Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 372, October 1846

WILD SPORTS AND NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HIGHLANDS. 1

This year we have been a defaulter on the Moors. Not that our eye has become more dim, our aim less sure, or our understanding weaker than of yore; but we are no longer subject to the same keen and burning impulses which used periodically to beset us towards the beginning of our departed Augusts, inflaming our destructive organs, and driving us to the heather, as the stag is said to be driven by instinct to the shores of the sea. Somehow or other, we now take things much more coolly. We no longer haunt the shop of Dickson – that most excellent and unassuming of gunmakers – for weeks before the shooting-season, discussing the comparative excellences of cartridge and plain shot, or refitting our battered apparatus with the last ingenuities of Sykes. Our talk is not of pointers or of setters; neither do we think it incumbent upon us to perambulate Princes Street in a shooting-jacket, or with the dissonance of hobnailed shoes. We can even look upon the northern steamers, surcharged with all manner of ammunition, crammed from stem to stern with Cockney tourists and sportsmen, carriages and cars, hampers, havresacks, and hair trunks, steering their way from our noble frith towards the Highlands, without the slightest wish to become one of that gay and gallant crew. Incredible as it may appear, we actually wrote an article upon the twelfth of August last; nor was the calm, even tenor of our thoughts for a moment interrupted by the imaginary whirr of the gor-cock. For the life of us, we cannot recollect what sort of a day it was. To be sure, we were early up and at work – that is, as early as we ever are, somewhere about ten: we wrote on steadily until dinner-time, with no more intermission than was necessary for the discussion of a couple of glasses of Madeira. After a slight and salubrious meal, we again tackled to the foolscap, and by nine o'clock dismissed the printer's devil to his den with a quarter of a ream of manuscript. We then strolled up to our club, where, for the first time, we were reminded of the nature of the anniversary, by the savour of roasted grouse. So, with a kind of melancholy sigh for the impairment of our blunted energies, we sat down to supper, and leisurely explored the pungent pepper about the backbone of the bird of the mountain.

But empty streets, hot sun, and dust like that of the Sahara, are combined nuisances too formidable for the most tranquil or indolent nature. It is not good for any one to be the last man left in town. You become an object of suspicion to the porters – that is, the more superannuated portion of them, for the rest are all gone to carry bags upon the moors – who, seeing you continue from day to day sidling along the deserted streets, begin to entertain strange doubts as to the real probity of your character, or, at all events, as to your absolute sanity. If you are a lawyer, and remain in town throughout August and September, your own conscience will tell you at once that you are nothing short of an arrant sneak. Are there not ten other months in the year throughout which you may cobble condescendences, without emulating the endurance of Chibert, and confining yourself in an oven, to the manifest endangerment of your liver, for the few paltry guineas which may occasionally come tumbling in? Will any agent of sense consider you a better counsel, or a more estimable plodder, because you affect an exaggerated passion for Morrison's Decisions, and refuse to be divorced even for a week from your dalliance with Shaw and Dunlop? Is that unfortunate Lord Ordinary on the Bills to be harassed day and night, deprived of his morning drive, and deranged in his digestive organs, on account of your unhallowed lust for fees? Is your unhappy clerk, whose wife and children have long since been dismissed to cheap bathing-quarters on the coast of Fife, where at this moment they are bobbing up and down among the tangled rocks, skirling as the waves come in, or hunting for diminutive crabs and cavies in the sea-worn pools – is that most oppressed and martyred of all mankind to be kept, by your relentless fiat, or rather wicked obstinacy, from participating in the same sanatory amusements with Bill, and Harry, and Phemie, and the rest of his curly-headed weans? Think you that the complaints of Mrs Screever will not be heard and registered against you in heaven, as, mateless and disconsolate, she cheapens haddocks in the market, or plucks sea-pinks along the cliffs of hoary Anstruther or of Crail? Shame upon you! Recollect, for the sake of others, if not for your own, that you call yourself a gentleman and a Christian. Shut up your house from top to bottom – fee the policeman to watch it – wafer a ticket on the window, directing all parcels to be sent to the grocer with whom you have deposited the key – give poor Girzy a holiday to visit her friends at Carnwath – and be off yourself, as fast as you can, wherever your impulses may lead you, either to the Highlands with rod and gun, or, if you are no sportsman, to Largs, or Ardrossan, or Dunoon, pleasant places all, where you may saunter along the shore undisturbed from morn until dewy eve, hire a boat at a shilling the hour, and purvey your own whitings; or haply, if you are in good luck, take a prominent part in the proceedings of a regatta, and make nautical speeches after dinner to the intense amusement of your audience.

But you say you are a physician. Well, then, cannot you leave your patients to die in peace? It is six months since you were called in to attend that old lady, who has a large jointure and a predisposition to jaundice. You have visited her regularly once a day – sometimes twice – prescribed for her a whole pharmacopeia of drugs – blistered her, bled her, leeched her – curtailed her of wholesome diet, forbidden cordial waters, and denounced the needful cinnamon. Dare you lay your hand on your heart and say that you think her better? Not you. Why not, then, give the poor old woman, who is not only harmless, but an excellent subscriber to several Tract societies, one chance more of a slightly protracted existence? Restore to her her natural food and adventitious comforts. Send her away to Cheltenham or Harrowgate, or some such other vale of Avoca, where, at all events, she may get fresh air, clean lodgings, and lots of mineral water. So shall you escape the pangs of an awakened conscience, and your deathbed be haunted by the thoughts of at least one homicide the less.

What we say to one we say to all. Stockbroker! you are a good fellow in the main, and you never meant to ruin your clients. It was not your fault that they went so largely into Glenmutchkins, and made such unfortunate attempts to bear the Biggleswade Junction. But why should you continue to tempt the poor devils at this flat season of the year, and with a glutted market, into any further purchases of scrip? You know very well, that until November, at the earliest, there is not the most distant prospect of a rise, and you have already pocketed, believe us, a remarkably handsome commission. Do not be in too great a hurry to kill the goose with the golden eggs. A rest for a month or so will make them all the keener for speculation afterwards, and nurse their appetite for premiums. We foresee a stirring winter, if you will but take things quietly in the interim. Assemble your brethren together – shut up the Exchange by common consent during the dog-days – convert your lists into wadding, and let Mammon have a momentary respite. – Writer to the Signet! is it fair to be penning letters, each of which costs your employer three and fourpence, when they are certain to remain unanswered? Do not do it. This is capital time for taking infeftments, and those instruments of sasine may well suffice to plump out the interior of a game-bag. No better witnesses in the world than a shepherd and an illicit distiller; and sweet will be your crowning caulker as you take instruments of earth and stone, peat and divot, and the like, in the hands of Angus and Donald, by the side of the spring, far up in the solitary mountain. Therefore, again we say, be off as speedily as you can to the moors, and leave the Deserted City to sun and dust, and the vigilance of a perspiring Town Council.

Example, they say, is better than precept – we might demur to the doctrine, but we are not in a disputatious humour. For we too are bound, though late, to the land of grouse – indeed we have already accomplished the greater part of our journey, and are writing this article in a pleasant burgh of the west, separated only by an arm of the sea, across which the bright-sailed yachts are skimming, from a long range of heathery hills, whereon we hope, if it pleases fortune, to do some execution on the morrow. Our three pointers, Orleans, Tours, and Bordeaux – so named after the speculation that enabled us to purchase them – are basking in the sun on the little green beneath our window; whilst Scrip, our terrier and constant companion, is perched upon the sill, barking with all his might at a peripatetic miscreant of a minstrel, who for the last half hour has been grinding Gentle Zitella to shreds in his barrel organ. We have tried in vain to move him with coppers dexterously shied so as to hit him if possible on the head, but the nuisance will not abate. We must follow the example of the Covenanters, and put an end to him at the expenditure of a silver shot. "There, our good fellow, is a shilling for you – have the kindness to move on a few doors further; there are some sick folks in this house. At the end of the row you will find a family remarkably addicted to music – the house with the green blinds – you understand us? Thank you!" And in a few moments we hear his infernal instrument, now not unpleasantly remote, doling out the popular air of the Glasgow Chappie, for the edification of the intolerable Gorbalier who poisoned our passage down the Clyde by constituting himself our Cicerone, and explaining the method by which one might discriminate the Railway boats from those of the Castle Company, by the peculiar ochreing of their funnels.

Did we intend to remain here much longer, we should be compelled in self-defence to clear the neighbourhood. This is not so impracticable as at first sight may appear. We have made acquaintance with a very pleasant fellow of a Bauldy – quite a genius in his way – who has a natural talent for the French horn. To him an old key-bugle would be an inestimable treasure, and we doubt not that with a few instructions he would become such a proficient as to serenade the suburb day and night. Nor would our conscience reproach us for having made one human creature supremely happy, even at the cost of the emigration of a few dozen others. But fortunately we have no need to recur to any such experiment. To-morrow we shall enact the part of Macgregor with our foot upon our native heather; and for one evening, wherever the locality, we could not find a more apt or pleasant companion than Mr Charles St John, whose sporting journals are at last published in the Home and Colonial Library.

We make this preliminary statement the more readily, because for divers reasons we had hardly expected to find the work so truly excellent of its kind; and had there been any shortcomings, assuredly we should have been foul of St John. In the first place, we entertained, and do still entertain, the opinion that very few English sportsmen are capable of writing a work which shall treat not only of the Wild Sports, but of the Natural History of the Highlands. They belong to a migratory class, and seldom exchange the comforts of their clubs for the inconveniences of northern rustication, at least before the month of June. Now and then, indeed, you may meet with some of them, whose passion for angling amounts to a mania, by the side of the Tweed or the Shin, long before the mavis has hatched her young. But these are usually elderly grey-coated men, whose whole faculties are bent upon hackles – the patriarchs of a far nobler school than that of Walton – magnificent throwers of the fly – salmonicides of the first water – yet in our humble estimation not very conversant with any other subject under heaven. Their sporting error – rather let us call it misfortune – is that they do not generalise. By the middle of September their occupation for the year is over. Shortly afterwards they assemble, like swallows about to leave our shores, on the banks of the Tweed, which river is permitted by the mercy of the British Parliament to remain open for a short time longer. There they angle on, kill their penultimate and ultimate fish; and finally, at the approach of winter, retreat to warmer quarters, and recapitulate the campaigns of the summer over port of the most generous vintage. These are clearly not the men to indite the Wild Sports and Natural History of the North.

The other section of English sportsmen come later and depart a little earlier. They are the renters of moors, crack sportsmen in every sense of the word, who resort to Ross-shire as regularly as they afterwards emigrate to Melton. Now, as to their slaughtering powers, we entertain not the shadow of a doubt. Steady shots and deadly are they from their youth upwards – trained, it may be, upon level ground, but still unerring in their aim. If not so wiry-sinewed, and sound of wind as the Caledonian, their pluck is undeniable, and their perseverance praiseworthy in the extreme. Show them the birds, and they will bring them to bag – give them a fair chance at a red-deer, and the odds are that next minute he shall be rolling in blood upon the heather. But this, let it be observed, is after all a mere matter of tooling. To be a good shot is only one branch of the finished sportsman's accomplishment, and it enters not at all into the conformation of the naturalist. We would not give a brace of widgeons for the best description ever written of a week's sport in the Highlands, or indeed any where else, provided it contained nothing more than an account of the killed and wounded, some facetious anecdotes regarding the lives of the gillies, and a narrative of the manner in which the author encountered and overcame a hart. Even the adventures of a night in a still will hardly make the book go down. We want an eye accustomed to look to other things beyond the sight of a gun-barrel – we want to know more about the quarry than the mere fact that it was flushed, fired at, and killed. Death can come but once to the black-cock as to the warrior, but are their lives to be accounted as nothing? Ponto we allow to be a beautiful brute – a little too thin-skinned, perhaps, for the moors, and apt, in case of mist, to lapse into a state of ague – yet, notwithstanding, punctual at his points, and cheap at twenty guineas of the current money of the realm. Howbeit we care not for his biography. To us it is matter of the smallest moment from what breed he is descended, by whose gamekeeper he was broken, neither are we covetous as to statistics of the number of his brothers and sisters uterine. It is of course gratifying to know that our southern acquaintance approves of the sport he has met with in a particular district; and that on the twelfth, not only the bags but the ponies were exuberantly loaded with a superfluity of fud and feather. Such intelligence would have been listened to most benignly had it been accompanied by a box of game duly addressed to us at Ambrose's – as it is, we accept the fact without any spasm of extraordinary pleasure.

There are, we allow, some sporting tours from which we have derived both profit and gratification; but the locality of these is usually remote and unexplored. We like to hear of salmon-fishing in the Naamsen, and of forty and fifty pounders captured in its brimful rapids – of bear-skalls in Sweden, buffalo-hunting in the prairies, or the chase of the majestic lion in Caffreland or Morocco. Such narratives have the charm of novelty; and if, now and then, they border a little upon the marvellous or miraculous, we do our best to summon up faith sufficient to bolt them all. We by no means objected to Monsieur Violet's account of the estampades in California, or of the snapping turtles in the cane-brakes of the Red River. He was, at all events, graphic in his descriptions; and the zoology to which he introduced us, if not genuine, was of a gigantic and original kind. In fact, no sort of voyage or travel is readable unless it be strewn thickly with incident and adventure, and these of a startling character. Nobody cares now-a-days about meteorological observations, or dates, or distances, or names of places; we have been tired with these things from the days of Dampier downwards. Nor need any navigator hope to draw the public attention to his facts unless he possesses besides a deal of the talent of the novelist. If incident does not lie in his path, he must go out of his way to seek it – if even then it should not appear, there is an absolute necessity for inventing it. What a book of travels in Central Africa could we not write, if any one would be kind enough to furnish us with a mere outline of the route, and the authentic soundings of the Niger!

Scotland, however, is tolerably well known to the educated people of the sister country, and her productions have ceased to be a marvel. Grouse are common as howtowdies in the London market; and even red-deer venison, if asked for, may be had for a price. There is no great mystery in the staple commodity of our sports. Something, it is true, may still be said with effect regarding deer-stalking – a branch of the art venatory which few have the opportunity to study, and of those few a small fraction only can attain to a high degree. Grouse are to be found on every hill, black-game in almost every correi; few are the woods, at the present day, unhaunted by the roe; but the red-deer – the stag of ten – he of the branches and the tines – is, in most parts of the country save in the great forests, a casual and a wandering visitor; and many a summer's day you may clamber over cairn and crag, inspect every scaur and glen, and sweep the horizon around with your telescope, without discovering the waving of an antler, or the impress of a transitory footprint. But this subject is soon exhausted. Scrope has done ample justice to it, and left but a small field untrodden to any literary successor. The Penny Magazine, if we mistake not, disposed several years ago of otter-hunting, and the chase of the fox as practised in the rocky regions; and finally, Colquhoun – he of the Moor and the Loch – with more practical knowledge and acute observation than any of his predecessors, reduced Highland sporting to a science, and became the Encyclopedist of the feræ naturæ of the hills. With these authorities already before us, it was not unnatural that we should have entertained doubts as to the capabilities of any new writer, not native nor to the custom born.

Neither did the puff preliminary, which heralded the appearance of this volume, prepossess us strongly in its favour. What mattered it to the sensible reader whether or no "the attention of the public has already been called to this journal by the Quarterly Review of December 1845?" The book was not published, had not an existence, until seven or eight months after that article – a reasonably indifferent one, by the way – was penned; and yet we are asked to take that sort of pre-Adamite notice as a verdict in its favour! Now, we object altogether to this species of side-winded commendation, this reviewing, or noticing, or extracting from manuscripts before publication, more especially in the pages of a great and influential Review. It is always injudicious, because it looks like the work of a coterie. In the present case it was doubly unwise, because this volume really required no adventitious aid whatever, and certainly no artifice, to recommend it to the public favour.

Whilst, however, we consider it our duty to say thus much, let it not be supposed that we are detracting from the merits of the extracts contained in that article of the Quarterly. On the contrary, they impressed us at the time with a high idea of the graphic power of the writer, and presented an agreeable contrast to the general prolixity of the paper. It is even possible that we are inclined to underrate the efforts of the critic on account of his having forestalled us by printing The Muckle Hart of Benmore– a chapter which we should otherwise have certainly enshrined within the columns of Maga. – At all events it is now full time that we should address ourselves more seriously to the contents of the volume.

Mr St John, we are delighted to observe, is not a sportsman belonging to either class which we have above attempted to describe. He is not the man whose exploits will be selected to swell the lists of slaughtered game in the pages of the provincial newspapers; for he has the eye and the heart of a naturalist, and, as he tells us himself, after a pleasant description of the wild animals which he has succeeded in domesticating – "though naturally all men are carnivorous, and, therefore, animals of prey, and inclined by nature to hunt and destroy other creatures, and, although I share in this our natural instinct to a great extent, I have far more pleasure in seeing these different animals enjoying themselves about me, and in observing their different habits, than I have in hunting down and destroying them."

Most devoutly do we wish that there were many more sportsmen of the same stamp! For ourselves, we confess to an organ of destructiveness not of the minimum degree. We never pass a pool, and hear the sullen plunge of the salmon, without a bitter imprecation upon our evil destiny if we chance to have forgotten our rod; and a covey rising around us, when unarmed, is a plea for suicide. But this feeling, as Mr St John very properly expresses it, is mere natural instinct – part of our original Adam, which it is utterly impossible to subdue. But give us rod or gun. Let us rise and strike some three or four fresh-run fish, at intervals of half-an-hour – let us play, land, and deposit them on the bank, in all the glory of their glittering scales, and it is a hundred to one if we shall be tempted to try another cast, although the cruives are open, the water in rarest trim, and several hours must elapse ere the advent of the cock-a-leekie. In like manner, we prefer a moor where the game is sparse and wild, to one from which the birds are rising at every twenty yards; nor care we ever to slaughter more than may suffice for our own wants and those of our immediate friends. And why should we? There is something not only despicable, but, in our opinion, absolutely brutal, in the accounts which we sometimes read of wholesale massacres committed on the moors, in sheer wanton lust for blood. Fancy a great hulking Saxon, attended by some half-dozen gamekeepers, with a larger retinue of gillies, sallying forth at early morning upon ground where the grouse are lying as thick and tame as chickens in a poultry-yard – loosing four or five dogs at a time, each of which has found his bird or his covey before he has been freed two minutes from the couples – marching up in succession to each stationary quadruped – kicking up the unfortunate pouts, scarce half-grown, from the heather before his feet – banging right and left into the middle of them, and – for the butcher shoots well – bringing down one, and sometimes two, at each discharge. The red-whiskered keeper behind him, who narrowly escaped transportation, a few years ago, for a bloody and ferocious assault, hands him another gun, ready-loaded; and so on he goes, for hour after hour, depopulating God's creatures, of every species, without mercy, until his shoulder is blue with the recoil, and his brow black as Cain's, with the stain of the powder left, as he wipes away the sweat with his stiff and discoloured hand. At evening, the pyramid is counted, and lo, there are two hundred brace!

Is this sporting, or is it murder? Not the first certainly, unless the term can be appropriately applied to the hideous work of the shambles. Indeed, between knocking down stots or grouse in this wholesale manner, we can see very little distinction; except that, in the one case, there is more exertion of the muscles, and in the other a clearer atmosphere to nerve the operator to his task. Murder is a strong term, so we shall not venture to apply it; but cruelty is a word which we may use without compunction; and from that charge, at least, it is impossible for the glutton of the moors to go free.