"crack," "crack," came the sound of fire-arms on three sides; and as
they turned and ran for the breastwork, a man hiccoughed and fell on his
face, clutching at the grass, coughing up his life-blood. No time to
turn and help; the yelling Redskins were at their heels, tomahawk and
scalping knife in hand; delay meant certain death for all, and the
fugitives tumbled into the breastwork just in time. Then, save for one
awful scream of agony, again for a time all was quiet; for any sign that
might be seen of them by the white men, the forest might have swallowed
up the enemy. But let one of these white men for but an instant show his
head over the breastwork, or in any way expose an arm or even a hand,
then from the concealed foe came at once a hail of bullets, and the
forest rang with the crack of rifles. Several of the little garrison,
careless, or too impatient to fire only through the roughly made
loopholes, lost their lives in this way; and some others were picked off
by Indians who had managed to get into the high branches of neighbouring
trees, and thence, concealed behind thick foliage, fired on the
garrison, for a time with impunity, till by chance it was discovered
from where the fatal shots were coming.
Meantime, for the white men it was almost like letting off their rifles
into the night; seldom could a Redskin be seen, and men fired only at
the spots where the smoke of Indian muskets hung about the undergrowth,
or where they saw a spirt of flame.
And so the fight went on, hour after hour, till many of the defenders
had fallen, and the necessity of husbanding ammunition slackened the
fire of Kerr and his comrades. Then the Indians, knowing that the white
men were few, abandoning caution tried to rush the breastwork. But now
necessarily they exposed themselves, and as the white men had reloaded
the empty rifles of their dead and wounded comrades, and thus had at
least two apiece ready, heavy toll was taken of the stormers, and the
Redskins were beaten back. Time and again was this repeated, once even
during the night--just before dawn. But each attempt failed, and the
baffled Indians finally drew off.
With thankful hearts, if with sore labour, the surviving white men, by
lightening their vessel, got her off the ground, and succeeded in
finding and stopping the leak. A few days saw them again safely at
Detroit.
No more, as a civilian, did Andrew Kerr face the Indians. On getting
back to New York in 1764 he was given a commission as ensign in the 1st
battalion of the 42nd Regiment, and in various parts of the world he saw
much service, finally retiring about 1780 with the rank of captain. He
did not wholly, however, sever his connection with the service, for
later, after he had purchased an estate in the Border, and had married,
he became a major in the Dumfries Militia.
It is given to few to pass a youth so stormy as Kerr's, and to end, as
he did, by becoming a peaceful, prosperous Border laird.
BORDER SNOWSTORMS
"St. Agnes' Eve--ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold."
The great round-backed, solemn Border hills, in summer time kindly
sleeping giants, smiling in their sleep, take on another guise when
winter smites with pitiless blast, when
"The sounds that drive wild deer and fox
To shelter in the brake and rocks,"
bellow fearsomely among the crags, and down glen and burn rushes the
White Death, bewildering, blinding, choking, and at the last, perhaps,
with Judas kiss folding in its icy arms some luckless shepherd whom duty
has sent from his warm fireside to the rescue of his master's sheep. You
would not know for the same those hills that so little time gone past
nursed you in their soft embrace. Then, in the warm, sunny days, shadows
of great fleecy clouds chased each other leisurely up the braes through
the bracken and the purpling heather; the burn sang to itself a merry
tune as it tumbled from boulder to boulder, rippling through pools where
the yellow trout lay basking; on the clear air came the call of grouse,
and afar off a solitary raven croaked in the stillness of a sun-steeped
glen. Now the bracken is dead, the bent sodden and chill with November's
sleet; against a background of heavy, leaden-grey sky the heather lies
black as if washed in ink. Across from the wild North Sea comes a wind
thin and nipping, waxing in strength, and with the gathering storm
piping ever more shrilly down the glen, driving before it now a fine,
powdery white dust that chokes nostril and mouth, and blinds the eyes of
those whom necessity compels to be out-doors. It is "an oncome," a
"feeding storm." Thus have begun many of the great snowstorms that from
time to time have devastated the Border and taken heavy toll of man and
beast.
In March 1615 snow fell to such a depth, and drifted so terribly, that
not only did many men perish, but likewise "most part of all the horse,
nolt, and sheep of the kingdom." In the years 1633 and 1665 there were
great storms, when vast numbers of sheep perished, and "the frost was
severe enough to kill broom and whins." But greater than these, both in
devastating effect and in duration, was the memorable storm of 1674. The
early part of that year was marked by extraordinarily tempestuous
weather. In January came a violent gale from east and by north that
strewed the coasts with wreckage. Down by Berwick and Eyemouth, by St.
Abb's, and along all that rugged shore, the cruel sea sported daily
with bodies of drowned sailors, flinging them from wave to wave, tossing
them headlong on to a stony beach, only with greedy far-stretched grasp
to snatch them back again to its hungry maw. In every rocky fissure,
where angry waves spout cliff-high and burst in clouds of spray; in
every rugged inlet, where the far-flung roaring seas boil furiously,
timbers and deck-hamper of vessels driven on a lee-shore churned
ceaselessly, pounding themselves to matchwood.
Throughout January, and till February was far advanced, this bitter
easterly gale blew fiercely. In mid-February the wind died down, leaving
a sky black with piled-up cloud gravid with coming evil. Inland, hill
and river lay frost-bound, white with snow, and already the pinch of
winter had begun to make itself seriously felt amongst the sheep. In
those days, beyond driving the flocks, when necessary, from the hill to
more sheltered, low-lying country, but little provision was ever made
for severe weather, and even the precaution of shifting the sheep to
lower ground was frequently too long delayed. Turnips, of course, had
not yet come into cultivation in Scotland, and feed-stuffs were
generally unknown.
This time farmers were caught napping. On 20th February a rising wind
drove before it snow, fine powdered and dry as March dust, and with the
waxing gale, and cold "intense to a degree never before remembered," the
drift quickly became a swirling blizzard which no living thing could
face. Day and night for thirteen days this maelstrom of snow continued,
and till the 29th of March no decided improvement took place in the
weather; the snow lay deep, and the frost held, so that there was "much
loss of sheep by the snow, and of whole families in the moor and high
lands; much loss of cows everywhere, also of wild beasts, as of doe and
roe."
"The Thirteen Drifty Days," folk called this storm, and by that name it
has gone down to history. "About the fifth and sixth days of the storm,"
says the Ettrick Shepherd, writing in _Blackwood's Magazine_ of July
1819, "the young sheep began to fall into a sleepy and torpid state, and
all that were affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of
the frost wind often cut them off when in that state quite
instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to
build up huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some
shelter for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little,
for about the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one
another's wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth
day from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not a
living sheep to be seen. Large misshapen walls of dead, surrounding a
small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their
lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and his
master."
As a matter of fact, something like nine-tenths of all the sheep in the
south of Scotland perished in this one storm, or if they did not then
actually perish, their vitality was so lowered, their constitutions so
wrecked, by the intense cold and the long deprivation of food, that they
never again picked up condition, but died like flies when the spring was
further advanced. Hogg says that in Eskdalemuir, out of 20,000 sheep
"none were left alive but forty young wedders on one farm, and five old
ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without
a tenant for twenty years subsequent to the storm." On another farm all
the sheep perished save one black-faced ewe; and she was not long left
to perpetuate her breed, for dogs hunted her into a loch, and she too
went the way of her fellows.
Amongst other great storms, Hogg also mentions one in this same century,
long remembered as the "Blast o' March." It occurred on a Monday, the
twenty-fourth day of March, and was of singularly short duration,
considering the havoc it wrought. The previous Sunday was so warm that
lassies returning from Yarrow Kirk in the evening took off shoes and
stockings and walked barefoot; the young men cast plaids and coats. To
their unconcealed astonishment, as they sauntered homeward these young
people found that an old shepherd, named Walter Blake, had driven his
entire flock of sheep into a sheltered position by the side of a wood,
near the road. Now, Blake was a deeply religious man, one to whom the
Sabbath was in the strictest sense a holy day, a day too sacred to be
broken in any fashion whatever, except for some extraordinarily powerful
reason. On being asked how it came to pass that he was found thus
following his worldly vocation, to the neglect of church-going, he said
that in the morning he had seen to the northward so ill-looking a
"weather-gaw" that he was convinced a heavy storm was coming, and that
probably before morning there would be a dangerous drift. The young men
laughed the old one to scorn. A snowstorm! The auld man was daft! Why,
the air was like June; no sensible body would even so much as dream of
snow.
"Belike we'll be up to oor oxters in snaw, the morn, Wattie," chirrupped
one damsel, in the bicker of rustic wit and empty laughter that flew
around.
"Weel, weel, lads! Time will show. Let them laugh that win," said old
Wattie.
That night there came a sudden shift of wind, and ere morning the
country-side was smothered in snow. Twenty thousand sheep perished, and
none but old Walter Blake came out of that storm free from loss.
The years 1709, 1740, and 1772 were all notable for unusually heavy
falls of snow. In the latter year the country was snow-clad from
mid-December till well on in April, and the loss of sheep was very
great, chiefly because partial thaws, occurring at intervals, encouraged
hill farmers to believe each time that the back of the winter was
broken. Hence, they delayed too long in shifting their sheep to lower
lands, and when the imperative necessity of removal at length became
obvious, if life were to be saved, it was too late; from sheer weakness
the poor animals were unable to travel.
Then came that terrible storm of 1794, a calamity that old men of our
own day may yet remember to have heard talked about by eye-witnesses of
the scenes they described. Nothing in nature ever wrought such havoc in
the Border. Seventeen shepherds perished in the endeavour to rescue
their flocks; no less than thirty others, overwhelmed by the intense
cold, the fury of the gale, and the blinding, choking whirlwind of snow,
dropped and lay unconscious, to all intents dead, sleeping the dreamless
sleep of those whom King Frost slays with his icy darts. And dead would
those thirty assuredly have been, but for the timely aid of brave men,
themselves toil-worn to the verge of collapse, who, through the deep
drifts and the swirling snow, bore home the heavy, unconscious bodies,
to revive them with difficulty.
The storm began on the 24th of January, and though the snow lay but a
week, whole flocks were overwhelmed, in some instances buried fifty feet
deep. Countless numbers of sheep, driven into burns and lochs by the
pitiless strength of the wind, were never again seen, swept away into
the sea by the tremendous floods that followed the melting of the snow.
There is on Solway Sands a place called the Beds of Esk, where with
terrible persistency the tides cast up whatever may have been carried to
sea by the rivers which in this neighbourhood empty themselves into the
Firth. Ghastly was the burden here strewn when the floods now went down.
In those Beds lay the lifeless bodies of two men and of one woman; the
swollen carcasses of five-and-forty dogs, eighteen hundred and forty
sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, one hundred and eighty hares;
and of rabbits and small animals a multitude innumerable. Death held
high carnival in Eskdalemuir that January of 1794.
Hogg gives a vivid picture of his own adventures in this storm. He had
gone from home the previous day, tramping over the Ettrick hills many a
long mile to attend some friendly meeting of fellow-shepherds, leaving
his sheep in charge of his master. Arrived at his destination, and
rendered uneasy by the unwonted appearance of the sky, without waiting
for rest or for anything but a little food and drink, he turned and set
out straightway on his homeward journey. A tramp of thirty or forty
miles over the hills is ordinarily no great matter for a young and
active shepherd. But now snow was falling; already it lay to some
depth, making the footing toilsome and insecure. Moreover, a curious
yellow mist had spread over the hills, shrouding the hollows from sight;
darkness must be on him hours before he could hope to reach home, and
the night promised to be wild. But what would daunt an ordinary
pedestrian has no terrors for the Border shepherd, and Hogg safely
reached his home before bedtime, to learn, greatly to his dismay, that
his master, good easy man, had left the sheep that evening on an exposed
part of the hill. Not even the master's "Never mind them the nicht,
Jamie; they're safe eneuch, and I'll gie ye a hand in the morning,"
could calm his anxiety. However, on looking out before going to bed, he
was comforted to find the wind coming from the south, and apparently a
thaw beginning. He might sleep in peace after all; things were going to
turn out less bad than he had feared.
Tired as he was, however, try as he might, sleep would not come that
night; an unaccountable feeling of restlessness and of vague
apprehension had him in its grip. Hour after hour he lay, listening
irritably to the snoring of his fellow-shepherd, Borthwick, starting
nervously at every scraping of rat or creak of timber. At last, long
after midnight, he rose and looked out. The wind had fallen, but snow
still fell; there was nothing abnormal in the night, and the weather
might have been described as merely "seasonable." But away in the
northern sky, low down, appeared a strange break in the mist, such as
in all his experience he had never before seen. And it came to his mind
that the previous day, when on his homeward way he had "looked in" at
his uncle's house, the old man had predicted the coming of a violent
storm, which would surely spring from that quarter in which should first
be seen a phenomenon such as that on which Hogg was now looking. The
shepherd returned to bed, and had almost succeeded in falling into a
doze, when again some impulse caused him to sit up and listen. From far
in the distant hills came quivering a strange low moaning that brought
with it something of awe and suspense. Nearer it drove, and nearer,
rising at length to a fierce bellow; and then, with appalling roar, as
of thunder, the gale hurled itself on to the building, shaking it to the
foundations. In the pitch blackness of the night Hogg groped his way to
an opening in the byre over which he and Borthwick slept, and thrust out
a hand and arm. "So completely was the air overloaded with falling and
driving snow that, but for the force of the wind, I felt as if I had
thrust my arm into a wreath of snow," he writes.
Presently he roused Borthwick, who had slept soundly through the hubbub,
and at once his fellow-shepherd dressed and tried to make his way from
the byre to the kitchen, a distance of no more than fourteen yards. But
even in the little time which had elapsed since the breaking of the
storm the space between kitchen and byre had drifted up with snow as
high as the house walls, and Borthwick straightway lost himself; neither
could he find his way to the house, nor succeed in regaining the byre.
Eventually both men with no small toil made their way to the kitchen,
where they found master and maids already assembled, and in a state of
no little alarm.
Their first concern was manifestly the safety of the sheep. But at such
an hour, in such a night, what could be done? Nevertheless, two hours
before daylight shepherds and master started for the hill, taking first
the precaution to _sew_ their plaids round them, and to tie on their
bonnets. For the thrilling details of the dangerous undertaking one must
refer to Hogg's own account, but it may here be noted that no sooner was
the kitchen door closed on the men than they lost each other, and lost
also all sense of direction; it was only by the sound of their voices
that the little party succeeded in keeping in each other's
neighbourhood. And such was the fury of the wind and the confusion of
the drift that frequently, in order to draw breath, they were compelled
to bend till their faces were between their knees. The farmhouse stood
within what in Scotland is called a "park," in this instance a small
enclosure, the wall of which might be at most three hundred yards
distant from the house door. It was two hours before daylight when they
entered this park; when morning broke, they had not yet succeeded in
making their way out of it.
Hogg's own story must be read, to learn how, and at what dire peril to
the searchers, Borthwick's flock was at length found. They were huddled
together, and buried deep in a snow wreath so compact that when the
outside sheep had been extricated, most of the remainder were able of
themselves to walk out, leaving where they had stood a sort of vast
cave. Hogg himself, when the bulk of Borthwick's sheep had been at
length saved, started alone to rescue his own flock. With comparatively
little trouble he found them, got them by slow degrees to a place of
safety, and then turned to make his way home. Of the course to steer, it
never occurred to him to doubt; he had known the hills from infancy, and
could have walked blindfold across them. His instinct for locality was
as the instinct of some wild animal, or of an Australian black-fellow.
But what put some dread in his mind was the knowledge that between him
and home lay the Douglas Burn, possibly by now in spate, and dangerous
to cross. The noise of the wind would prevent him from hearing the roar
of the swollen torrent, the driving snow prevent him from seeing the
danger, and a false step on the bank might deposit him where he would
never come out alive. To a man alone on the hill in such weather, the
task was arduous, the danger great; moreover, in the last thirty-six
hours he had walked far, had undergone great toil, and he had been
without sleep all night. The prospect was no pleasing one. But he
struggled on through the blinding, wind-driven snow, heading, as he
confidently believed, straight for home. Yet doubt presently began to
fill his mind. He should long ago have reached the Douglas Burn, but not
a sign even suggestive of such a thing as a watercourse had he yet seen.
Presently he roused with a start, for now he stood amongst trees,
stretching apparently in endless succession to an infinite distance.
After all, it seemed that he _had_ missed his way. Where he was he could
not tell; and it needed some minutes of anxious groping ere he could
clear his mind and make certain of his position. He stood not much more
than fifty yards from the farm-house door, by the side of a little clump
of trees, which in that blurred light and in the confusion of the
drifting snow took on the semblance of some vast forest. Without being
aware of it, Hogg had crossed the gully of the Douglas Burn on a bridge
formed by the deep snow, and crossed over the park wall in similar
fashion.
Many have been the terrible winters since those of which Hogg wrote,
many the lives lost, and more, perhaps, the narrow escapes from what
seemed certain death. In 1803 the frozen, deep-buried body of a man was
found near Ashestiel, within what--but for the raging storm the previous
night--must have been easy hail of his own cottage, where, sick with
anxiety, his wife and little ones sat waiting his return from the hill.
In that same storm a young shepherd, within sight of his own father,
fell over a precipice near Birkhill, and, with spine hopelessly injured,
lay helpless amongst the snow-covered boulders in a place inaccessible
to the distracted father. A party succeeded in rescuing him, but rescue
availed him little; he lay afterwards at home for several weeks unable
to stir hand or foot, and in great pain, till death mercifully released
him.
In 1825 came an on-fall so sudden and violent that scores of people who
happened to be on journeys were compelled to remain for weeks wherever
they had chanced to be when the storm broke. There was no possibility of
getting away; except those in the immediate vicinity of large towns, all
roads were completely blocked, and communication was absolutely cut off.
The mails had ceased to run, and of course in those days the electric
telegraph was unknown. Thus, many a man, the father of a family, was
parted indefinitely from wife and children without possibility of
allaying their anxiety for his welfare; many a commercial traveller
passed week after week in some roadside inn, waiting vainly for the
long-delayed thaw to enable him to communicate with his employer. And
had country people in those days depended for their supplies on
tradesmen's carts, as is the custom now, many a family must have found
itself in the direst straits ere the storm was half over.
Then a few years later came that memorable storm of 1831, of which men
in Tweedsmuir still speak almost as if it were an event of yesterday. It
was in the days of the old mail coaches, and the event which served to
fix this storm indelibly in the public mind occurred on or near the old
coach road from Dumfries to Edinburgh. The road runs past Moffat and up
something like five miles of very heavy gradient to the Devil's Beef
Tub, ascending in that distance nearly nine hundred feet; from the Tub
it crosses the lonely, desolate watershed which divides Tweed from
Annan, then by easy slope drops past Tweedshaws and Badlieu, and so by
Tweedsmuir and the old Crook Inn--with Broad Law upheaving his massive
shoulder on the right--slips gradually into country less unkind in days
of storm than are those bleak upper regions.