'Is that Highland manners, lass?' he said, but with perfect good humour. 'I'm thinking ye might say "if ye please." But I'll get ye a hare or two, sure enough, and ye'll keep the first dance for me on Monday night.'
'Indeed I am not sure that I will be at the dancing at all,' retorted the pretty Nelly; but this was merely to cover her retreat—she did not wish to have any further conversation before that lot of idle half-grinning fellows.
As for Ronald, he bade them good-morning, and went lightly on his way again. He was going up the hill anyway; and he might as well bring down a brace of hares for Mrs. Murray; so, after walking along the road for a mile or so, he struck off across some rough and partly marshy ground, and presently began to climb the lower slopes of Clebrig, getting ever a wider and wider view as he ascended, and always when he turned finding beneath him the wind-stirred waters of the loch, where a tiny dark object, slow-moving near the shores, told him where the salmon fishers were patiently pursuing their sport.
No, there were no more unsettling notions in his brain; here he was master and monarch of all he surveyed; and if he was profoundly unconscious of the ease with which he breasted this steep hillside, at least he rejoiced in the ever-widening prospect—as lochs and hills and stretches of undulating moorland seemed to stretch ever and ever outward until, afar in the north, he could make out the Kyle of Tongue and the faint line of the sea. It was a wild and changeable day; now filled with gloom, again bursting forth into a blaze of yellow sunshine; while ever and anon some flying tag of cloud would come sweeping across the hillside and engulf him, so that all he could then discern was the rough hard heather and bits of rock around his feet. It was just as one of these transient clouds was clearing off that he was suddenly startled by a loud noise—as of iron rattling on stones; and so bewildering was this unusual noise in the intense silence reigning there that instinctively he wheeled round and lowered his gun. And then again, the next second, what he saw was about as bewildering as what he had heard—a great creature, quite close by, and yet only half visible in the clearing mist, with huge outspread wings, dragging something after it across the broken rocks. The truth flashed upon him in an instant; it was an eagle caught in a fox-trap; the strange noise was the trap striking here and there on a stone. At once he put down his gun on an exposed knoll and gave chase, with the greatest difficulty subduing the eager desire of the yelping Harry to rush forward and attack the huge bird by himself. It was a rough and ludicrous pursuit but it ended in capture—though here, again, circumspection was necessary, for the eagle, with all his neck-feathers bristling, struck at him again and again with the talons that were free, only one foot having been caught in the trap. But the poor beast was quite exhausted; an examination of the trap showed Ronald that he must have flown with this weight attached to his leg all the way from Ben Ruach, some half dozen miles away; and now, though there was yet an occasional automatic motion of the beak or the claws, as though he would still strike for liberty, he submitted to be firmly seized while the iron teeth of the trap were being opened. And then Ronald looked at his prize (but still with a careful grip). He was a splendid specimen of the golden eagle—a bird that is only found here and there in Sutherlandshire, though the keepers are no longer allowed to kill them—and, despite himself, looking at the noble creature, he began to ask himself casuistical questions. Would not this make a handsome gift for Meenie?—he could send the bird to Macleay at Inverness, and have it stuffed and returned without anybody knowing. Moreover, the keepers were only charged to abstain from shooting such golden eagles as they might find on their own ground; and he knew from the make of the trap that this one must have come from a different shooting altogether; it was not a Clebrig eagle at all. But he looked at the fierce eye of the beast, and its undaunted mien; he knew that, if it could, it would fight to the death; and he felt a kind of pride in the creature, and admiration for it, and even a sort of sympathy and fellow-feeling.
'My good chap,' said he, 'I'm not going to kill you in cold blood—not me. Go back to your wife and weans, wherever they are. Off!'
And he tried to throw the big beast into the air. But this was not like flinging up a released pigeon. The eagle fell forward, and stumbled twice ere it could get its great wings into play; and then, instead of trying to soar upward, it went flapping away down wind—increasing in speed, until he could see it, now rising somewhat, cross the lower windings of Loch Naver, and make away for the northern skies.
'It's a God's mercy,' he was saying to himself, as he went back to get his gun, 'that I met the creature in the daytime; had it been at night, I would hae thought it was the devil.'
Some two or three hundred feet still farther up the hillside he came to his own eyrie—a great mass of rock, affording shelter from either southerly or easterly winds, and surrounded with some smaller stones; and here he sate contentedly down to look around him—Harry crouched at his feet, his nose between his paws, but his eyes watchful. And this wide stretch of country between Clebrig and the northern sea would have formed a striking prospect in any kind of weather—the strange and savage loneliness of the moorlands; the solitary lakes with never a sign of habitation along their shores; the great ranges of mountains whose silent recesses are known only to the stag and the hind; but on such a morning as this it was all as unstable and unreal as it was wildly beautiful and picturesque;—for the hurrying weather made a kind of phantasmagoria of the solid land; bursts of sunlight that struck on the yellow straths were followed by swift gray cloud-wreaths blotting out the world; and again and again the white snow-peaks of the hills would melt away and become invisible only to reappear again shining and glorious in a sky of brilliant blue; until, indeed, it seemed as if the earth had no substance and fixed foundation at all, but was a mere dream, an aerial vision, changed and moved and controlled by some unseen and capricious hand.
And then again, on the dark and wind-driven lake far below him, that small object was still to be made out—like some minute, black, crawling water insect. He took out his glass from its leather case, adjusted it, and placed it to his eye. What was this? In the world suddenly brought near—and yet dimly near, as though a film interposed—he could see that some one was standing up in the stern of the boat, and another crouching down, by his side. Was that a clip or the handle of the landing-net; in other words, was it a salmon or a kelt that was fighting them there? He swept the dull waters of the loch with his glass; but could make out no splashing or springing anywhere near them. And then he could see by the curve of the rod that the fish was close at hand; there was a minute or two longer of anxiety; then a sudden movement on the part of the crouching person—and behold a silver-white object gleams for a moment in the air and then disappears!
'Good!' he says to himself—with a kind of sigh of satisfaction as if he had himself taken part in the struggle and capture.