the little bird, having been fed with his brothers and sisters, ran
about in the sun till it went down, and then crept back to the nest
where the shells of broken eggs had been lying, pale cream shells
covered with heavy blotches of red. The little grouse, warm under his
mother's feathers and above the moss that lined the nest, slept quite
happily, dreaming of the days when he would be able to fly over the
moor. He woke with a start hearing his father crying:--
"Who goes there? Who goes there? my sword, my sword."
"Don't be frightened," said Mother Grouse reassuringly, as the little
ones nestle closer to her, "he says that every morning."
The newcomer soon became accustomed to be called at daybreak by this
startling cry, and he learned as soon to hide from the buzzard, the
peregrine falcon and the carrion crows that, between them, eventually
managed to secure all his brothers, because they would not listen to
their father's warning. Mrs. Grouse had decided at last that the last
big egg, which was as broad at one end as at the other, held no son or
daughter, and as soon as she had made up her mind about that she put on
her summer dress; it was buff-coloured and marked with irregular bars of
black. When the family had admired it they flew together across the
heather. Father Grouse had no summer dress; he did not change his
costume before autumn.
The family kept to the moor, where they met many very pleasant relatives
with children quite grown up, so much like their mothers that it was
hard to tell the difference, and while they were together Father Grouse
gave his only son a lot of useful information.
"We keep to the heather," he said. "It is our own. On the hills beyond,"
and he pointed to the mountain behind the moor, "you find our cousins,
the ptarmigan. In the plantation below the hills where there are birch,
hazel, ash and juniper trees and where the roebuck hides in the ferns,
you have another cousin, the blackcock. He feeds with us sometimes. We
have not much to do with either of them, though we are not unfriendly.
Kok-kok."
It was a very fine summer, the heather was fresh and sweet to eat, and
very warm to lie on. The little grouse soon lost the yellow down that
had covered him, and his plumage became very much like his mother's. The
family would fly about in a group, father and mother leading, and they
often went off the heather to eat the grass and early berries.
"I have lived more than one whole year," said Father Grouse, "but I was
born in a very bad season. The heather was bitten by the frost, the rain
was unceasing, we could not get enough food, and it was terribly cold on
the wet ground. Hundreds died--but lie down, somebody is coming."
The family crouched low in the heather and saw the landlord's factor
walking up the hill-side with a stout gentleman who wore an unbecoming
coat and a waistcoat with a heavy watch chain across it. The stout
gentleman passed a handkerchief across his forehead. "It is a fine
view," he gasped, "and what are the limits of the bag?"
"Eight hundred brace of grouse may be shot and forty stags but the laird
is not a hard man and might make it a thousand brace and fifty stags,"
said the factor, who had forgotten how to blush.
"Now," whispered Father Grouse, and uttering a challenge, he rose within
three yards of the stout gentleman, closely followed by wife and family.
"You see," said the factor, "the moor is packed with birds, you can
almost walk over them."
"Why did you show yourself like that, my dear?" said Mother Grouse, when
they had settled after a long easy flight.
"Ah," replied her husband, "you leave me to attend to my own business. I
like to see men like that on the moor, they do no harm. It is the young,
slender men who are never tired and are always shooting that I object
to. You can't get away from them, Kok-kok."
"Did you hear the factor," continued Father Grouse, after as near an
approach to a chuckle as a red grouse can achieve. "He said the bag was
limited to eight hundred brace, though the laird might make the limit up
to a thousand. Now there are not two hundred and fifty brace on the
moor. As for the stags, fancy a man like that trying to stalk them;
well, let us go and eat some heather-tops--such talk makes me feel
weak."
They were glorious days that led to the middle of August. The young
grouse was becoming quite big; he could take long flights without
fatigue, could accomplish a small call, was an adept at finding good
food and soft sleeping places, and he never allowed his attentions to
stray from his feathered enemies.
He had some narrow escapes; on one occasion the peregrine falcon struck
down one of his sisters as she was flying by his side; on another the
great Golden Eagle, coming from his eyrie on the mountain top, was
circling over him, but suddenly saw a young deer calf on a rock not far
away. The rock looked over the bare hill-side, and the eagle, lighting
on the poor calf's back, buffeted its face so heavily with his wings
that it fell off the rock and, tumbling down, was killed on the
hill-side. The Golden Eagle made his meal, the fox and the carrion crow
took what was left. It was a sad sight, and the Golden Eagle was more
unpopular than ever on the moor and in the forest.
The young grouse made the acquaintance of the biggest deer on the hill,
a king of stags, with brow, bay and tray antlers, who explained that he
was a stag royal. This acquaintance was made one afternoon in early
August when the grouse family were feeding on some succulent grasses by
the side of the burn where the stag came to drink.
"I am more than pleased to meet you again," said the stag. "I wish you
and your family as sure an escape from the shot gun as I hope to get
from the rifle." So saying he trotted off, and Father Grouse spread his
feathers just as though he had been a blackcock in a juniper tree, and
challenged as loudly as he could.
"Last September," he said, turning to his wondering son, "after my
parents had met with misfortune passing over the butts, I found myself
on some high ground near the big corrie. The royal stag you saw just now
was resting there with his family, and he had been seen by the stalker.
I was sitting on a heather tuft thinking that now I had lost my parents
I should have to join the grouse pack, when I saw the stalker and the
man who shoots the stags, crawling along the ground in my direction.
They wanted to get behind the stag and shoot him as he sat head to wind.
"I can see them now--the stalker very cool, and the shooter very tired.
As I looked I thought I recognised him as the man who had shot my
parents. I did not hesitate, but rose up when they were almost near
enough to touch me, flew within hearing of the stag and called out:--
"Who goes there? The gun, the gun."
"The royal stag and all his family scattered, the stalker put down his
gun and took up his whisky-flask; the man who had shot my parents used
language no respectable grouse could listen to without feeling ashamed.
They went to the wood for their lunch and my cousin, the grey hen, heard
the stalker say he thought they had walked twelve miles after that stag.
Kok-kok."
It was good to be alive in those August days, to wake up when the sun
started work, look out for food in the morning and late afternoon, and
lie close through the heat of the day. The southerner had taken the
shooting on lease and spent one or two days looking over the land, to
the great delight of Father Grouse, who declared that no bird need
suffer uneasiness on his account.
"All old men," said Father Grouse, "would fire into a pack without
hurting anything." This was on the night of the 11th August which
happened to fall on Saturday. Sunday, the 12th, brought no guns to the
moor, and Father Grouse was first puzzled and then delighted. "I have
it," he said at last; "there will be no grouse shot this year, that
stout man knows he will have no chance against us. He will try to shoot
stags because they are bigger. Kok-kok."
Monday, the 13th of August, found the grouse family up betimes; they fed
heartily, as was their custom, and then retired to shelter from the
heat. Father Grouse, Mother Grouse, three daughters and the one son,
comprised the family now. Once or twice Mother Grouse stirred uneasily
and said she heard men, but her husband remonstrated with her.
"You are very nervous, my dear," he said, "haven't I told you there will
be no shooting this year? They will be cutting the corn in the lower
fields soon, and we'll go down there to feed on the stooks. You want a
change of diet to strengthen your nerves. I know well enough you have no
occasion for uneasiness."
* * * * *
"It's no good starting too early," the head keeper had said at the lodge
on the previous evening, "give the birds time to eat and time to settle
down, and then you'll do all right."
And on the morning of the 13th he had declared that the breeze was just
what was wanted, and that everything pointed to a successful day. The
party, four guns and two keepers, with retrievers, had gone steadily
from the low ground where the lodge stood, across the fresh-cut fields,
over the hill-side and on to the moor. The heather was short and
pointers were not used on it.
The old gentleman who took the moor did not shoot, but his three sons
and nephew were first-class shots. While Father Grouse was saying his
last words, he had seen them, and had realised that the men with the
guns were young and sturdy, just the sort he had learned to fear. In
that trying moment he realised how he had deceived himself and family,
and how the gunners, by coming up the wind, had made it impossible for
him to scent them in time.
"Rise quickly with me," he whispered bravely to the Mother Grouse,
"we'll go for a safer place, my dear, and you follow us," he added to
his children. With these words he rose, and the others followed so
quickly that the six birds seemed to take wing together.
"Bang, bang, bang, bang," said the guns, and Father and Mother Grouse
sank down into the heather that had been their home so long, with never
a feather of their fine plumage ruffled. They were shot dead so cleanly
that they knew no pain, and with them two of their children fell, not to
die so easily. The white spot at the base of the beak of Father Grouse
had a bright drop of blood on it, Mother Grouse did not even show as
much.
"Mark down the others," cried the man who had shot the parent birds, and
opened the season with a successful "right and left".
"Isn't worth while," said his friend who had shot one of the younger
birds, "they are only cheepers."
Then the birds being retrieved, the party continued to shoot its way
over the moor, meeting with fair success, for the wind kept the birds
from hearing the approach, and they had fed so well during the fine
weather that they were not at all wild. Twenty odd brace had gone to the
bag by two o'clock.
The young cock grouse never knew how he got away, nor what became of his
family. He heard the guns cracking at the back of him, the hissing of
shot through the air, and he flew wildly until he felt he had reached
safety, then sank down into the heather, not daring to stir. He heard
the guns again; once the remnant of a broken covey passed over the
heather where he crouched, but he did not move until feeding-time came,
and then, after a brief meal, returned to shelter.
For the next two weeks the moor was quite unsafe, the four guns sounded
every morning and afternoon; on one or another of the five beats the
birds fell in all directions. One day the guns came upon the young
grouse suddenly, when he had no idea of their proximity and, crouched in
the heather, he remained quite still. It was a hot day, no breath of air
stirred the leaves; the ground was hard as iron and there was no scent.
A dog passed within a yard of him without betraying his presence; the
gunners moved away to the right; he was safe.
He met single birds on the moor, and all told the same doleful tale of
disaster, and when with the last day of the month the weather changed
and the wind rose, word passed from bird to bird that it was time to
pack. So he joined one or two others and they joined some more, and when
they were fifty strong they joined another band as large, and their
addition went on until the pack numbered hundreds if not thousands. This
was not on the old moor where he had been born, but on another one not
far away, where the guns had only stayed for a day or two before going
on to the high forest lands some mile or more away in pursuit of the
stags. The young grouse and his companions had become very keen of sight
and hearing; they were alarmed by the least sound, and gunners who tried
to walk after them never arrived within firing distance.
One afternoon when the pack was feeding, the young grouse came upon his
friend the royal stag by the side of the burn that ran through the heart
of the heather. The great beast had been wounded by an ill-aimed bullet
and had found his way to the water alone, for his hinds had scattered.
He lay crouched amid the moss and water grasses.
"I have been here for two days," he said to the grouse, "and if I'm left
alone for two more I'll be healed of my wounds and I'll baffle the
stalkers yet. They nearly tracked me, but had no dog, or I must have
fought for it."
"We're staying here awhile," said the grouse, "and I'll do what I can
for you in the way of warning."
The red grouse fed and rested in that quarter for several days, and the
stag went back to the forest on the third evening. "I am well enough to
go to sanctuary now," he said, "to the wood in the centre of the forest
where the stalkers may not follow us. Good-bye, good luck, take care of
the butts." So saying, he trotted off bravely, before the young grouse
could ask what the butts might be.
He was not left long in doubt. On the morning following the stag's
departure, he and his companions were alarmed to see a body of men armed
with white flags approaching from the distance. With one accord the
birds rose and went en masse in the direction indicated by the wind,
right over some little banks of turf they had seen many times before on
the moor. There were several of these banks on various moors, they were
in a line, one being seventy yards or more from the other and were quite
harmless as a rule.
This morning, however, as the birds passed over, the cry of the guns was
heard, shot after shot was fired, bird after bird fell, for every little
enclosure held one or two men. Some birds tried swerving, but it only
carried them from one earth to another; it was a frightful experience
and one that was destined to be repeated, for the birds followed the
wind whenever they fled from the beaters and were caught again and
again.
If the walkers had shot their tens, the drivers secured their hundreds
in the next week or two, until the weather changed again for the worse
and the packs took to a wilder and higher flight than they had ever
attempted before. Then the gunners went off the moors and returned to
the lower lands to shoot partridges.
To his last day the young grouse never knew how he survived the driving.
The constant alarms, the headlong flights through the air, the hiss of
the expanding shot that struck down near neighbours, these experiences
filled him with a strange unreasoning fear, and he was not to escape
scot free, for a couple of stray pellets cut off two of the toes of his
left leg and another skinned the feathers above the left eye so that
they never grew again.
On one occasion in his mad flight from the moor, he would have been
killed against the telegraph wires of the Highland Railway, had not the
singing of the "protectors" warned him just in time to dive below the
wires. He felt little pain and inconvenience from his wounds and soon
learned to go on short allowance of toes, but his fear increased until
the least sound sent him into flight. Long after the moor had ceased to
echo with the sound of guns, he trembled at every noise. The stags
roared in the forest, and he fled in fear; a bird of prey screamed in
the air--he dashed off again.
[Illustration: RED GROUSE [Photo by C. Reid]]
"Have no more fear," said the royal stag one day in later October, "the
guns have gone for the year, the shooting season is over and I go about
the forest as I like. Until my horns have fallen and grown again they
will not return."
This assurance comforted the grouse and he changed his clothes for a
black and buff combination that yielded in a little while to the
splendid chestnut with white tipped lower feathers that he remembered
his father wearing. He still travelled with the pack, but they ate less
heather than they had eaten before, and depended more upon late autumn
berries, grass and corn left on unploughed fields. He grew strong and
indifferent to the storms that swept the moors and made the forest bare.
No sportsman came near, and at the end of December the pack separated,
and our friend was left so near to his own moor that he lighted on it,
and there he met a young lady grouse in her charming winter gown with
its bars of red and buff and spots at the tips of the feathers. He asked
her if she would fly with him, explaining that he had, he feared, lost
his family and friends. She feared that hers was a similar plight and
said she would be glad of a protector. So they went out together and
found the scattered remains of their friends, and for two or three
months enjoyed a pleasant courtship.
Then when the stale winter heather was about to yield to a new crop, one
bird brought news of a district where all the old growth had been burnt
by the proprietors of the land a few years earlier and the new shoots
were plentiful and sweet. The grouse and his lady flew to that spot, and
found a little unoccupied hollow under a heather tuft. He helped her to
line it with grass and moss, and she filled it with ten eggs. It was now
the end of March, and during the first part of April he stood on sentry
duty a little way from the nest, and uttered his war cry in Gaelic as
his father had done before him. Happily the weather was fine once more
and ten little babies were his before April turned to May. He was a
proud grouse on the day when the last bird had come from its shell.
Other birds had been carelessly content to nest in the old uneatable
heather, or on parts of the moorland where the ground was damp and
undrained; the mortality among them had been very great, for they caught
pneumonia and other troubles which are peculiar to the grouse. But this
grouse flourished, and so did his wife and family, and by rare good luck
no birds of prey secured the little ones; the food supply did not fail,
and the weather was never cold enough to kill the children in days when
their down had not changed to feathers.
By this time all remembrance of the autumn had passed from the grouse
and his wife. It was no more to them than a dream. They thought of
nothing but love and domesticity. Spring, which had restored all its
beauty to the Highland country, had effaced recollection of autumn and
winter and all the woes they bore. Summer deepened the remembrance of
the spring and the joy of life; as Mrs. Grouse remarked to her husband,
there was not a pair on the moors that led a finer covey of little ones.
June passed in days that seemed to be twenty hours long, there was no
night--only a prolonged twilight; July was so fine that the burns
dwindled down to little threads, and the farmers on the lowlands were
crying for the water of which in nine years out of ten they had too
much. August found the heather full of fragrance and the grouse forward,
and strong on the wing. "They are exactly like you, my dear," said
Father Grouse to his wife, who had put on her summer dress with the
irregular black bars across buff feathers, as they skimmed over the
heather side by side. The parent birds were like her, very fat and very
lazy, for the heather-tops had been young and plentiful in their part
and they had rather overeaten themselves.
* * * * *
"That was a fine covey," said the first gun to his neighbour at ten
o'clock on the morning of the 12th. "A dozen in all, and we got six. How
odd; last year you bagged the leader with your first shot just as you've
done now. What is it, Donald? Yes, that's odd, this old cock bird must
have been hit twice last season. Two toes gone from left leg and mark of
shot above left eye. Well, put them in. If we go on like this we will
have a good bag."
THE ROEBUCK
With the beginning of June, full leaf came to the plantation, but never
a human foot disturbed the fresh thick undergrowth, and save for the
subdued note of birds the silence was complete. Above the woodland the
pines towered along the side of rising ground that led to the more
abrupt hills in whose corries the red deer were to be found; below the
woodland the arable lands began, and stretched in rich and plenteous
growth to the inhabited districts.
The corn was young and green, and the farmers had no work to do within
its area. So the doe that had left her mate and the little party with
which she travelled, in the third week of May, felt happily secure in
the hiding-place she had chosen, a secluded spot amid thick bracken, and
very early in June two little fawns were born to her. They were pretty
babies with coats lighter than their mother's summer dress, and marked
with white spots that did not remain very long. Their mother watched
over them with most anxious and affectionate care, and until they were
weaned could not bear them out of her sight for a moment. In the days of
their utter helplessness she did not leave the wood at all, and the
first walks abroad seemed to fill her with anxiety.
At the beginning of July, when the fawns were able to frisk about in
prettiest fashion, happily ignorant of the element in life called
danger, Donald's retriever pup, making a little journey of discovery,
came quite by chance into the wood. It was quite a puppy, without any
definite ideas of a proper function in life, and no desire to do more
than play with strange animals, but the mother of the little ones was
very frightened, and could not fathom its intentions. She called upon
her babies to lie down in the thick fern, and then made her way to the
puppy.
Had she possessed horns it might have gone ill with the intruder, as it
was she managed to kick him very severely, and he fled from the wood
howling. After this alarm the doe redoubled her precautions, and very
often would stop feeding to stand with one fore-leg raised and listen
intently to some sound coming from far away. Towards the end of the
month the return of her errant husband lightened her anxieties.
The Roebuck came jauntily into the wood and offered no excuse or
explanation for his two months' absence. He was quite a handsome fellow
with about nine inches of antlers bearing the backward and forward tine
that mark the complete development of what our forefathers called the
"fair roebuck". From the shoulder he stood about two feet two inches,
from nose to the end of his short tail he was about four feet long; his
head was short, his eyes were large, and there were black and white
markings on his lips. His coat was the light reddish-brown of summer,
and his conspicuous white patch gave an effective contrast to it. He was
very well pleased with the children his wife had brought him, and
expressed his satisfaction in a series of short, sharp barks.
The family stayed in the wood for a brief time, living on grasses and
ivy and the fresh growth of young trees, to which the fawns soon learned
to help themselves, as they cared more for leaves than grass; but the
pleasure of the season was quite spoilt by the flies. The wood was full
of them, and they bit and worried the fawns until life became a burden.
"We must go up into the hills," said the Roebuck decisively; "it is our
only chance of escape from this trouble. Midges can't climb so far."
"But what about the babies?" said the doe anxiously; "don't forget the
great big stags with long horns that live up there."
"It is quite safe," explained the Roebuck; "we are good friends. Next to
the red grouse, there is no bird or beast that does so much for the red
deer as we do. At the first sign of danger we give the alarm, and send
the red herd scampering over the hills out of harm's way. Often when the
stalkers are abroad we spoil their day's work by coming between them and
the quarry. So you have nothing to fear from our big cousins."
Reassured, the doe and her fawns accompanied the roebuck to the high
hills, choosing night-time for the journey, with the fear of mankind
before them. Food was less plentiful in the high grounds, but there were
sufficient grasses to keep serious trouble away, and the cool shade was
free from the worries that went with it below.