The Wild Red Deer of Scotland - Notes from an Island Forest on Deer, Deer Stalking, and Deer Forests in the Scottish Highlands: Read Country Book

INTRODUCTION.

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AN ISLAND RACE.

The red deer of Scotland possess an exceptional interest for the sportsman and the naturalist as a race of deer which have acquired, by force of circumstance, a life opposed to their natural and ancient habit, and which, by reason of this acquired life, present opportunity for a form of sport attainable in other parts of the world only with wild sheep and goats on high mountain ranges. Sufficient attention has not been paid to this point of view, and Continental critics of Scottish deer and deer forests are apt to forget that the life of a Scottish hill stag is a phenomenon without parallel in the natural history of his species.

Little has been added to the art of deer-stalking by the experience of a generation, but recent years have added much to our knowledge of wild deer and their habits, and a complete account of Scottish red deer to-day would cover a wide field. New facts have come to hand not only from observant sportsmen in our own Highlands, where large herds of deer, living on bare hills, afford unique opportunities for investigation, but also from the hunters of big game, who have pushed into unexplored hunting-grounds and enriched our museums with valuable trophies. Old facts have also gained new significance in the comparative study of allied species from the standpoint of descent with modification, and light has been thrown by eminent naturalists upon the history of deer in past times, their past and present geographical distribution, the form and development of antlers, the physiology of antler growth, and other related questions. The present writer makes no pretence to deal with this abundant material in the following notes, but its existence has been recognised in their preparation.

The true stags, among which our own red deer takes rank as a typical though diminutive specimen, form a natural group, easily recognised by their splendid antlers, which exhibit the distinctive combination of doubled brow-tines with a middle point and forked or cupped tops. They are all inhabitants of the north temperate zone in the Holarctic region of zoological geography, and their place in the geological record coincides with the Quaternary period, which has witnessed the zenith of horn and antler development. Our knowledge of the stags in detail leaves much to be desired, but the known facts permit us to fix their headquarters in Asia, and to recognise as divergent branches of the original stock (1) a red deer group, distributed chiefly through South-Western Asia, which crossed into Europe from Asia Minor, and (2) a wapiti group, distributed chiefly through North-Eastern Asia, which crossed into America by way of Bering’s Strait—an eastward and westward migration of this kind being rendered not only possible but probable by the vast physical changes which we know to have taken place on the Asiatic continent within (geologically speaking) a comparatively recent date. European red deer vary enormously in size and colour, in calibre and complexity of antlers, in skull measurements, and in other details; and the problem of assorting them into species or races has proved at once the delight and despair of zoologists.¹ Deer-stalkers, accustomed on moor and in forest to study wild red deer amid their native surroundings, have been swift to recognise the essential unity of type in an amazing variety of form ; and big-game hunters, best competent to judge, are agreed upon the view that all the European stags, from the sturdy Hebridean in the west to the stately Caucasian in the east, may reasonably be regarded as geographical modifications or local varieties of the same specific type.²

Fossil fragments of bones, together with skulls and antlers, exhumed from the British Quaternary deposits, establish the fact that Britain was once the home of red deer stags at least as large as the living wapiti, with antlers of distinctively Caucasian type. The remarkable contrast in size between these antlered giants of old time and our smaller race of deer, that are nevertheless their lineal descendants, may be explained as the result of insular conditions such as have prevailed in Britain since the subsidence of the North Sea plain. In the days of the big stags, Britain was an integral part of the European continent and the haunt of a big-game fauna to which there is no living parallel. An. all-encompassing forest secured to them a sanctuary from man, and liberty to roam on a great continent kept them in constant touch with the best blood of their ancestral stock. Britain, as an inhabited island set in a stormy sea, became a prison for the big game that were left in it, and their extinction or degeneration was merely a question of time. In the grim struggle between the wild men and the wild beasts, the larger animals, being more dangerous or more valued, were the first to go. Immense horns and antlers, that could deal fatal blows at close quarters, were overmatched by man with his missile weapons. The red deer have outlived their forest associates of the Continental period—the Irish elk, the bison, the aurochs—but the penalty of an island life, continuous breeding from inferior stock, has made them an island race. Every step forward in the ascent of man and in the progress of civilised life accelerated the rate of decline, and the retrogressive forces worked from opposing points to the same end. The gradual improvement in weapons, from flint to gunpowder, facilitated the destruction of the best deer, just as the gradual extinction of wolves, by depriving the herds of their sanitary police, facilitated the survival of the worst. Here and there in our scanty record we can trace the footprints of the process. Antlers of the period called recent by geologists are of lesser calibre than the fragments left to us of the Pleistocene stag, but are more massive and more branched than antler trophies with which we are familiar in our own times. Within the narrow limits of the British Isles the native deer of Harris and the Lews, contrasted with their weightier mainland relatives, attest the retrogressive work of insular modification ; and even in our own Highlands, during the brief passage of a single century, the Children of the Forest have made a new departure as Children of the Mist, and lost calibre in the process.

But it is just to this susceptibility of adaptive modification that the red deer owes his enduring resistance to the vicissitudes of fortune and his wide geographical range. It is thus that in Britain he has outlived a host of mighty rivals, which are known to us only through their fossil remains; that he has survived the fierce Machairodus, the cave hunters, the age of ice. Let us hope that he may also survive the economic illusions which have made him a political scapegoat, and continue to link the latter days of our zoologically impoverished island with the splendid fauna that lies buried under the glacial drift.

¹The Scottish stag has been described as a distinct race under the name of Cervus Elaphus Scoticus by Prof. Einar Lönnberg of Sweden, and as a distinct species, in company with the Norway stag, under the name of Cervus Atlanticus by Dr Leonard Stejneger of the United States.

²This view is tersely expressed by Mr St George Littledale in a letter to the present writer, dated January 1899 :—

I hardly think there are any real missing links between the small stag of the Hebrides and his giant relatives in eastern Europe and Asia Minor—of course, any number of local varieties.

Mr E. N. Buxton says the same thing in another way when he writes (’ Short Stalks,’ second series, p. 65): There is no fixed line of demarcation to the west of which the deer can be described as red deer, and to the east of it as belonging to some larger race.

Gustav Radde’s view, which agrees with the above, will be found in Appendix II.

The Wild Red Deer of Scotland.

CHAPTER I.

THE OLD DEER-STALKING AND THE NEW.

It is pleasant to sit alone towards sunset of a summer’s evening on some rocky spur that overhangs the secluded glen, and watch the stags draw down from the high hill-face to their accustomed pasture in the strath below. They come leisurely enough, in twos and threes, perhaps a score of them, feeding as they move, yet moving all the time. No sound falls upon their nervous ears save the familiar plash of brawling streams; no strange scent taints the delicious odour of young grass and budding heather which fills their expanding nostrils. At this hour of peace the eye may rest at will upon their spreading antlers, their glorious colour, their majestic motion. And while the last light fades on the slopes, and the shadows deepen in the corries, it is pleasant to remember that these deer are of a race as old as the hills. They are the lineal descendants of the great European stags that crossed the dry floor of the North Sea when the ice sheet rolled from Britain, and possessed the old Caledonian forest, in company with the wolf and the boar, the bear and the beaver, the white bulls, and the Stone men. The march of civilisation has destroyed their forests, ploughed their pastures, circumscribed their bounds, and made them a lesser race than their mighty ancestors; but their pedigree is none the less unimpeachable, and the successful sportsman spills the blue blood of prehistoric times.

Palaeolithic remains from caves and river-gravels of Western Europe—implements, ornaments, pictures¹—tell their own story of primitive hunting man, his sport, his weapons, and his quarry. Memories of a past nearer to ourselves, yet older than any literature, survive in the Gaelic place-names which all around us, on crag and scaur, in strath and corrie, breathe intimate and immemorial association with haunts and habits of deer. Many such names refer to ancient areas of indigenous wood, which has come and gone, leaving few visible traces; but the contours of the landscape, indestructibly moulded from solid rock, are unchanged, and the place-names tell us that our deer cling closely to the beaten tracks of ages. The Height of the Roaring (Barravourich) on yonder broad bluff marks a famous battle-ground of rival stags, and stags will soon be calling there again. The Big Deer’s Rock (Creag-na-fiadh-mòr), with its grey cornice and crest of russet green, has sheltered countless generations of big deer, and will shelter them yet. The Hinds’ Tarn (Lochan Eildè), traced by a streak of gold in its girdle of hills, was a beloved trysting-place of hinds at feed, and thither this evening the hinds have kept their tryst. High above the tarn, the Hinds’ Pass (Lairig Eildè), worn smooth by the trampling hoofs of thousands, still leads impatient mothers to the Calves’ Corrie (Coire-nan-Laogh), where night now falls upon a perennial playground of youngsters. These names and the like, which are scattered broadcast upon the scenery of the Highlands, commemorate a time when haunts and habits of deer were the supreme interest of a hunting people. They bring before us in a peculiarly realistic manner the enduring affection of deer for particular spots with which they have inherited associations, the observant hunter’s instinct of the Gaelic tribesmen, and the bond of hunting ancestry which links the civilised sportsman to his savage brother in the time-honoured fraternity of sport. But the call of hunting ancestry from our Highland mountains comes still nearer to us in the rainbow mist of Gaelic poetry and legend. No other extant literature so vividly reflects a race of hunters that lived by the stag. Its dominant note, from the heroic age in the Highlands to the close of the feudal period, is passionate devotion to deer and hills. Ossian, the Gaelic Homer, according to the Skye tradition, was born of a hind, and imbibed with his mother’s milk the tremendous music of Nature’s elemental forces which has captured the civilised world. Ossian’s poems, by whomsoever composed, emerge from a primitive hunting society for whom the clash of battle mingles grandly with incidents and imagery of the chase. Heroes and heroines alike excel as deer-slayers, and the calibre of a chief is described by the extent of his deer ground. Comal was a son of Alban, the chief of an hundred hills; his deer drank at a thousand streams; a thousand rocks replied to the voice of his dogs. Legends and lyrics of the clan period give enchanting pictures of the hunter’s life—its joyous freedom, its intimate companionship with Nature, its adventurous accidents, its fateful association with the Silent Folk. All the romance of the deer-forest here finds eloquent expression in the simple language which springs from the heart to the lips. Prone on the heather, the hunter-poet with his trusty hound, his arrows of birch, and his bow of yew, waited long hours on deer by burn and brae, in deep forest or mist-wreathed corrie; and while the solitude stirred his imagination, the deer occupied his thoughts—the couched stag, the hinds at feed, the calves at play. And thoughts of deer were not only an inspiration in life, they were also a consolation in death. The prayer of the dying outlaw rendered in immortal verse by an English nineteenth-century poet is but the last request of Donald Mac Fionn-laidh, the deer-slaying bard of Loch Treig, who directed his friends to bury him, wrapped in a deerskin, far out in the Blackwater forest where the deer would walk over his bed.¹

The conditions of sport from which these old-time deer-stalkers drew poetic inspiration differed widely from those with which we are familiar in our own day. Strange as it may seem, the Highlands of Scotland as late as the fifteenth century presented a hunting-ground less ample, indeed, but scarcely less primitive than the Highlands of Alaska in the twentieth. Mountains and glens now totally denuded of wood were then wrapped in a continuous cloud of forest, above which rolled a stony sea of desolate peaks, and upon the outer skirts of which were thinly dotted the castles of chiefs and the humbler dwellings of clansmen. Within this all-encompassing forest were vast solitudes, remote from human habitation, which gave ideal sanctuary to game. Red deer and roe could browse undisturbed in heavily-timbered straths, and bed securely in the dense coppice which enveloped all the high glens. Salmon and sea-trout multiplied in lakes and streams unknown to fame, which mirrored in their crystalline depths the resplendent foliage of primeval woods. Broad peatmosses, the forests of a bygone world, smothered in heath-plants and seamed with glistening tarns, harboured the red grouse together with a host of migrant fowl; and dangerous swamps, concealed in scrubby bush, provided beasts of prey with inaccessible lairs. This unreclaimed hunting-ground was called by the Gaels, with the descriptive genius of their race, am fàsach—the wilderness, which gives the picture in a word. The mammalian fauna of the fàsach, as listed by Sir Robert Gordon in 1630, comprised reid deer and roes, woulffs, foxes, wyld catts, brocks, skuyrells, whittrets, weasels, otters, martrixes, hares, and fumarts; but the game animals from time immemorial were distinctively the stag and the roe.

Highland cattle and hill ponies were pastured at large upon the fàsach, and both are included by more than one Saxon chronicler in the feræ naturæ of North Britain. Extensive forest areas of famous repute for deer were reserved as private hunting-ground by the feudal overlords, whether chief or king, as far back as there is any record. Apart from these reservations, the sport and pasturage of the fàsach was shared in common by members of the clan, who paid for the privilege with their sword. Restrictive game-laws, such as are perforce imposed by modern rights of ownership, did not exist in the military organisation of the clans, and game had no commercial value beyond its immediate utility as food. Deer-stalking in its modern and accepted sense was precluded by physical conditions, for the stag of the fàsach was still a forest animal like his congeners all over the world. Deer were not gathered together in large herds on bare hills exposed to telescopic observation, but widely scattered through dense covert, and visible from viewpoints only when at feed on the cleared spaces. The sport of kings, chiefs, and gentlemen of the clans was the drive, in Gaelic Tainchel,¹ as in mediaeval Europe, and hunt-gatherings for the purpose were held annually in autumn throughout the Highlands, often on a huge scale, which has made them historical. Killing deer by the still hunt, or silent stalk, in the pathless solitudes of the fàsach, did not appeal as a sport to Highland gentlemen, and substantial members of a clan replenished their larder by means of a professed stalker attached to their retinue. Hence the result, surprising to modern sportsmen, that deer-stalking in these days was essentially the sport of clansmen—the rank and file, and, as shown by their literature, it entered deeply into their lives. Successful stalking meant days and nights on the hill, patient watching at dusk and dawn for deer on the feed, much disappointment due to imperfect weapons, and many a rough-and-tumble with wounded stags, for which a well-trained hound gave indispensable aid. Thus were the Highlanders of Scotland bred to the pursuit of arms in the strenuous atmosphere of wild sport, and few rewards for distinguished service were more highly valued than permission to kill deer in the reserved hunting-ground of the chief.

Large game must inevitably disappear, sooner or later, from any limited tract of country which is free to a growing community for the support of life. Deer became scarce and haunts of deer were thinned on the common lands of the fàsach by constant and indiscriminate destruction of both, while the reserved hunting-grounds, which remained in their primitive state, imposing remnants of primeval times, gave sanctuary to game, and gradually acquired for themselves the distinctive title of forest, in memory of the greater forest that had once encompassed them all. When we tread firm ground in the history of the clans, these hereditary deer-lands—reservations by the chief, clan forests, and reservations by the king, royal forests—are firmly established by Scottish law, and conveyed or confirmed, with special privileges, by charter from the Crown. Glen Tilt, Glenfinlas, and Glenartney divide the honours of royal patronage with the ancient forest of the kings of Alban which sweeps round the shaggy skirts of Benalder. Far in the north, the Lords of Reay, who hunt through half a county, find excellent and delectable sport on the surf-beaten wastes of Parph. Eastward of the Great Glen the steep hills of Gaick, the granite range of Mar, and the grey corries of the Monadh-liath, form the immemorial centres of renowned deer-lands, which, in the magnitude of their hunt-gatherings, contest the palm with the deep valleys of the west, the solitudes of Monar, the Alps of Torridon, and the mountain deserts that flank the Dirry Mor. Under the shadow of Gulvain, Lochiel’s celebrated forest embosoms the loveliest of Scottish lakes, while beyond the green braes of Glenorchy, Bendoran becomes immortal in the Gaelic muse of M’Intyre. Across the stormy Minch, in the rugged glens of Harris, the chiefs of M’Leod find game enough when they are disposed to hunt, and far in the south the Paps of Jura raise their triple peaks over the Deer Island of the Norse sea-kings.

These old-time deer-forests, though highly prized and carefully protected, did not suffer from the hard-and-fast bounds inseparably associated with the blackfaces and cheviots of our own day and generation. They were in origin simply selected districts from uninhabited and uninhabitable country which deer shared with wolves. Their marches were natural features defined by the overlord, which it was the duty of the forester to keep inviolate.¹ Disturbance might come, on the one hand, from the trespass of black cattle, which pastured in thousands upon the fàsach, or, on the other hand, from unauthorised stalking, which in these tempestuous times was a constant source of trouble. But hill sheep-farming was among the secrets of the future, and the broad billows of the mountain ocean, rolling westwards and northwards from the Highland border to the blue Atlantic, belonged everywhere to the wild beasts of the forest. As late as the eighteenth century vast stretches of the old Caledonian Wood clothed the slopes with its sheltering glades, and swept into the glens, despite the axe and fire of social progress. The summer grazings of cattle made winter grazings for deer. There were no fences. The antlered monarchs were free to roam from the Braes of Doune to the Kyle of Durness, and from the Braes of Angus to the Point of Ardnamurchan. There were giants on the earth in those days, stags of a weight and beam unknown on bare hills, the last survivors of the ancient forest race that were rapidly disappearing with the woods.

PAPS OF JURA FROM SOUND OF ISLAY.

By the gradual extinction of wolves towards the close of the seventeenth century, the red deer were relieved of an inveterate and hereditary foe, but the way was prepared for the great agricultural discovery which was destined a century later to revolutionise the rural economy of the Highlands. Before the recorded death of the last wolf-slayer (1797), mountain sheep-farming had been proved a profitable industry; and a few years later, with the advent of Lowland farmers to the Grampians, the new sheep carried everything before them. Crofter-clansmen were sent to the seaboard or shipped overseas, black cattle were banished from the glens, mountain slopes were ruthlessly shorn of their natural woods to make pasture for sheep, and, almost without exception, the old deer-forests of the Highlands were placed at the service of wool and mutton. In Sutherland the desolation reached tragic proportions, and tradition relates how the disgusted deer, expelled by the cheviots from Ben Armin, moved in a vast column towards the remote fastnesses of the wilder western hills. To the lairds of those days, many of them on the verge of bankruptcy for their fidelity to a lost cause, deer were of no value compared with an industry that turned bogs and rocks into gold. The famous hunting-grounds of chiefs and kings were hired out for sheep with the rest, and the old wood stag was perilously threatened with the fate of the wolf as a British extinct