The month of January, as our old Gaelic notion has it, borrows three
days from July for a bribe of three young lambs. Those three days we
call Faoilteaeh, and often they are very genial and cheerful days, with
a sun that in warmth is a sample of the mellow season at hand. But this
year, as my history has shown, we had no sign of a good _Faoilteach_,
and on the morning of the last day of January, when Alasdair MacDonald’s
army set over the hills, it was wild, tempestuous weather. A wind rose
in the dawning and increased in vehemence as the day aged, and with it
came a storm of snow--the small bitter sifting snow that, encountered
on the hill, stings like the ant and drifts in monstrous and impassable
wreaths. Round about us yawned the glens, to me nameless, mysterious,
choked to the throat with snow-mist that flapped and shook like grey
rags. The fields were bleak and empty; the few houses that lay in
the melancholy plain were on no particularly friendly terms with
this convocation of Erse-men and wild kerns: they shut their doors
steadfastly on our doings, and gave us not even the compliment of
looking on at our strange manoeuvres. There was but one exception, in a
staunch and massive dwelling,--a manifest baron keep or stout domicile
of that nature, just on the border of the Meld in which the camp was
pitched: it was apparently in the charge of two old spinster sisters
whose men-folk were afield somewhere else, for they had shuttered
the windows, barricaded the gates, and ever and anon would they show
blanched faces as the tumult of our preparation disturbed them, and they
came to the door and cunningly pulled it open a little and looked out
on this warlike array. If a soldier made a step in their direction they
fled inside with terror, and their cries rang in the interior.
Those two spinsters--very white, very thin clad for a morn so rigorous,
and with a trepidation writ on every feature--were all that saw us off
on our march to the south-east They came out and stood hand in hand on
the door-stoop, and I have little doubt the honest bodies thanked the
God of Israel that the spoilers were departed furth their neighbourhood.
The country we now plunged into, as may be guessed, was a _terra
incognita_ to me. Beyond that it was Bade-noch and an unhealthy clime
for all that wear the Campbell tartan, I could guess no more. It
was after these little wars were over I discovered the names of the
localities--the glens, mounts, passes, streams, and drove-roads--over
which we passed in a march that Gustavus never faced the like of.
With good judgment enough our captors put a small advance-guard ahead,
a score of Airlie’s troopers, swanky blaspheming persons, whose horses
pranced very gaily up Glen Tarf, guided by John Lom. M’Iver and I
walked together with the main body, quite free and unfettered, sometimes
talking with affability to our captors. The Irish were in good humour;
they cracked jokes with us in their peculiar Gaelic that at first is
ill for a decent Gael of Albion to follow, if uttered rapidly, but soon
becomes as familiar as the less foreign language of the Athole men,
whose tongue we Argiles find some strange conceits in. If the Irish
were affable, the men of our own side of the ocean were most singularly
morose--small wonder, perhaps, for we have little reason to love each
other. Sour dogs! they gloomed at us under their bonnets and swore in
their beards. I have no doubt but for their gentry there had been dirks
in us before we reached Corryarick.
It was with the repartee of the Irish and the scowls of the Gaels
we went up the rough valley of the Tarf, where the wind moaned most
drearily and drove the thin fine snow like a smoke of burning heather.
But when we got to the pass of Corryarick our trials began, and then
such spirit did M’Iver put in the struggle with the task before us,
such snatches of song, sharp saying and old story,--such commradary as
it might be named,--that we were on good terms with all. For your man
of family the Gael has ever some regard. M’Iver (not to speak of myself)
was so manifestly the _duine-uasail_ that the coarsest of the company
fell into a polite tone, helped to their manners to some degree no doubt
by the example of Montrose and Airlie, who at the earliest moments of
our progress walked beside us and discoursed on letters and hunting, and
soldiering in the foreign wars.
The pass of Corryarick met us with a girning face and white fangs. On
Tarf-side there was a rough bridle-path that the wind swept the snow
from, and our progress was fairly easy. Here the drifts lay waist high,
the horses plunged to the belly-bands, the footmen pushed through in
a sweat. It was like some Hyperborean hell, and we the doomed wretches
sentenced to our eternity of toil. We had to climb up the shoulder of
the hill, now among tremendous rocks, now through water unfrozen, now
upon wind-swept ice, but the snow--the snow--the heartless snow was our
constant companion. It stood in walls before, it lay in ramparts round
us, it wearied the eye to a most numbing pain. Unlucky were they who
wore trews, for the same clung damply to knee and haunch and froze,
while the stinging sleet might flay the naked limb till the blood rose
among the felt of the kilted, but the suppleness of the joints was
unmarred.
It was long beyond noon when we reached the head of the pass, and
saw before us the dip of the valley of the Spey. We were lost in a
wilderness of mountain-peaks; the bens started about us on every
hand like the horrors of a nightmare, every ben with its death-sheet,
menacing us, poor insects, crawling in our pain across the landscape.
I thought we had earned a halt and a bite of meat by this forenoon of
labour; and Montrose himself, who had walked the pass on foot like his
fellows, seemed anxious to rest, but Sir Alasdair pushed us on like a
fate relentless.
“On, on,” he cried, waving his long arms to the prospect before; “here’s
but the start of our journey; far is the way before; strike fast, strike
hot! Would ye eat a meal with appetite while the Diarmaids wait in the
way?”
M’iver, who was plodding beside MacDonald when he said these words, gave
a laugh. “Take your time, Sir Sandy,” said he; “you’ll need a bowl or
two of brose ere you come to grips with MacCailein.”
“Well never come to grips with MacCailein,” said MacDonald, taking the
badinage in good part, “so long as he has a back-gate to go out at or a
barge to sail off in.”
“I could correct you on that point in a little affair of arms as between
gentlemen--if the time and place were more suitable,” said M’Iver,
warmly.
“Let your chief defend himself, friend,” said MacDonald. “Man, I’ll
wager we never see the colour of his face when it comes to close
quarters.”
“I wouldn’t wonder,” I ventured. “He is in no great trim for fighting,
for his arm is----”
Sir Alasdair gave a gesture of contempt and cried, “Faugh! we’ve heard
of the raxed arm: he took care when he was making his tale that he never
made it a raxed leg.”
Montrose edged up at this, with a red face and a somewhat annoyed
expression. He put his gloved hand lightly on MacDonald’s shoulder and
chided him for debate with a prisoner of war.
“Let our friends be, Alasdair,” he said, quietly. “They are, in a way,
our guests: they would perhaps be more welcome if their tartan was a
different hue, but in any case we must not be insulting them. Doubtless
they have their own ideas of his lordship of Argile----”
“I never ask to serve a nobler or a more generous chief,” said M’Iver,
firmly.
“I would expect no other sentiment from a gentleman of Argile’s clan.
He has ever done honestly enough by his own people. But have we not had
enough of this? We are wasting our wind that should be more precious,
considering the toils before us.”
We found the descent of Corryarick even more ill than its climbing.
The wind from the east had driven the snow into the mouth of it like a
wedge. The horses, stepping ahead, more than once slipped into drifts
that rose to their necks. Then they became wild with terror, dashed
with frantic hooves into deeper trouble, or ran back, quivering in every
sinew and snorting with affright till the troopers behove to dismount
and lead them. When we in the van reached the foot of the come we looked
back on a spectacle that fills me with new wonder to this day when I
think of it,--a stream of black specks in the distance dropping, as
it were, down the sheer face of white; nearer, the broken bands of
different clansmen winding noiselessly and painfully among the drifts,
their kilts pinned between their thighs, their plaids crossed on their
chests--all their weapons a weariness to them.
In the afternoon the snow ceased to fall, but the dusk came on early
notwithstanding, for the sky was blotted over with driving clouds.
At the head of Glen Roy the MacDonalds, who had lost their bauchles of
brogues in the pass, started to a trot, and as the necessity was we had
to take up the pace too. Long lank hounds, they took the road like deer,
their limbs purple with the cold, their faces pinched to the aspect of
the wolf, their targets and muskets clattering about them. “There are
Campbells to slay, and suppers to eat,” the Major-General had said.
It would have given his most spiritless followers the pith to run till
morning across a strand of rock and pebble. They knew no tiring, they
seemingly felt no pain in their torn and bleeding feet, but put mile
after mile below them.
But the Campbells were not in Glen Roy. They had been there and
skirmished for a day among their old foes and had gone back to
Lochyside, little thinking the fires they left in the Cameron barns at
morning would light the enemy on ere night The roofs still smouldered,
and a granary here and there on the sides of the valley sent up its
flames,--at once a spur to the spirit of the MacDonalds and a light to
their vengeance.
We halted for the night in Glen Spean, with Ben Chlin-aig looming high
to the south, and the river gulping in ice beside our camp. Around was
plenty of wood: we built fires and ate as poor a meal as the Highlands
ever granted in a bad year, though it was the first break in our fast
for the day. Gentle and simple, all fared alike--a whang of barley
bannock, a stirabout of oat-and-water, without salt, a quaich of spirits
from some kegs the troopers carried, that ran done before the half of
the corps had been served. Sentinels were posted, and we slept till the
morning pipe with sweet weariness in our bones.
Our second day was a repetition of the first. We left without even a
breakfast whenever the pipers set up the Cameron rant, “Sons of the
dogs, O come and get flesh!” The Campbells had spoiled the bridge with
a charge of powder, so we had to ford the river among the ice-lumps,
MacDonald showing the way with his kilt-tail about his waist A hunter
from a hamlet at the glen foot gladly left the smoking ruin of his
home and guided us on a drove-road into the wilds of Lochaber,
among mountains more stupendous than those we had left behind. These
relentless peaks were clad with blinding snow. The same choking drifts
that met us in Corryarick filled the passes between Stob Choire and
Easan Mor and Stob Ban, that cherish the snow in their crannies in the
depths of midsummer. Hunger was eating at our hearts when we got to Glen
Nevis, but the glen was empty of people, and the second night fell ere
we broke fast.
I have hungered many times on weary marches, but yon was the most cruel
hunger of my life. And though the pain of the starving could be dulled a
little by draughts of water from the wayside springs, what there was no
remede for was the weakness that turned the flesh in every part of me
to a nerveless pulp. I went down Nevis Glen a man in a delirium. My head
swam with vapours, so that the hillside seemed to dance round and before
me. If I had fallen in the snow I should assuredly have lain there and
died, and the thought of how simple and sweet it would be to stretch out
my heavy limbs and sleep the sleep for ever, more than once robbed me of
my will. Some of the Stewarts and Camerons, late recruits to the army,
and as yet not inured to its toils, fell on the wayside halfway down the
glen. Mac Donald was for leaving them--“We have no need for weaklings,”
he said, cruelly, fuming at the delay; but their lairds gave him a sharp
answer, and said they would bide bye them till they had recovered. Thus
a third of our force fell behind us in the march, and I would have been
behind too, but for M’Iver’s encouragement. His songs were long done;
his stories chilled on his lip. The hunger had him at the heart, but he
had a lion’s will and a lion’s vigour.
“For the love of God!” he said to me, “do not let them think we are so
much of the Covenanter that we cannot keep up! For a Scots Cavalier you
are giving in over early.”
“Campaigning with Mackay was never like this,” I pleaded, wearily; “give
me the open road and an enemy before me, and I would tramp gaily to
the world’s end. Here’s but a choked ravine the very deer abhor in such
weather, and before us but a battle we must not share in.”
He said never a word for a few moments, but trudged on. My low-heeled
shoon were less fitted for the excursion than his close-thonged brogues
that clung to the feet like a dry glove, and I walked lamely. Ever and
anon he would look askance at me, and I was annoyed that he should think
me a poorer mountaineer than those unwearied knaves who hurried us. I
must have shown my feeling in my face, for in a little he let-on to fall
lame too, and made the most grievous complaint of ache and weariness.
His pretence deceived me but for a little. He was only at his old quirk
of keeping me in good repaie with myself, but he played the part with
skill, letting us both fall behind the general company a little, so that
the Mac Donalds might not witness the indignity of it.
Glen Nevis, as I saw it that night in the light of the moon, is what
comes to me now in my dreams. I smell the odour of the sweat-drenched,
uncleanly deeding of those savage clans about us; I see the hills lift
on either hand with splintered peaks that prick among the stars--gorge
and ravine and the wide ascending passes filled ever with the sound of
the river, and the coarse, narrow drove-road leads into despair. That
night the moon rode at the full about a vacant sky. There was not even a
vapour on the hills; the wind had failed in the afternoon.
At the foot of the hill Cam Dearg (or the Red Mount), that is one of
three gallant mountains that keep company for Nevis Ben the biggest of
all, the path we followed made a twist to the left into a gully from
which a blast of the morning’s wind had cleaned out the snow as by a
giant’s spade.
So much the worse for us, for now the path lay strewn with boulders
that the dragoons took long to thread through, and the bare feet of the
private soldiers bled redly anew. Some lean high fir-trees threw this
part into a shadow, and so it happened that as I felt my way wearily on,
I fell over a stone. The fall lost me the last of my senses: I but heard
some of the Stewarts curse me for an encumbrance as they stumbled over
me and passed on, heedless of my fate, and saw, as in a dwam, one of
them who had abraded his knees by his stumble over my body, turn round
with a drawn knife that glinted in a shred of moonlight.
I came to, with M’Iver bent over me, and none of our captors at hand.
“I had rather this than a thousand rix-dollars,” said he, as I sat up
and leaned on my arm.
“Have they left us?” I asked, with no particular interest in the answer.
It could work little difference whatever it might be. “I thought I saw
one of them turn on me with a knife.”
“You did,” said M’Iver. “He broke his part of the parole, and is
lying on the other side of you, I think with a hole in his breast.
An ugly and a treacherous scamp! It’s lucky for us that Montrose or
MacColkitto never saw the transaction between this clay and John M’Iver,
or their clemency had hardly been so great ‘You can bide and see to
your friend,’ was James Grahame’s last words, and that’s the reason I’m
here.”
M’Iver lifted me to my feet, and we stood a little to think what we
should do. My own mind had no idea save the one that we were bound
to keep in touch with the company whose prisoners we were, but M’Iver
hinted at an alternative scarce so honest--namely, a desertion and a
detour to the left that would maybe lead us to the Campbell army before
active hostilities began.
“You would surely not break parole?” said I, surprised, for he was
usually as honourable in such matters as any Highlander I ever met.
“Bah!” he cried, pretending contempt at hesitation, though I could
perceive by his voice he was somewhat ashamed of the policy he proposed.
“Who quitted the contract first? Was it not that Stewart gentleman on
your other side who broke it in a most dastardly way by aiming at your
life?”
“I’m thankful for the life you saved, John,” said I, “little worth
though it seems at this time, but Montrose is not to be held responsible
for the sudden impulse of a private. We made our pact as between
gentleman and gentleman--let us be going.”
“Oh, very well!” said he, shortly. “Let us be going. After all, we are
in a trap anyway we look at all; for half the Stewarts and Gainerons are
behind in the wood there, and our flank retreat among these hills might
be a tempting of Providence. But are you thinking of this Athole corp
and what his kin will be doing to his slayers?”
“I’ll risk it,” I said, shortly. “We may be out of their hands one way
or the other before they miss him.”
On a sudden there rose away before us towards the mouth of the glen the
sound of a bagpipe. It came on the tranquil air with no break in its
uproar, and after a preparatory tuning it broke into an air called
“Cogadh no Sith”--an ancient braggart pibroch made by one Macruimen of
the Isle of Skye,--a tune that was commonly used by the Campbells as a
night-retreat or tattoo.
My heart filled with the strain. It gave me not only the simple illusion
that I saw again the regimentals of my native country--many a friend and
comrade among them in the shelter of the Castle of Inverlochy--but it
roused in me a spirit very antique, very religious and moving too, as
the music of his own land must in every honest Gael.
“_Cruachan_ for ever!” I said lightly to M’Iver, though my heart was
full.
He was as much touched by that homely lilt as myself. “The old days, the
old styles!” said he. “God! how that pibroch stings me to the core!” And
as the tune came more clearly in the second part, or _Crunluadh_ as we
call it, and the player maybe came round a bend of the road, my comrade
stopped in his pace and added with what in another I might have thought
a sob--“I’ve trudged the world; I have learned many bravadoes, so that
my heart never stirred much to the mere trick of an instrument but one,
and the _piob mhor_ conquers me. What is it, Colin, that’s in us, rich
and poor, yon rude cane-reeds speak so human and friendly to?”
“Tis the Gaelic,” I said, cheered myself by the air. “Never a roar of
the drone or a sob of the chanter but’s in the Gaelic tongue.”
“Maybe,” said he, “maybe: I’ve heard the scholars like yourself say the
sheepskin and the drones were Roman--that or Spanish, it’s all one to
me. I heard them at Boitzenburg when we gave the butt of the gun to
Tilly’s _soldadoes_, they played us into Holstein, and when the ditch
of Stralsund was choked with the tartan of Mackay, and our lads were
falling like corn before the hook, a Reay piper stood valiantly in front
and played a salute. Then and now it’s the pipes, my darling!”
“I would as lief have them in a gayer strain. My fondest memories are of
reels I’ve danced to their playing,” I said, and by now we were walking
down the glen.
“And of one reel you danced,” said he, quizzingly, “not more than two
months gone in a town that was called Inneraora?”
“Two months!” I cried,--“two months! I could have sworn offhand we have
been wandering in Lorn and Badenoch for as many years!”
Such spirit did my native pipes, played by a clansman, put in me that my
weariness much abated, and we made great progress down the glen, so that
before the tune had ceased we were on the back of Montrose’s men as they
crept on quietly in the night.
The piper stopped suddenly enough when some shots rang out,--an exchange
of compliments between our pickets ahead and some wandering scouts of
Argile.
And yonder below us, Loch Linnhe and Locheil glanced in the moonlight,
and the strong towers of Inverlochy sat like a scowl on the fringe of
the wave!