"Such as, that oats would replace the fairies on the hill of Tomnahourich, and that ships with sails unfurled would pass and repass it; but the green bracken and the purple heather wave yet on the Fairies' Hill, and we hare heard nothing of the ships."*
* The captain spoke in 1800. "Tomnahourich, the far-famed Fairies' Hill, has been sown with oats," states the Inverness Advertiser of 1859; "according to tradition, the Brahn prophet, who lived 200 years ago, predicted that ships with unfurled sails would pass and repass Tomnahourich; and further, that it would yet be placed under lock and key. The first part of the prediction was verified by the opening of the Caledonian Canal, and we seem to be on the eve of seeing the realization of the rest by the final closing up of the Fairies' Hill." In what succeeds I have closely followed local and oral tradition; but the black officer was not the last of his race, as he left a daughter, who, I believe, was married in England.
"Kenneth Ower never spoke in vain," said the white-haired sergeant.
"I am too old a soldier to be terrified by silly predictions," exclaimed the captain, wrathfully; "so enough of this. Set forward, men—away to the forest! Let us drink, dance, and hunt while we may!"
And quaffing off a huge jug of alcohol, with a party of gillies, whom he had made half tipsy, he departed towards the Forest of Qaich.
Of all that band of hunters, not a man ever came down from the Grampians again!
On that night, when the whole atmosphere seemed calm and still, a terrific tempest, sudden as the discharge of a cannon, swept over the mountains. For hours the forked lightning played and flashed over Benoch-Corri-Va and the Haunted Forest of Gaich, while the thunder-peals made the old women in every cottage and clachan totter down on their knees to mutter a prayer for deliverance from evil and danger, as the electric salvos hurtled over the great wooded valley, through which the swollen Spey, the most furious of the Scottish rivers, laden with the spoil of a hundred forests, swept with a ceaseless roar to the German Ocean.
Over Gaich, the sky seemed all on fire. It was an expanse of crimson flame streaked with forky green flashes; and against this steady flush the huge Grampians stood strongly forth in sombre outline.
With night this storm passed away.
Three days after, some shepherds who, in pursuit of their scattered flocks, ventured into the wilderness of Gaich, saw a sight, the memory of which causes many yet to shudder, as they tell to their grandchildren around the winter hearth the story of the Captain Dhu.