An old Fingalian Hero—His keenness of Sight and sharpness
of Ear- Foresters and Keepers —Foxhunters—Donald MacDonald—His
Dogs—Sandy MacArthur the Mole-catcher.
The hero
of one of our most popular old Fingalian tales is described as very
marvellously gifted. In order to secure the hand of a beautiful
Scandinavian princess, whose locks are as the beams of the setting sun,
about the time the summer sea is flecked and barred with gold, and with
whom he has long been in love, he has to undertake the most strange and
startling adventures; and not the least important of his qualifications
for combating the frequent difficulties of his position is a
preternatural acuteness of eye and ear, of sight and hearing. His
keenness of sight, for instance, is indicated by his being able to count
the beats of the swallow's wings in all the gyrations of its flight over
the summer grove; and as for his acuteness of ear, enough is said when
the veracious chronicler does not hesitate to assert that his hero could
hear the grass grow? "We, in our unheroic and degenerate day, cannot
boast of anything like this. We are content to know that the swallow
skims the pool with a swiftness due to a motion of wing too rapid to be
detected in its separate beats by the acutest eye, and that the grass
does grow, and at times with marvellous rapidity, albeit the stir and
tumult of its upward rush is inaudible to human ears. But if we cannot hear the
grass grow, we can safely aver that in such exceptionally splendid
seasons as this [July 1875], and without fear of being charged with any
very culpable exaggeration, we can see it
grow, not only from day to day, but almost literally from hour to
hour—so rapid, so marked, and visibly perceptible is the progress
towards a large and lusty maturity of grass and grain and every green
herb of the field. Anything, indeed, to equal the sturdy vigour and
upward rush of vegetation during the month of June last past we never
did see before, and had it not come immediately under our own
observation, we could hardly have believed it possible anywhere outside
the tropics. The harvest must necessarily be a late one, though not
quite so late as it was at one time feared must be the case. If we say
that the season of ingathering will be later than usual by ten days, or
a fortnight at the most, we are probably not far from the mark. But,
late or early, it is sure to be an exceedingly abundant harvest, there
being at present all over the West Highlands every promise of very heavy
returns, the heaviest, perhaps, that, under any circumstances whatever,
the land could safely bear, with the hope of an eventually fully ripe
and lusty maturity.
Readers of our Nether
Lochaber papers
will in nowise be surprised to hear that we have all our lifetime made
it a point to cultivate the confidence and friendly goodwill of keepers,
foresters, and their followers, wherever we chanced to meet with them;
nor would it be proper to suppress our grateful acknowledgment of the
fact that to them we have been largely indebted in all our zoological
studies for a long quarter of a century. We look upon foresters and
gamekeepers as at the head of their profession, what the French call
"princes of the game," and we have ever found them exceedingly courteous
and kind, highly intelligent almost without exception, and not merely
willing but well pleased to be examined, and cross-examined when
occasion calls, on anything and everything appertaining to, or at all
connected with, their office. With their humbler brethren of the craft,
too, we have long been thoroughly en
rapport; these
humbler brethren being the fox-hunters, mole-catchers, and
vermin-killers generally, by whatever name or designation known from the
Moray Firth to the Clyde. Most readers of poetry will remember how Pope,
in one of his finest poems (Prologue to
the Satires),
apostrophises his friend Dr. Arbuthnot as
"Friend to my life ! which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song."
And if one dared to parody any couplet from a poem so
beautiful, we should be disposed to address the first fox-hunter or
mole-catcher of our numerous acquaintances among them who are deacons of
their craft, we chanced to meet, in some such words as these—
"Friend to my mill! which did not you supply
With frequent grist, I'd
wither, wane, and die."
A few days ago the Ardgour fox-hunter, Donald Macdonald
by name, a Moidart man, and an excellent specimen of his class, called
upon us with his quarterly budget of news from glen and upland, from
hill and scaur, and den and corrie; and a wonderful season in his
particular line he vows it has been. Since the middle of April last he
has killed and bagged no fewer than fifty-one foxes
all told, besides a number, both young and old, that were worried to the
death by his terriers in the deepest recesses of their saobhies or
dens, whence, when the turmoil of battle had ceased, and his dogs had
emerged bearing very visible marks of the deadly conflict within, it was
impossible to dig them out. All these foxes were got on the borders of
three conterminous farms—Aryhuelan (Dr. Simpson's), Conaglen and
Inverscaddle (the Earl of Morton's), and Glennahuirich (Mr. Milligan's).
Donald, who has been a fox-hunter for upwards of thirty years, never
before knew foxes so numerous, and this not in one or more favourite
haunts within a given district, but generally over the country. He
couldn't himself in any way satisfactorily account for the fox fecundity
of 1874-75, and we could only regret that we were unable to enlighten
him in the least, for he avowedly came for enlightenment on a subject
that was very naturally exceedingly interesting to him. We were obliged
to confess that the matter was as much a puzzle to us as to himself, but
promised to think it over. Account for it as we may, it is in truth a
fact that has attracted attention everywhere, that not for many years,
if indeed ever before, have foxes been so numerous all over the
Highlands. In the three adjoining districts of Badenoch, Lochaber, and
Ardgour, the last including a part of Sunart, we are assured that no
less a number than two
hundred and forty-three foxes
have been killed or captured since mid-April, besides, as already
stated, a considerable number worried in the recesses of their big rock
dens which could not be actually "bagged" or charged for after the
fashion of the craft by brush or pad, though there was no doubt at all
of their having succumbed after, in each case, a more or less desperate
battle, to the assaults of their terrier assailants. And here, good
reader, you must permit us, en
parenthese, a
slight disgression, not altogether, we hope, uninteresting. We wonder if
in the great family of dogs anywhere throughout the- world there is
anything to equal in hardihood, pluck, and all endurance the Highland
fox-hunter's canine following] They are invariably a rough and ragged
lot enough, and seemingly at sixes and sevens as to anything like
assortment; no two of them exactly alike in colour, size, or breed; and
they are usually low in stature, though of considerable bone and well
developed muscle what there is of it; but be what they may in these
respects, when you fall in with one of our fox-hunter's packs, six,
seven, eight, or a dozen in number, as the case may be, be sure you have
before you the gam est, varmint
est little
beggars to tackle otter, fox, or badger that the whole world can show.
Our visitor of the other day had only one little fellow of his pack
along with him. "What's his name, Donald?" we asked, pointing to his
wiry follower, that we could easily see was, from the ink-black tip of
his nose to the extremity of his tail, a "varmint" of the first order.
"What do you call him?" "Speach," he replied, and speach,
our non-Gaelic readers must he told, means a wasp or hornet, and, even
like a wasp, we knew that that little fellow with his dander up in the
labyrinthine recesses of a fox's den or a badger's garaidh, would
fight against any odds until he was torn into ribbons, and on each and
every occasion would prove himself
"Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer," which
old Robertson of Struan admirably rendered into our native Doric,
without the loss of a particle of meaning or force—
"A fiery ettercap, a fractious cbiel,
As bet as ginger, and as stieve as steel!
"And is 'Speach' good, then, Donald?" we inquired. "Yes,
sir," was the reply, "a very good little dog. He is but small, you see,
and light; the smallest, indeed, at present in my pack, but he will take
hold of fox or badger or otter at the readiest spot that offers, and,
having once got hold, will never let go again while his antagonist is in
life; at
every dig only burying his muzzle deeper into his opponent. " We
quite agreed with him that a dog that did that must
be good indeed; and we are perfectly satisfied that he did not in the
least exaggerate the indomitable pluck and never-say-die tenacity of his
tiny favourite. Two very good things remain to be said in praise of our
Highland fox-hunters' dogs. They are never known to bite, and very
rarely even to bark at human beings; and no fox-hunter's dog was ever
known to be affected with hydrophobia or canine madness. The exemption
from canine madness may, perhaps, be largely due to their open air and
natural mode of life, but it is difficult to understand why they should
be so entirely free from any propensity to bite or otherwise annoy a
human being, a vice common enough to dogs of unexceptionable character
and breeding otherwise, and from which even the highly intelligent and
much-lauded collie is
by no means so free as his many admirers seem to suppose. Even a collie
is always prepared to hark, and oftentimes to bite on very little
provocation, or no provocation at all. The fox-hunter's terrier, whether
he is pure or a nondescript cross, very rarely indeed barks at a
stranger, and never under any circumstances offers to bite. We question
if there is a human being to-day in life who can honestly assert that he
has ever been bitten by a fox-hunter's dog. With Macdonald we had a long
and interesting crack, in the course of which we touched on some matters
of sufficient importance to be introduced to the reader on a future
occasion.
We had also a visit some little time ago from Sandy
Macarthur, a well-known mole-catcher in Lochaber and the neighbouring
districts; a very intelligent and civil man, whose only fault is that
when you have collared him there is no spontaneity in his crack. Even
when you have got firm hold enough of him, you have to extract his
frequently very valuable information from him by a process akin to that
which an ingenious and learned counsel employs in the case of a
recalcitrant and unwilling witness at an important jury trial. Sandy,
however, is a good fellow all the same, slow but sure; and his quiet
unobtrusiveness and reticence is perhaps to be attributed to the
exigencies of his profession; a "rattling, roaring Willie" of a
mole-catcher, with, to use a Gaelic phrase, his tongue constantly on his
shoulder, would probably prove but an unsuccessful hunter of the
velvet-coated quick-eared, and timid subterranean family of the Mac Talpa. Sandy,
on the contrary, goes to work in dead silence and a-tiptoe, and bags his
mole as quietly as an angler baskets his trout from out the glassy pool,
over which, if but his shadow moved, he would angle long in vain. Sandy
assures us that moles are to be found this season where they were never
seen before, and where he was at first a good deal puzzled to account
for their appearance. On a full consideration of the case Macarthur's
theory is briefly to this effect: Moles are mainly underground dwellers,
and even their travelling and migrating from place to place are done
subterraneously. If, however, they find themselves, as in the Highlands
they must frequently do, in a district or part of district separated
from other parts in-which they have never been by rocky spurs and
ridges, they will not venture over these latter unless they carry
sufficient earth to hide their tunnelling, which, it is needless to say,
they frequently do not. The mole in such a case remains insulated, a
prisoner, so to speak, within his present domain. Last winter and
spring, however, according to Sandy's theory, the snow lay so deep and
lay so long, that the moles took advantage of the fact, and making their
tunnels under the snow, where it lay on spur and ridge, just as if it
had been so much superincumbent soil, they easily got into fresh fields
and pastures new. In this way alone can Sandy account for the appearance
of moles this summer in places into which hitherto they had no means of
ready access; and he may be right, though it is a point in the natural
history of the Talpa well
deserving further investigation. Sandy further avers that moles
sometimes swim across rivers, fresh-water lakes, and even arms of the
sea in their migrations; and this is just possible, though we took the
liberty of expressing ourselves slightly incredulous. Sandy, however,
ought to know; he has spent the best part of a life already approaching
its grand climacteric in the careful and close and constant study of, as
one may say, a single animal—to wit, the mole—and it is always hazardous
gravely to doubt or contradict the deliberately expressed opinion of
such a man on a matter strictly within his proper province. All the same
we still venture to question the assertion that the mole ever
voluntarily enters water deep enough to swim in, or ever dims the
velvety sheen of its glossy pile even by such a luxury as a voluntary
bath in the shallows, till we have some stronger proof for it than has
yet been adduced. |