Then comes the collection of the slain and crippled, and loading men and gillies with the slain.
The reader may say, Why not send a cart or pannier pony? simply because the peat moss of Caithness is too soft to carry a pony.
It was a pleasing little shoot, and the weather at that time of year being generally stormy, the outlook from the hill was very grand.
[ Remarks on the Outcome of Disease.]
A perusal of the foregoing reminiscences will show that grouse shooting, like other sports, is very uncertain, and that really good shooting cannot apparently be looked for in more than four seasons out of seven, consequent on the ravages of disease.
With the exception of portions of Southern Perthshire say the district west of Dunkeld, embracing the Breadalbane Moors, which for many years have had comparative immunity from disease, but will have it sooner or later, the moors of Aberdeen, Banff, Inverness, Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness are attacked at pretty regular intervals, and an old and experienced hand may spot the years of disease pretty well in advance.
In Sutherlandshire the recovery is rather slower than in Caithness, and the period of good shooting rather less.
On the smaller moors on the north-east of Caithness mixed up with the arable land there is certainly very much less disease, and when the birds get a touch, it is called a bad breeding season; as the tenant of a very fair moor in that district put it, "We never have disease, but we had a season of poor shooting as the birds did not breed that year." Of course, that meant disease.
I take it that in that district, the climate being better, the ground carrying few birds and being sprinkled in patches mixed with arable, that the risk of contagion is less, besides which, from the tendency of birds to draw down from the higher to the lower grounds in the storms of winter, the gaps caused by disease get filled up.