SCOTTISH DEER-FORESTS.
Deer-stalking has for many a long year been looked upon as the king of sports; and in Scotland, a large area of land has from an early period been occupied by the red-deer and the roebuck. At the present time, as far as has been ascertained by a recent inquiry under Royal Commission, the extent of all the deer-forests in Scotland amounts to about two millions of acres. It is only, however, right to say that the land devoted to these animals could not be more profitably employed. It has been affirmed by practical men that it is scarcely possible to feed even one hardy black-faced sheep on less than six acres of such land, so scant is the herbage. Indeed, some intelligent farmers maintain that it will take a hundred and sixty acres of forest-land to graze a score of these sheep. No person who is even tolerably familiar with the deer-districts of Scotland will gainsay this. The contour, altitude, and climate of a deer-forest quite unfit it for agricultural purposes—the range of ground occupied by these stately animals is of the most miscellaneous description: hill and dale, moor and morass, mountain and glen, with every here and there rocky precipices, and small groups of trees naturally planted, and chiefly of the hardy native birch. In the three chief deer-counties of Scotland, the cultivable area is singularly small in proportion to their total extent. Taking Argyll, Inverness, and Ross-shire as examples, only three hundred and eighty-seven thousand five hundred and ninety-eight acres are to be found under cultivation, out of an area which covers six million eight hundred and twenty-three thousand and two acres, leaving nearly six and a half millions of acres to be inhabited by sheep, deer, and grouse, and as the site of lochs, rivers, and mountains, and sterile places on which nothing grows and nothing can live.
No authentic statistics are collected in Scotland of the deer which are annually slain in the way of sport; but we are enabled from records which appear from time to time in the public prints, to estimate the number of stags which are killed in the different forests. In the county of Inverness—which may be called the deer-county of Scotland par excellence, in the same way as Perthshire is looked upon as being the representative grouse-producing county of the kingdom—probably about sixteen hundred stags are annually killed. The figure which represents the number of deer in all Scotland, counting animals of all ages, must be very considerable, seeing that, as stated in evidence before the recent Royal Commission, it yields to the sportsman’s rifle four thousand six hundred and fifty stags per annum, and a nearly equal number of hinds. Scrope the deer-stalker, when writing his celebrated work some fifty years since, estimated that in the Forest of Athole, which at that date contained an area of over fifty-one thousand acres, there would be, young and old, between five and six thousand deer. Calculating on that data, there ought now to be found on the two million acres of land at present given over to stags and hinds and their calves, as many as two hundred and twenty-five thousand animals of the deer kind. Each stag which succumbs to the prowess of the stalker has been estimated to cost fifty pounds to the lessee or proprietor of a deer-forest. At that rate, the four thousand six hundred and fifty stags annually killed in Scotland represent a sum of two hundred and thirty-two thousand five hundred pounds paid in the form of rent and other items of expenditure which are yearly incurred. As to the rent paid for particular deer-forests, it varies considerably according to extent and amenities. Some forests contain a large area of ground; and although the rental per acre looks trifling enough—ranging as it probably does from ninepence to double, or in some instances to treble, that sum—the amount soon accumulates and becomes important. For an area of twelve thousand acres, a thousand pounds will frequently be paid. Many Scottish forests are, however, rented at double that sum; and not a few at an even larger rent. In the county of Inverness, for example, there are a dozen which yield a total amount of fully thirty-three thousand pounds, including five of three thousand pounds and upwards, and one of nearly six thousand pounds, of yearly rent. In the counties of Ross, Argyll, Aberdeen, and Perth there are also many forests which command a high price. In the first-named county, we could name twenty that fetch an aggregate annual rent of upwards of thirty-three thousand pounds, or an average of nearly seventeen hundred pounds; while it is no secret that an American gentleman pays a yearly rental for deer-ground in Inverness and Ross of nearly eleven thousand pounds.
Deer-stalking has been denominated ‘the pastime of princes;’ and it is a sport that calls for pluck, patience, and endurance on the part of those who undertake it. From daybreak to sundown has been often spent in circumventing the monarch of the mountain; and often, after a hard day’s work, the noble hart has got the better of his pursuers, and found his way to a place of safety. The deer is difficult of access, being a most suspicious and wary animal, with a wonderfully acute power of scent and sense of hearing. The antlered stag has to be watched from afar with a powerful telescope, the anxious stalker and his gillies requiring to be circumspect in all their movements. As an intelligent forester told the writer: ‘You have to creep on your stomach like a serpent; you have to crouch as you go like a collier at work; while to make sure of your prey, you may have to make a tour of a couple of miles, even though you are just about within range. You must force your way through the morass, and must, if necessary, walk for a few hundred yards up to your middle in water—that is all in the way of business, sir, when you go deer-stalking. A slight rustle, the displacing of a stone on the mountain-side as you laboriously creep or climb to overlook your quarry, and your chance is gone; the deer being perhaps miles away before you can realise the fact that you have disturbed him.’
These words contain an epitome of the work of deer-stalking. A stag will note a man a long way off, and will, when he does so, most probably at once take alarm and run for his life. The sense of smell which has been bestowed on these animals is wonderful; wind carries the scent to them unbroken, and whenever they have ‘got the wind,’ as it is called, of man, or any other source of disturbance, they are sure to move off to a place of safety. When once a herd of deer is disturbed, they will take themselves away to a distance; and it is generally a considerable time before they settle down again to rest or feed in quietness. The red-deer is excessively shy, and, as we have been trying to show, easily frightened. The melancholy note of a flying plover, the crowing of a cock-grouse, or the bustling past of a mountain hare, will sometimes cause him to gallop in a state of alarm for a mile or two before he pauses to see what has happened; and consequently, it is generally the policy of the devoted deer-stalker to discourage the rearing of grouse or hares in his deer-forest. The desire for possessing ‘fine heads’ causes some of the best specimens of the tribe to be shot at an early stage of the season, a stag-royal being a prize greatly coveted. It is a somewhat curious feature of the economy of a forest that so few horns are found. The deer sheds its horns every year; but what becomes of most of those that are shed is not very accurately known, the number found not being in anything like proper proportion to the number that must be shed. The horns, as a general rule, are given to the foresters who find them, as a perquisite; and therefore it may be taken for granted they are well looked after; or their scarcity may be partly due to the fact of their being eaten by the deer themselves after being shed! This, to a certain extent at least, seems certainly to be the case.
It has been said of the Highland sports of deer-stalking and grouse-shooting, that as they never can be made to ‘pay’ in a commercial sense, so they never can be vulgarised. The deer-forests in particular are sure to remain select; it is only men who have an annual income of many thousands who can afford to indulge themselves in the ‘pastime of princes.’ As regards the produce of these vast areas of ground—the venison—it can hardly be said to have a marketable value. To produce a haunch at table on the occasion of a dinner-party is with some persons a matter of ambition; but table venison, except in Highland shooting-lodges and hotels, is generally obtained from park-bred fallow-deer, especially fed for the purpose, and which in its season commands a very high price. Red-deer venison—that is, a haunch from a Highland hart or hind—can only be assigned a secondary place in the cuisine. Happily, some sportsmen have discovered that venison does not require to be kept till it has begun to decay before it can be brought to table, but can be used to the greatest advantage in the space of two or three days after being killed, when its flavour is excellent and the flesh presumably nutritious. The deer can also be cut into chops, such cuts being delicious. Among sportsmen who thus utilise their venison we may be allowed to name the father of them all—Horatio Ross. There is, however, some probability that the Scottish red-deer may yet cut a better figure at table than it has ever done, and pains are being taken, we understand, to fortify the various breeds. The deer is a rather local animal, and therefore there must be in the various herds a certain amount of in-breeding; and to counteract the deterioration which must result from such a circumstance, Sutherland stags were some time ago placed in the forests of Ross and Cromarty with gratifying results; the Queen, it was some time ago stated, had forwarded some red-deer from Windsor to be crossed with the deer of the Duke of Portland in the county of Caithness; and various gentlemen well known in the deer-forest world of the Highlands have recently followed these examples. It is to be hoped we may learn in time how these experiments have succeeded.
In conclusion, we have only to remark, that it is a fortunate circumstance for the owners of Highland estates that they can be rented for deer-forests. In no other way could the proprietors obtain so good an income from their lands. Those engaged in the sport of deer-stalking year by year expend a large amount of money; they give remunerative employment to many hundred persons, and have done much in many instances to improve the moral as well as the material circumstances of the people by setting those employed by them a good example. As to the question whether it would be more profitable to feed sheep or deer, that must be left to settle itself by the inevitable operation of economic law. It is a question of rental; persons having moors and forests in their hands, naturally enough let them to those who offer most money for them. It has been accurately ascertained by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Crofting System, &c., that all the deer-forests in Scotland—comprising about two million acres—are capable of throwing on the market only about four hundred thousand sheep per annum; and as there are in the United Kingdom nearly thirty million sheep, it is at once seen how comparatively meagre is the displacement of sheep by the Scottish deer-forests.
BY MEAD AND STREAM.
CHAPTER LVI.—UPHILL.
She knew and he knew that they were something more to each other on that white winter day than they had ever been before. What the degree of the ‘something more’ might be, neither Madge nor Philip attempted to calculate. They were conscious of it, and that was enough: yet both wondered how there could be this sense of closer alliance, when, looking back, they remembered how often they had thought that nothing on earth could decrease or increase their affection. They were learning the priceless lesson that Love grows in suffering where mere passion quickly withers and dies, and frequently turns to hate.