THE HEATHER ON FIRE!
On this night Callum and I were loitering in the glen, among the
ruins of our once-peaceful and contented mountain hamlet; but
oppressed by sadness, on witnessing the new desolation of the place,
we wandered three or four miles away, and there older scenes of
barbarity awaited us.
We sat down on some piles of stones that were half shrouded by the
rising dog-grass, the moss, and the long feathery bracken. These
marked the site of a few huts. Here once dwelt a brave little
community named the Mac Ellars, one of whom had been my tutor, and
here I had attended his little school, bringing each day with me,
like other boys, a peat, as a contribution to his fire; for this is
the old Highland custom, and the urchin who failed to do so was
denied the privilege of warming his kilted legs for that day. Here
often had I played the truant, and been threatened by my mother with
_the Druid_--that venerable bugbear of the Highland urchin.
The Mac Ellars were all brave and hardy men, whose progenitors had
occupied their 'holdings' since the days of Lachlan Mohr; and it was
with them that Callum made the famous riot in Glen Ora, when burning
the effigies of a certain English historian, and his miserable
Scottish imitator, for their falsehoods and absurd antipathy to the
clansmen and their national characteristics. But the youth of the
clachan, twelve sturdy young lads, had been cajoled by a noble
marquis and the duchess, his mother, into the ranks of the Sutherland
Highlanders, and had marched to fight the Russians: _then_ their
cottages were levelled, and their aged parents were driven forth to
beg, to starve, or die--tidings, no doubt, but ill-calculated to
rouse the patriotism or fan the _amor patriæ_ of the poor Celtic
soldier, when chewing his green coffee in the frozen trenches of
Sebastopol, or sinking under disease, with other victims of treachery
and mismanagement, in the frightful hospital at Scutari; but
fortunately for our Government, the poor clansman is animated by a
love of home, which neither time can efface nor tyranny destroy.
Thus were the Mac Ellars rooted out--the young sent to storm
Sebastopol--the old to starve in the Lowlands, while the marquis and
his _passé_ mother were in a state of fervid Uncle Tommery, and,
inspired by Mrs. Stowe's romance, were the leaders and patrons of
anti-slavery meetings in the South, and fustian addresses to the
women of America.
The ruined cottages which are met with at every few miles, amid the
depopulated portions of our Highlands, dotting those vast glens which
are silent and voiceless now as the most savage wilds of Hudson's
Bay, or the great desert of Zahara, are well calculated to excite
emotions of melancholy, as being the last relics of an old and
departed race.
The wild gooseberry-bushes straggling among the stones; the old well,
half choked by sand or weeds; the half-flattened fences; the
garden-flowers growing rank among the encroaching heather, all told
us the visual melancholy tale; and Callum and I sat in silence on the
mossy stones, watching the daylight dying away beyond the distant
sea, and full of our own sad and bitter thoughts.
He seemed wholly intent on polishing the butt of a steel Highland
pistol, and while he did so, there hovered a dark and sombre aspect
of ferocity on his brow.
We were silent, I have said, for both were too much oppressed to
speak. Suddenly a black cock appeared on a fragment of rock near us,
and clapped his wings as if in defiance. Quick as lightning Callum
levelled the pistol and shot him dead; a moment the outstpread
pinions beat the heather, and then lay still, while the pistol-shot
was pealing among the echoes of the wilderness. My fosterer
leisurely reloaded and brought the bird to me; it was large, weighing
more than five pounds, its sable plumage glazed all over with a
shining blue, and its stomach gorged with bilberries.
'I hope the report may not reach the ear of some rascally keeper,'
said I, throwing a hasty glance about me; 'if so, we shall be accused
of poaching. It was a risk, Callum, to shoot that bird just now.'
'It is the last shot I may ever have on a Highland mountain,' said
Callum Dhu, with a fierce sigh; 'and with little regret would I have
put the same ball into the fat brisket of Sir Horace himself, if he
stood within twelve paces of me, on this red heather to-night.'
'For heaven's sake, Callum, do not speak thus,' said I; 'Sir Horace
is less to blame than his evil mentor, Snaggs--I believe that in
heart he is rather amiable.'
'Listen, Co-dhalta!' retorted Callum, turning upon me, and gazing
with a full and angry frown. 'You love this man's daughter, and I
like it as little as the good lady your mother (now, God rest her, in
her grave) would have done. You love one who despises you--and yet
your blood is as red as any in Scotland!'
'She does not despise me!' I responded, almost fiercely.
'Yet loving her is folly.'
'A folly that makes me happy.'
'A folly that makes you miserable! Will you remember her only as the
daughter of one who has the lives of Gillespie's wife and child, and
of the widow of the Oa-Dearg to answer for?'
'Sir Horace is no worse than the canting Marquis, or a hundred other
proprietors in the North.'
'That is saying but little--there are many great men in Scotland
still, deserving the dagger of Kirkpatrick and the bullet of
Bothwellhaugh--and great is the pity that such pretty things have
gone out of fashion. The best tune Rory Dall ever played men will
tire of; and so I am tired of this Lowlander's tyranny.'
'He is no Lowlander, Callum,' said I, anxiously observing the fierce
expression of my companion.
'He is an Englishman, which is almost as bad.'
I burst into a fit of laughter at this remark.
'Ah--you laugh,' said Callum, grimly; 'let us see whose laugh will be
loudest to-morrow. He has cleared the glen of men to make way for
game--let us see what he will gain by that--the club-footed ouzel.'
'How?' I asked, glancing in alarm at the pistol on which he was
carefully placing a percussion cap.
'This very night I shall fire the heather.'
'For heaven's sake, Callum,' said I, 'beware what you do; for the
consequent destruction of life and property may be terrible.'
'I care not--these lords and holiday-chiefs are destroying the
people--_let the people destroy the game that brings them gold_. I
will fire the heather, I tell you!' he added, in a fierce Gaelic
whisper; 'by that blessed star which led the wise men to the cradle
of God, I have sworn to do so, and it shall be done, come of it what
may!'
I was about to speak again, when the clatter of hoofs rang on the
mountain-path, and Mr. Snaggs passed us on his shaggy-coated cob.
Anger swelled my breast on seeing him; but he bowed to us with an
ironical smile, and we saw--or thought we saw--that his eyes were
brilliant with malice at the success of that "ingenious ferocity"
with which he had extirpated the peasantry of the district. He rode
slowly up the slope of the great Ben, and the outlines of his
ungainly figure and barrel-bellied charger appeared in dark relief
between us and the yellow flush that bathed the western sky.
'What errand takes him to the Craig-na-tuirc to-night?' I remarked.
'The devil only knows: perhaps to see the desolation he has made, and
whether any of our people have lit a fire in the glens below. There
he goes--may evil follow, and destruction dog him close! may the
curse of the poor on whom he tramples, and the scorn of the rich whom
he worships, be his lot! I'll show them a flame on Ben Ora to-night
that will startle all the Western Highlands!'
Callum drew forth his powder-horn, and after casting a keen but
furtive glance around him in the dusk, and after seeing Mr. Snaggs
fairly disappear in a hollow of the hills, he shook out the contents,
laying across the narrow mouth of the glen a train on the soft dry
heather and its bed of turf and decayed moss below. Careless of the
event, and now resigned to whatever might follow, I observed him in
moody silence, and not without feeling within me that longing for
revenge which is so curiously mingled in the Celtic nature, with a
wild sense of justice and of injury.
'This is a crime against the law,' said I, in a low voice,
remembering that _muirburning_ is a serious offence in Scotland, and
that the Acts passed by the Parliaments of the first, third, fourth,
and fifth Jameses concerning it, are alike stringent and severe.
'Curse upon the laws,' grumbled Callum; 'if none were made, they
would never be violated,' and with these words he emptied the last
contents of his horn. Again he looked round him.
The sun had set long since; the tints of the vast mountain had turned
from purple to black, and no living thing seemed to be stirring in
that intense solitude. Callum stooped, and fired his pistol at the
train. The powder flashed, and rose like a fiery serpent along the
grass; the dry summer-moss, the decayed leaves and dead ferns ignited
like tinder, and in a moment the thick heath and its bed of turf and
peat below were wrapped in smoke and flame--a flame that spread on
every hand, deepening and extending, as it rolled, like a devouring
and encroaching tide, mounting up the sides of the glen before the
soft west wind that blew from the dark waves of the salt lake.
Fiercely it crackled, smouldered, and burned, in those places where
the bracken or whins, the burr-docks, brambles, rank weeds, and gorse
grew thick; but in others it rolled steadily on with great rapidity,
spreading and widening in the form of a vast semi-circle, as if it
would embrace the whole country in its grasp. As it mounted into the
higher portions of the landscape, and seized on the thickets of
silver birch and the resinous mountain-pine, the conflagration began
to crackle, roar, and hiss, and its flames to shoot aloft and
brighten against the sky like the wavering beams of the Northern
Lights, tinging the clouds with pink and purple hues.
Now sheep and cattle, horses, rabbits, foxes, and fuimarts, with
herds of frantic deer, fled before the flames; and screaming in their
terror and confusion, the muirfowl flew hither and thither, or hung
overhead among the vapour that shrouded the starry sky. The scene
was strange, wild, and terrible; the more so that amid all this
general alarm of nature there was not heard the voice of man in
wonder or in fear; but the glens had been swept of their people, and
the beasts of the field and the birds of the air alone remained.
With astonishment and somewhat of awe, I gazed on this strange and
striking scene, while Callum Dhu surveyed it with a grim smile of
triumph and derision on his weather-beaten face, which was reddened
by the distant glow.
This was one of the most dreadful instances of muirburning that ever
occurred in Scotland: the flames travelled at the rate of one hundred
and fifty yards a minute, and soon embraced a front of nearly sixteen
miles in length, being four miles more than that tide of fire which
lately devoured the moors of Strathaven.
The whole of the muirlands--covered with short dry summer heather,
the thickets of fir and the game preserves round the base of Ben Ora,
from the mouth of the glen where we sat to the deep dark gorge of
Garchoine, from the shore of the loch on the east to the hazel wood
of Coilchro on the west, where the narrow path to St. Colme's chapel
overhangs the foaming sea--a semicircle, as I have said, of sixteen
miles--were sheeted in red and yellow flame. Above the mighty
wreaths of smoke which rose from the blazing and falling plantations,
and from the remains of old primeval forests, towered the huge
mountain--the monarch of the western hills--like a dark and wonderous
dome. At its base lay the loch gleaming in light, and seeming, in
this nocturnal blaze, like a mighty mirror zoned by the smoke and
fire, which gradually crept from the low districts upward to the
summit of the craigs and hills, where it played in streaks of deep
and fiery red, or flashed upward in forky and lambent flames before
it died away in vapour.
In the deep and naked ravines, and those places over which the fire
had passed, sweeping like a burning tide, the nests and lairs of the
game, with every trace of animal and vegetable life, passed away,
leaving only the bare black roots of the turf and heather, while vast
columns of smoke hung motionless, like giants in mid-air as if the
fires of the Day of Doom had sent them forth; and through these murky
masses the broad round moon at times peered dimly and darkly out,
like Fingal's shield, half hidden and half seen.
'Down, Mac Innon, down!' cried Callum, as a herd of terrified deer
came rushing like a living torrent down a narrow ravine, which was
threaded by a mountain stream, up the margin of which we were now
ascending, as being the safest pathway through this land of fire:
'Hoigh! look at Mac Gilonie's dun cattle, how they come thundering
down with the sparks at their heels!'
These words were barely uttered, when the frantic herd--three hundred
and more--were upon us, with all their branching antlers lashing the
air; but as we threw ourselves flat on our faces among the long
bracken and dog-grass, this four-footed tempest swept lightly over
us, and disappeared towards the seashore.
'There they go towards the Atlantic--dun deer and red foxes, fat
hares and long-eared rabbits, fuimarts, otters, and everything! By
the blood that is in us, Sir Horace, but it is mighty little shooting
you or yours will have hereabout for these some years to come! The
people have gone towards the sea, and your devilish game have
followed them. But see,' added Callum; 'what is that--a man mounted
on a deer?'
'No, no--a pony.'
'How he gallops! Dioul! my fine fellow, take care of your neck.'
'It is Snaggs!' said I.
'Snaggs--and he rides like fury--up hill too! now the pony falls--'
'He is down!'
'Up again--on foot, and he runs like a sow possessed by a devil
towards the Craig-na-tuirc, with the fire rolling at his heels,' said
Callum, rubbing his hands in fierce glee.
'Fire behind and a precipice in front.'
'Dioul--we are giving him claw for claw at last!'
'But we must save him, Callum--he will be scorched to death or dashed
to pieces.'
A fierce laugh was his only reply. While all this passed in less
time than I have taken to record it, we dashed along the stony
ravine, guided by the rivulet, and though half-blinded by smoke,
reached the Ora, which was there overhung by the Craig-na-tuirc. At
that moment a wild and despairing cry for succour rang in the air
above us.
'Ay, bay to the moon, false wolf--but there are few ears now in Glen
Ora to hear you!' growled Callum through his thick, rough beard, as
we began rapidly to clamber up the brow of the precipice, the summit
of which was shrouded by smoke, and streaked with fire like the
crater of a volcano.