Over the first rise of the hills was a long dreary waste—treeless, awesome, desolate. Whiles, as we ran, a curlew would rise, and its long whirling cry rose in the night, filling the ears and leaving an emptiness afterwards in the silence, for things not canny to be filling. Once we startled a herd of red-deer feeding round the mossy lips of a frozen pool, and away they galloped. One lordly stag wheeled with antlers high, gazed at our flight, and vanished, leaving us in that dreadful stillness, and a cold eerie wind whined and sighed over us. We spoke little, having no breath to spare, for the ground was growing more steep and broken towards the second rise, up which we clambered, sliding and falling, grasping frozen heather till we reached the top. The hill was now a riddle of peat hags and binks, like a bee's skep, a place of treachery and slimy death, although the frost would have most of the sinking pools in its iron hand; but we never stopped the long stride that seemed so slow to me at first. Dan bent and twisted through the peat banks like a hound on the trail. Here was a place where folk had wrought, cutting their fuel for generations; and God knows what memories were lurking here from the old days, what ghosts of love and hatred, what spirits of tears and laughter. Would the race never end? My tongue, dry and swollen, stuck raspily against the roof of my mouth. Round my lips was a hot fire, for I had grasped a handful of snow and melted it in my mouth as I ran. We were past the peat hags, and the ground fell away under our feet; the heather got scantier and sprits more common, until we had descended, maybe, five hundred feet into a wide valley with a level plain at its heart, with many clumps of stunted birches and hardy firs. Here was the great grazing for young beasts in the summer, away here in the glen, but now only stillness and desolation. A wide burn rumbled and splashed on its gravelly banks in front of us, and we could hear the deep noise of a waterfall.
"Hold in to the fall," cried McKinnon, and his voice was hoarse as a raven's.
"I ken this like the back o' my hand," said Dan, and led us, with never a break, to an easy crossing.
And now we took the greatest care of our going, for a great hill rose before us steep, as it seemed to me, as the wall of a house, and then all our care was made useless, for the snow began again.
Slowly, blindly we clambered and spelled up the hillside, now numb with cold, now fiery hot, Dan always in the lead, and me groaning at his hurdie.
"Keep a stout heart, Hamish; this is the last o't."
We were now, as it were, on a ladder on the hill face, for there were a succession of great holes like steps, on each of which three men could stand—the giant's steps, the old folks called them.
At the back of the step where we three lay was a grey rock, as though the earth had been worn away, leaving the rock partly bare. As we lay Dan struck it three times with a stone about the size of a putting-ball, and a great low baying sounded, and my blood ran cold, and then the grey rock moved inch by inch, and I heard a great rift of Gaelic, and Dan went crawling like a snake through the hole, and myself and McKinnon at his heels.
"Welcome, hearty welcome; whatever drives ye sae fast. Welcome to
McAllan's Locker."
"It's latish for ceilidhing," said Dan. "I'm hoping me and my friends are not putting ye out in any ways, but just a shakedown o' breckans is all we're asking, and thankful for it."