Indeed, gentlemen, you have reason to be ashamed of yourselves—but where is the awkward squad? Clean gone. They have stolen a march on us, and while we have been preaching they have been poaching—sans mandate of the Marquess and Monzie. We may catch them ere close of day; and, if they have a smell of slaughter, we shall crack their sconces with our Crutch. No apologies, Hamish—'tis only making the matter worse; but we expected better things of the Dogs. O'Bronte! fie! fie! sirrah. Your sire would not have fallen asleep during a speech of ours—and such a speech!—he would have sat it out without winking—at each more splendid passage testifying his delight by a yowl. Leap over the Crutch, you reprobate, and let us see thee scour. Look at him, Hamish, already beckoning to us on his hurdies from the hill-top. Let us scale those barriers—and away over the table-land between that summit and the head of Gleno. No sooner said than done—and here we are on the level—such a level as the ship finds on the main sea, when in the storm-lull she rides up and down the green swell, before the trade-winds that cool the tropics. The surface of this main land-sea is black in the gloom, and green in the glimmer, and purple in the light, and crimson in the sunshine. O, never looks Nature so magnificent
"As in this varying and uncertain weather,
When gloom and glory force themselves together,
When calm seems stormy, and tempestuous light
At day's meridian lowers like noon of night!"
Whose are these fine lines? Hooky Walker, Our own. Dogs! Down—down—down—be stonelike, O Shelty!—and Hamish, sink thou into the heather like a lizard; for if these old dim eyes of ours may be in aught believed, yonder by the birches stands a Red-Deer snuffing the east wind! Hush! hush! hush! He suspects an enemy in that airt—but death comes upon him with stealthy foot, from the west; and if Apollo and Diana—the divinities we so long have worshipped—be now propitious, his antlers shall be entangled in the heather, and his hoofs beat the heavens. Hamish, the rifle! A tinkle as of iron, and a hiss accompanying the explosion—and the King of the Wilderness, bounding up into the air with his antlers higher than ever waved chieftain's plume, falls down stone-dead where he stood; for the blue-pill has gone through his vitals, and lightning itself could hardly have withered him into more instantaneous cessation of life!
He is an enormous animal. What antlers! Roll him over, Hamish, on his side! See, up to our breast, nearly, reaches the topmost branch. He is what the hunter of old called a "Stag of Ten." His eye has lost the flash of freedom—the tongue that browsed the brushwood is bitten through by the clenched teeth—the fleetness of his feet has felt that fatal frost—the wild heart is hushed, Hamish—tame, tame, tame; and there the Monarch of the Mountains—the King of the Cliffs—the Grand Llama of the Glens—the Sultan of the Solitudes—the Dey of the Deserts—the Royal Ranger of the Woods and Forests—yea, the very Prince of the Air and Thane of Thunder—"shorn of all his beams," lies motionless as a dead Jackass by the wayside, whose hide was not thought worth the trouble of flaying by his owners the gypsies! "To this complexion has he come at last"—he who at dawn had borrowed the wings of the wind to carry him across the cataracts!
A sudden pang shoots across our heart. What right had we to commit this murder? How, henceforth, shall we dare to hold up our head among the lovers of liberty, after having thus stolen basely from behind on him, the boldest, brightest, and most beautiful of all her sons! We, who for so many years have been just able to hobble, and no more, by aid of the Crutch—who feared to let the heather-bent touch our toe, so sensitive in its gout—We, the old and impotent, all last winter bed-ridden, and even now seated like a lameter on a shelty, strapped by a patent buckle to a saddle provided with a pummel behind as well as before—such an unwieldy and weary wretch as We—"fat, and scant of breath"—and with our hand almost perpetually pressed against our left side, when a coughing-fit of asthma brings back the stitch, seldom an absentee—to assassinate that red-deer, whose flight on earth could accompany the eagles in heaven; and not only to assassinate him, but, in a moral vein, to liken his carcass to that of a Jackass! It will not bear further reflection; so, Hamish, out with your whinger, and carve him a dish fit for the gods—in a style worthy of Sir Tristrem, Gill Morice, Robin Hood, or Lord Ranald. No; let him lie till nightfall, when we shall be returning from Inveraw with strength sufficient to bear him to the Tent.
But hark, Hamish, to that sullen croak from the cliff! The old raven of the cove already scents death—
"Sagacious of his quarry from afar!"
But where art thou, Hamish? Ay, yonder is Hamish, wriggling on his very belly, like an adder, through the heather to windward of the croaker, whose nostrils, and eyes, and bill, are now all hungrily fascinated, and as it were already fastened into the very bowels of the beast. His days are numbered. That sly serpent, by circuitous windings insinuating his limber length through among all obstructions, has ascended unseen the drooping shoulder of the cliff, and now cautiously erects his crest within a hundred yards or more of the unsuspecting savage, still uttering at intervals his sullen croak, croak, croak! Something crumbles, and old Sooty, unfolding his huge wings, lifts himself up like Satan, about to sail away for a while into another glen; but the rifle rings among the rocks—the lead has broken his spine—and look! how the demon, head-over-heels, goes tumbling down, down, down, many hundred fathoms, dashed to pieces and impaled on the sharp-pointed granite! Ere nightfall the bloody fragments will be devoured by his mate. Nothing now will disturb the carcass of the deer. No corbies dare enter the cove where the raven reigned; the hawk prefers grouse to venison, and so does the eagle, who, however, like a good Catholic as he is—this is Friday—has gone out to sea for a fish dinner, which he devours to the music of the waves on some isle-rock. Therefore lie there, dethroned king! till thou art decapitated; and ere the moon wanes, that haunch will tower gloriously on our Tent-table at the Feast of Shells.
What is your private opinion, O'Bronte, of the taste of Red-deer blood? Has it not a wild twang on the tongue and palate, far preferable to sheep's-head? You are absolutely undergoing transfiguration into a deer-hound! With your fore-paws on the flank, your tail brandished like a standard, and your crimson flews (thank you, Shepherd, for that word) licked by a long lambent tongue red as crimson, while your eyes express a fierce delight never felt before, and a stifled growl disturbs the star on your breast—just as you stand now, O'Bronte, might Edwin Landseer rejoice to paint thy picture, for which, immortal image of the wilderness, the Duke of Bedford would not scruple to give a draft on his banker for one thousand pounds!
Shooting grouse after red-deer is, for a while at first, felt to be like writing an anagram in a lady's album, after having given the finishing-touch to a tragedy or an epic poem. 'Tis like taking to catching shrimps in the sand with one's toes, on one's return from Davis' Straits in a whaler that arrived at Peterhead with sixteen fish, each calculated at ten tun of oil. Yet, 'tis strange how the human soul can descend, pleasantly at every note, from the top to the bottom of passion's and imagination's gamut.