs o’ him.’
‘Is he a Haripol gillie?’
‘He’s the second stalker. He’s under notice, for him and young Mr Claybody doesna agree. Macqueen comes frae the Lowlands, and has a verra shairp tongue. They was oot on the hill last week, and Mr Johnson was pechin’ sair gaun up the braes, an’ no wonder, puir man. He cries on Macqueen to gang slow, and says, apologetic-like, “Ye see, Macqueen, I’ve been workin’ terrible hard the past year, and it’s damaged my wund.” Macqueen, who canna bide the sight of him, says, “I’m glad to hear it, sir. I was feared it was maybe the drink.” Gey impident!’
‘Shocking.’
‘Weel, he’s workin’ off his notice … I’m pleased to see him yonder, for it means that Macnicol will no be there. Macnicol’ – Wattie chuckled like a dropsical corncrake – ‘is maist likely beatin’ the roddydendrums for the wee dog. Macqueen is set there so as he can watch this Beallach and likewise the top of the Red Burn on the Machray side, which I was tellin’ ye was the easiest road. If ye were to kill that stag doun below he could baith see ye and hear ye, and ye’d never be allowed to shift it a yaird … Na, na. Seein’ Macqueen’s where he is, we maun try the wee corrie right under Sgurr Dearg. He canna see into that.’
‘But we’ll never get there through all those deer.’
‘It will not be easy.’
‘And if we get a stag we’ll never be able to get it over this Beallach.’
‘Indeed it will tak a great deal of time. Maybe a’ nicht. But I’ll no say it’s not possible … Onyway, it is the best plan. We will have to tak a lang cast roond, and we maunna forget Macqueen. I’d give a five-pun-note for anither blatter o’ rain.’
The next hour was one of the severest bodily trials which Lamancha had ever known. Wattie led him up a chimney of Sgurr Mor, the depth of which made it safe from observation, and down another on the north face, also deep, and horribly loose and wet. This brought them to the floor of the first corrie at a point below where the deer had been observed. The next step was to cross the corrie eastwards towards Sgurr Dearg. This was a matter of high delicacy – first because of the number of deer, second because it was all within view of Macqueen’s watch-tower.
Lamancha had followed in his time many stalkers, but he had never seen an artist who approached Wattie in skill. The place was littered with hinds and calves and stags, the cover was patchy at the best, and the beasts were restless. Wherever a route seemed plain the large ears and spindle shanks of a hind appeared to block it. Had he been alone Lamancha would either have sent every beast streaming before him in full sight of Macqueen, or he would have advanced at the rate of one yard an hour. But Wattie managed to move both circumspectly and swiftly. He seemed to know by instinct when a hind could be bluffed and when her suspicions must be laboriously quieted. The two went for the most part on their bellies like serpents, but théir lowliness of movement would have been of no avail had not Wattie, by his sense of the subtle eddies of air, been able to shape a course which prevented their wind from shifting deer behind them. He well knew that any movement of beasts in any quarter would bring Macqueen’s vigilant glasses into use.
Their task was not so hard so long as they were in hollows on the corrie floor. The danger came in crossing the low ridge to that farther corrie which was beyond Macqueen’s ken, for, as they ascended, the wind was almost bound to carry their scent to the deer through which they had passed. Wattie lay long with his chin in the mire and his eyes scanning the ridge till he made up his mind on his route. Obviously it was the choice of the least among several evils, for he shook his head and frowned.
The ascent of the ridge was a slow business, and toilful. Wattie was clearly following an elaborate plan, for he zigzagged preposterously, and would wait long for no apparent reason in places where Lamancha was held precariously by half a foot-hold and the pressure of his nails. Anxious glances were cast over his shoulder at the post where Macqueen was presumably on duty. The stalker’s ears seemed of an uncanny keenness, for he would listen hard, hear something, and then utterly change his course. To Lamancha it was all inexplicable, for there appeared to be no deer on the ridge, and the place was so much in the lee that not a breath of wind seemed to be abroad to carry their scent. Hard as his condition was, he grew furiously warm and thirsty, and perhaps a little careless, for once or twice he let earth and stones slip under his feet.
Wattie turned on him fiercely. ‘Gang as if ye was growin’,’ he whispered. ‘There’s beasts on a’ sides.’
Sobered thereby, Lamancha mended his ways, and kept his thoughts rigidly on the job before him. He crept docilely in Wattie’s prints, wondering why on a little ridge they should go through exertions that must be equivalent to the ascent of the Matterhorn. At last his guide stopped. ‘Put your head between thae rashes,’ he enjoined. ‘Ye’ll see her.’
‘See what?’ Lamancha gasped.
‘That dour deevil o’ a hind.’
There she was, a grey elderly beldame, with her wicked puck-like ears, aware and suspicious, not five yards off.
‘We canna wait,’ Wattie hissed. ‘It’s ower dangerous. Bide you here like a stone.’
He wriggled away to his right, while Lamancha, hanging on a heather root, watched the twitching ears and wrinkled nozzle … Presently from farther up the hill came a sharp bark, which was al
most a bleat. The hind flung up her head and gazed intently … Five minutes later the sound was repeated, this time from a lower altitude. The beast sniffed, shook herself, and stamped with her foot. Then she laid back her ears, and trotted quietly over the crest.
Wattie was back again by Lamancha’s side. ‘That puzzled the auld bitch,’ was his only comment. ‘We can gang faster now, and God kens we’ve nae time to loss.’
As Lamancha lay panting at last on the top of the ridge he looked down into the highest of the lesser corries, tucked right under the black cliffs of Sgurr Dearg. It was a little corrie, very steep, and threaded by a burn which after the rain was white like a snow-drift. Vast tumbled masses of stone, ancient rock-falls from the mountain, lay thick as the cottages in a hamlet. At first sight the place seemed to be without deer. Lamancha, scanning it with his glass, could detect no living thing among the debris.
Wattie was calling fiercely on his Maker.
‘God, it’s the auld hero,’ he muttered, his eyes glued to his telescope.
At last Lamancha got his glasses adjusted, and saw what his companion saw. Far up the corrie, on a patch of herbage – the last before the desert of the rocks began – stood three stags. Two were ordinary beasts, shootable, for they must have weighed sixteen or seventeen stone, but with inconsiderable heads. The third was no heavier, but he had a head like a blasted pine – going back fast, for the beast was old, but still with thirteen clearly marked points and a most noble spread of horn.
‘It’s him,’ Wattie crooned. ‘It’s the auld hero. Fine I ken him, for I seen him on Crask last back-end rivin’ at the stacks. There’s no a forest hereaways but they’ve had a try for him, but the deil’s in him, for the grandest shots aye miss. What’s your will, my lord? Dod, if John Macnab gets yon lad, he can cock his bonnet.’
‘I don’t know, Wattie. Is it fair to kill the best beast in the forest?’
‘Keep your mind easy about that. Yon’s no a Haripol beast. He’s oftener on Crask than on Haripol. He’s a traiveller, and in one season will cover the feck o’ the Hielands. I’ve heard that oreeginally he cam oot o’ Kintail. He’s terrible auld – some says a hundred year – and if ye dinna kill him he’ll perish next winter, belike, in a snaw-wreath, and that’s a puir death to dee.’
‘It’s a terrible pull to the Beallach.’
‘It will be that, but there’s the nicht afore us. If we don’t take that beast – or one o’ the three – I doubt we’ll no get anither chance.’
‘Push on, then, Wattie. It looks like a clear coast.’
‘I’m no so sure. There’s that deevil o’ a hind somewhere afore us.’
Down through the gaps of the Pinnacle Ridge blew fine streams of mist. They were the precursors of a new storm, for long before the two men had wormed their way into the corrie the mountain before them was blotted out with a curtain of rain, and the wind, which seemed for a time to have died away, was sounding a thousand notes in the Pan’s-pipes of the crags.
‘Good,’ said Lamancha. ‘This will blanket the shot.’
‘Ba-ad too,’ growled Wattie, ‘for we’ll be duntin’ against the auld bitch.’
Lamancha believed he had located the stages well enough to go to them in black darkness. You had only to follow the stream to its head, and they were on the left bank a hundred yards or so from the rocks. But when he reached the burn he found that his memory was useless. There was not one stream but dozens, and it was hard to say which was the main channel. It was a loud world again, very different from the first corrie, but, when he would have hastened, Wattie insisted on circumspection. ‘There’s the hind,’ he said, ‘and maybe since we’re out o’ Macqueen’s sicht there’s nae need to hurry.’
His caution was justified. As they drew themselves up the side of a small cascade the tops of a pair of antlers were seen over the next rise. Lamancha thought they were those of one of the three stags, but Wattie disillusioned him. ‘We’re no within six hundred yards o’ yon beasts,’ he said.
A long circuit was necessary, happily in good cover, and the stream was not rejoined till at a point where its channel bore to the south, so that their wind would not be carried to the beasts below the knoll. After that it seemed advisable to Wattie to keep to the water, which was flowing in a deep-cut bed. It was a job for a merman rather than for breeched human beings, for Wattie would permit of no rising to a horizontal or even to a kneeling position. The burn entered at their collars and flowed steadily through their shirts to an exit at their knees. Never had men been so comprehensively and continuously wet. Lamancha’s right arm ached with pulling the rifle along the bank – he always insisted on carrying his weapon himself – while his body was submerged in the icy outflow of Sgurr Dearg’s springs.
The pressure of Wattie’s foot in his face halted him. Blinking through the spray, he saw his leader’s head raised stiffly to the alert in the direction of a little knoll. Even in the thick weather he could detect a pair of bat-like ears, and he realised that these ears were twitching. It did not need Wattie’s whisper of ‘the auld bitch’ to reveal the enemy.
The two lay in the current for what seemed to Lamancha at least half an hour. He had enough hill-craft to recognise that their one hope was to stick to the channel, for only thus was there a chance of their presence being unrevealed by the wind. But the channel led them very close to the hind. If the brute chose to turn her foolish head they would be within view.
With desperate slowness, an inch at a time, Wattie moved upwards. He signed to Lamancha to wait while he traversed a pool where only his cap and nose showed above the water. Then came a peat wallow, when his face seemed to be ground into the moss, and his limbs to be splayed like a frog’s and to move with frog-like jerks. After that was a little cascade, and, beyond, the shelter of a big boulder which would get him out of the hind’s orbit. Lamancha watched this strange progress with one eye; the other was on the twitching ears. Mercifully all went well, and Wattie’s stern disappeared round a corner of rock.
He laboured to follow with the same precision. The pool was easy enough except for the trailing of the rifle. The peat was straightforward going, though in his desire to follow his leader’s example he dipped his face so deep in the black slime that his nostrils were plugged with it, and some got into his eyes which he dared not try to remove. But the waterfall was a snag. It was no light task to draw himself up against the weight of descending water, and at the top he lay panting for a second, damming up the flow with his body … Then he moved on; but the mischief had been done.
For the sound of the release of the pent-up stream had struck a foreign note on the hind’s ear. It was an unfamiliar noise among the many familiar ones which at the moment filled the corrie. She turned her head sharply, and saw something in the burn which she did not quite understand. Lamancha, aware of her scrutiny, lay choking, with the water running into his nose; but the alarm had been given. The hind turned her head, and trotted off up-wind.
The next he knew was Wattie at his elbow making wild signals to him to rise and follow. Cramped and staggering, he lumbered after him away from the stream into a moraine of great granite blocks. ‘We’re no twa hundred yards from the stags,’ the guide whispered. ‘The auld bitch will move them, but please God we’ll get a shot.’ As Lamancha ran he marvelled at Wattie’s skill, for he himself had not a notion where in the wide world the beasts might be.
They raced to a knoll, and Wattie flung himself flat on the top.
‘There,’ he cried. ‘Steady, man. Tak the nearest. A hundred yards. Nae mair.’
Lamancha saw through the drizzle three stags moving at a gentle trot to the south – up-wind, for in the corrie the eddies were coming oddly. They were not really startled, but the hind had stirred them. The big stag was in the centre of the three, and the proper shot was the last – a reasonable broadside.
Wattie’s advice had been due to his loyalty to John Macnab, and not to his own choice, and this Lamancha knew. The desire of the great stag wa
s on him, as it was on the hunter in Homer, and he refused to be content with the second-best. It was not an easy shot in that bad light, and it is probable that he would have missed; but suddenly Wattie gave an unearthly bark, and for a second the three beasts slowed down and turned their heads towards the sound.
In that second Lamancha fired. The great head seemed to bow itself, and then fling upwards, and all three disappeared at a gallop into the mist.
‘A damned poor tailoring shot!’ Lamancha groaned.
‘He’s deid for all that, but God kens how far he’ll run afore he drops. He’s hit in the neck, but a wee thing ower low … We can bide here a while and eat our piece. If ye wasna John Macnab I could be wishin’ we had brought a dog.’
Lamancha, cold, wet, and disgusted, wolfed his sandwiches, had a stiff dram from his flask, and smoked a pipe before he started again. He cursed his marksmanship, and Wattie forbore to contradict him; doubtless Jim Tarras had accustomed him to a standard of skill from which this was a woeful declension. Nor would he hold out much hope. ‘He’ll gang into the first corrie and when he finds the wund different there he’ll turn back for the Reascuill. If this was our ain forest and the weather wasna that thick, we might get another chance at him there … Oh, aye, he might gang for ten mile. The mist is a good thing, for Macqueen will no see what’s happenin’, but if it was to lift, and he saw a’ the stags in the corrie movin’, you and me wad have to find a hidy-hole till the dark … Are ye ready, my lord?’
They crossed the ridge which separated them from the first corrie, close to the point where it took off from the massif of Sgurr Dearg. It was a shorter road than the one they had come by, and they could take it safely, for they were now moving upwind, owing to the curious eddy from the south. Over the ridge it would be a different matter, for there the wind would be easterly as before. But it was a stiff climb and a slow business, for they had to make sure that they were on the track of the stag.
Wattie trailed the blood-marks like an Indian, noticing splashes on stones and rushes which Lamancha would have missed. ‘He’s sair hit,’ he observed at one point. ‘See! He tried that steep bit and couldna manage it. There’s the mark o’ his feet turnin’ … He’s stoppit here … Aye, here’s his trail, and it’ll be the best for you and me. There’s nothing like a wounded beast for pickin’ the easiest road.’