Fred elected not to continue grouse shooting, and our pleasant partnership came to an end, and I had to decide what I would do.
When in Caithness, I had picked up all the information I could gather as to Caithness moors.
In all ways they were the very opposite to Glenmarkie. Grouse sat well for quite a month, rather more on the hill moors, and rather less on the low moors, and nowhere did they pack, except in heavy snowstorms when the ground was all white, and they made away to the lower grounds for food.
There was nothing like the quantity of grouse that I had at Glenmarkie, but the ranges were larger—wide ranging dogs and good walking imperative; but when dogs got birds they sat well.
There was also a considerable quantity of wild fowl, wild geese, ducks, and blue hares; very few on Glenmarkie. No low ground shooting, in fact, no arable on the hill moors.
The heather was short and stunted, with stretches of deer grass and flows; in fact, no good heather on the hill moors. Excepting on the burn banks and dry knolls, the ground was mostly peat bog, too soft to carry a pannier pony, and the birds had to be carried in panniers on gillies' backs.
The trout fishing in the upper streams and burns of the Thurso that fed Loch More was pretty good. The trout were plentiful but small, running about four to the pound, but they came quick and lively. The loch fishing was not much account; perhaps I should except one loch, that yielded heavy trout of fine quality, but very shy.
Glenmarkie was a Christian-like place, but the principal moors of Caithness were a howling wilderness, not a tree and scarcely a shrub; but it was a wilderness of weird beauty in changing lights. The outlook from the top of Ben Alasky on a wild stormy day, with changing sunlight and storms, over the loch bespattered land, backed up by the cliffs of Orkney, was one of the things to see and to remember.