Such are some of the pleasures which the mountaineer is heir to. But whether we leave the heights in calm or storm, in sunshine or shadow, we leave them only for the moment; we descend, but with an inner prompting to return. However prosperous our ascent may have been, there is always the something left undone, the ridge unclimbed or valley unexplored, which is the spur to further effort. Here, if nowhere else in the land, the sense of satiety is unknown; and it is to this mental tonic, even more than to the bracing air of the heights, that we owe the unwearied spirit which nerves us to walk more leagues upon the mountains than we could walk miles upon the plain. For in the lowlands we walk with the body only; in the highlands we walk also with the mind.
V
Wild Life
To the rambler upon these hills few things are so attractive, next to the hills themselves, as the glimpses which he gains into the ways of the non-human people that have their homes there. It thrills us to remember that the mountains, lonely though we call them, have for centuries on centuries had their own populous dramas of life and death, and that their rocky tenements were inhabited, in some cases down to comparatively modern times, by the bear, the wolf, the boar, the wild cat, and other hardy outlaws that now exist but in a name or a tradition; but while we must lament the loss of such peaceful animals as the beaver, spoken of by Giraldus Cambrensis as still resident on one Welsh stream in the twelfth century,[16] and the stag, now surviving only in a corner of the Lake District, we need not affect to regret the disappearance of the more savage beasts of prey, for banditti, whether human or non-human, must be subdued.
And it is one of the compensating advantages of the destruction of the greater “game” that the mountains are no longer a hunting-place. You may walk where you will, round Snowdon or round Scafell, without the fear of being turned back, as so often happens in the Scotch highlands, by the nuisance of game-preserving; nor will your own feelings be harassed by the spectacle of a troop of deer-stalkers, or other blood-sportsmen intent on “killing something.” There is, of course, fishing in plenty, but that, as far as I have watched it in these upland places, is an exercise rather of faith and imagination than of the red right hand; at any rate one seldom sees the fisherman catch anything, and the “fool with a gun” is now as rare a sight as the rare birds whom his forerunners have “dropped”—to use that telling expression of the game-keepers. Fox-hunting on foot goes on to some extent in the winter months; but the need of killing these mischievous pilferers is here a reality, and not, as in fashionable hunting-counties, a sham, and we may rightly wish to see the fox exterminated as the wolf has been—a far humaner and more rational course than that of “preserving” him to be tortured by huntsmen. The otter-worry, that very mean form of cruelty, is carried on in the lower valleys of a few mountain districts, where the pools are large and deep, but climbers on the hills are in little danger of meeting with the motley rabble who partake in it.
Here, then, is another goodly feature of mountaineering, that, as one of its accomplished masters, Mr. Owen Glynne Jones, observed, it “does not claim the sacrifice of beasts and fishes.” The craft of climbing is a fine physical training which, as a school of manliness and self-reliance, immeasurably transcends the wretched amateur butchery that masquerades as “sport.” “The mountaineer,” says Reclus, “experiences, like the huntsman, the delight of conquest after toil, yet he enjoys the pleasure all the more, in that he has risked none but his own life; he has kept his hands unstained.”
In the absence of the larger kinds of wild animals that have gone down under the stress of what we call civilization, it is to the mountain birds that we first turn with interest. We think at once of the golden eagle, in regions where the names of so many cliffs recall his former sovereignty; and those who have seen the great bird, as I have, flying in freedom among the mountains of Skye, and, as happened on one occasion I recall, mobbed by dwarfish-looking ravens, as a kestrel is mobbed by sparrows, on the shores of Loch Coruisk, until he sailed off on wide wings across the corrie, cannot but regret that he is no longer known in his traditional haunts on Snowdon, or on his famous crag in Borrowdale. But when we read in old books of travel, such as West’s Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland (1781), that “the devastation made on the fold in the breeding-season, by one eyrie, was computed at a lamb a day,” we understand why the doom of the eagle was even then unavoidable and why it became “a common species of traffic,” as another author described it, “to supply the curious with young eagles, in the taking of which the inhabitants were very expert.”[17]
I was told by a sheep-farmer in Scotland, who had trapped or shot over a score of these feathered freebooters, that for an eagle to carry off a plump lamb from the pastures there is need of a freshening breeze to lift the mighty wings; he had seen cases when, in dull listless weather, the bird was unable to rise with its quarry, and on the approach of the shepherd was obliged to abandon it and flap reluctantly away.
A lady who had been pained to see a golden eagle “for sale,” once asked me whether, in the event of her ransoming the captive, it would be possible to set him at liberty on some mountain height, and for a time I was rather dazzled by the idea of releasing the imperial bird from the top of Snowdon or Scafell, or, if the companionship of other eagles was desired, from some far northern peak; but on my consulting a well-known ornithologist he assured me that the eagle, cramped by long imprisonment, would probably be unable to fly, and that if he did fly he would almost certainly fall a victim to some local “sportsman,” or be pecked to death by his wild congeners, if there were any in the neighbourhood; so in the face of these discouraging predictions the project was given up.