‘When does your tenancy of Machray begin?’ he asked.
‘I have got it now – ever since April. The sea-trout come early there.’
‘And you can go up whenever you like?’
‘Yes. We propose starting about the fifth of August.’
‘Take my advice and start at once,’ he said.
I asked why, though I guessed his reason.
‘Because I’m not very happy about you here. You’ve insulted to the marrow the vainest and one of the cleverest men in the world. Don’t imagine he’ll take it lying down. You may be sure he is spending sleepless nights planning how he is to get even with you. It’s you he is chiefly thinking about. Me he regards as a rival in the same line of business – he’d love to break me, but he’ll trust to luck for the chance turning up. Lavater has been his slave and has escaped – but at any rate he once acknowledged his power. You have fooled him from start to finish and left his vanity one raw throbbing sore. He won’t be at ease till he has had his revenge on you – on you and your wife.’
‘Peter John!’ I exclaimed.
He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. He won’t try that line again – at any rate not yet awhile. But he would be much happier, Dick, if you were dead.’
The thought had been in my own mind for weeks, and had made me pretty uncomfortable. It is not pleasant to walk in peril of your life, and move about in constant expectation of your decease. I had considered the thing very carefully, and had come to the conclusion that I could do nothing but try to forget the risk. If I ever allowed myself to think about it, my whole existence would be poisoned. It was a most unpleasant affair, but after all the world is full of hazards. I told Sandy that.
‘I’m quite aware of the danger,’ I said. ‘I always reckoned that as part of the price I had to pay for succeeding. But I’m hanged if I’m going to allow the fellow to score off me to the extent of disarranging my life.’
‘You’ve plenty of fortitude, old fellow,’ said Sandy, ‘but you owe a duty to your family and your friends. Of course you might get police protection from Macgillivray, but that would be an infernal nuisance for you, and, besides, what kind of police protection would avail against an enemy as subtle as Medina?… No, I want you to go away. I want you to go to Machray now, and stay there till the end of October.’
‘What good would that do? He can follow me there, if he wants to, and anyhow the whole thing would begin again when I came back.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘In three months’ time his wounded vanity may have healed. It’s no part of his general game to have a vendetta with you, and only a passion of injured pride would drive him to it. Presently that must die down, and he will see his real interest. Then as for Machray – why a Scots deer-forest is the best sanctuary on earth. Nobody can come up that long glen without your hearing about it, and nobody can move on the hills without half a dozen argus-eyed stalkers and gillies following him. They’re the right sort of police protection. I want you for all our sakes to go to Machray at once.’
‘It looks like funking,’ I objected.
‘Don’t be an old ass. Is there any man alive, who is not a raving maniac, likely to doubt your courage? You know perfectly well that it is sometimes a brave man’s duty to run away.’
I thought for a bit. ‘I don’t think he’ll hire ruffians to murder me,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because he challenged me to a duel. Proposed a place in the Pyrenees and offered to let me choose both seconds.’
‘What did you reply?’
‘I wired, “Try not to be a fool.” It looked as if he wanted to keep the job of doing me in for himself.’
‘Very likely, and that doesn’t mend matters. I’d rather face half a dozen cut-throats than Medina. What you tell me strengthens my argument.’
I was bound to admit that Sandy talked sense, and after he had gone I thought the matter out and decided to take his advice. Somehow the fact that he should have put my suspicions into words made them more formidable, and I knew again the odious feeling of the hunted. It was hardly fear, for I think that, if necessary, I could have stayed on at Fosse and gone about my business with a stiff lip. But all the peace of the place had been spoiled. If a bullet might at any moment come from a covert – that was the crude way I envisaged the risk – then good-bye to the charm of my summer meadows.
The upshot was that I warned Tom Greenslade to be ready to take his holiday, and by the 20th of July he and I and Mary and Peter John were settled in a little white-washed lodge tucked into the fold of a birch-clad hill, and looking alternately at a shrunken river and a cloudless sky, while we prayed for rain.
Machray in calm weather is the most solitary place on earth, lonelier and quieter even than a Boer farm lost in some hollow of the veld. The mountains rise so sheer and high, that it seems that only a bird could escape, and the road from the sea-loch ten miles away is only a strip of heather-grown sand which looks as if it would end a mile off at the feet of each steep hill-shoulder. But when the gales come, and the rain is lashing the roof, and the river swirls at the garden-edge, and the birches and rowans are tossing, then a thousand voices talk, and one lives in a world so loud that one’s ears are deafened and one’s voice acquires a sharp pitch of protest from shouting against the storm.
We had few gales, and the last week of July was a very fair imitation of the Tropics. The hills were cloaked in a heat haze, the Aicill river was a chain of translucent pools with a few reddening salmon below the ledges, the burns were thin trickles, the sun drew hot scents out of the heather and bog-myrtle, and movement was a weariness to man and beast. That was for the day-time; but every evening about five o’clock there would come a light wind from the west, which scattered the haze, and left a land swimming in cool amber light. Then Mary and Tom Greenslade and I would take to the hills, and return well on for midnight to a vast and shameless supper. Sometimes in the hot noontides I went alone, with old Angus the head stalker, and long before the season began I had got a pretty close knowledge of the forest.
The reader must bear with me while I explain the lie of the land. The 20,000 acres of Machray extend on both sides of the Aicill glen, but principally to the south. West lies the Machray sea-loch, where the hills are low and green and mostly sheep-ground. East, up to the river-head, is Glenaicill Forest, the lodge of which is beyond the watershed on the shore of another sea-loch, and on our side of the divide there is only a stalker’s cottage. Glenaicill is an enormous place, far too big to be a single forest. It had been leased for years by Lord Glenfinnan, an uncle of Archie Roylance, but he was a frail old gentleman of over seventy who could only get a stag when they came down to the low ground in October. The result was that the place was ridiculously undershot, and all the western end, which adjoined Machray, was virtually a sanctuary. It was a confounded nuisance, for it made it impossible to stalk our northern beat except in a south-west wind, unless you wanted to shift the deer on to Glenaicill, and that beat had all our best grazing and seemed to attract all our best heads.
Haripol Forest to the south was not so large, but I should think it was the roughest ground in Scotland. Machray had good beats south of the Aicill right up to the watershed, and two noble corries, the Corrie-na-Sidhe and the Corrie Easain. Beyond the watershed was the glen of the Reascuill, both sides of which were Haripol ground. The Machray heights were all over the 3,000 feet, but rounded and fairly east going, but the Haripol peaks beyond the stream were desperate rock mountains – Stob Bán, Stob Coire Easain, Sgurr Mór – comprising some of the most difficult climbing in the British Isles. The biggest and hardest top of all was at the head of the Reascuill – Sgurr Dearg, with its two pinnacle ridges, its three prongs, and the awesome precipice of its eastern face. Machray marched with Haripol on its summit, but it wasn’t often that any of our stalkers went that way. All that upper part of the Reascuill was a series of cliffs and chasms, and the red deer – who is no rock-climber – rarely ventured t
here. For the rest these four southern beats of ours were as delightful hunting-ground as I have ever seen, and the ladies could follow a good deal of the stalking by means of a big telescope in the library window of the Lodge. Machray was a young man’s forest, for the hills rose steep almost from the sea-level, and you might have to go up and down 3,000 feet several times in a day. But Haripol – at least the north and east parts of it – was fit only for athletes, and it seemed to be its fate to fall to tenants who were utterly incapable of doing it justice. In recent years it had been leased successively to an elderly distiller, a young racing ne’er-do-well who drank, and a plump American railway king. It was now in the hands of a certain middle-aged Midland manufacturer, Lord Claybody, who had won an easy fortune and an easier peerage during the War. ‘Ach, he will be killed,’ Angus said. ‘He will never get up a hundred feet of Haripol without being killed.’ So I found myself, to my disgust, afflicted with another unauthorized sanctuary.
Angus was very solemn about it. He was a lean anxious man, just over fifty, with a face not unlike a stag’s, amazingly fast on the hills, a finished cragsman, and with all the Highlander’s subtle courtesy. Kennedy, the second stalker, was of Lowland stock; his father had come to the North from Galloway in the days of the boom in sheep, and had remained as a keeper when sheep prices fell. He was a sturdy young fellow, apt to suffer on steep slopes on a warm day, but strong as an ox and with a better head than Angus for thinking out problems of weather and wind. Though he had the Gaelic, he was a true Lowlander, plain-spoken and imperturbable. It was a contrast of new and old, for Kennedy had served in the War, and learned many things beyond the other’s ken. He knew, for example, how to direct your eye to the point he wanted, and would give intelligent directions like a battery observer, whereas with Angus it was always ‘D’ye see yon stone? Ay, but d’ye see another stone?’ – and so forth. Kennedy, when we sat down to rest, would smoke a cigarette in a holder, while Angus lit the dottle in a foul old pipe.
In the first fortnight of August we had alternate days of rain, real drenching torrents, and the Aicill rose and let the fish up from the sea. There were few sea-trout that year, but there was a glorious run of salmon. Greenslade killed his first, and by the end of a week had a bag of twelve, while Mary, with the luck which seems to attend casual lady anglers, had four in one day to her own rod. Those were pleasant days, though there were mild damp afternoons when the midges were worse than tropical mosquitoes. I liked it best when a breeze rose and the sun was hot and we had all our meals by the waterside. Once at luncheon we took with us an iron pot, made a fire, and boiled a fresh-killed salmon ‘in his broo’ – a device I recommend to anyone who wants the full flavour of that noble fish.
Archie Roylance arrived on 16th August, full of the lust of Hunting. He reported that they had seen nothing remarkable in the way of birds at Flacksholm, but that David Warcliff had had great sport with the sea-trout. ‘There’s a good boy for you,’ he declared. ‘First-class little sportsman, and to see him and his father together made me want to get wedded straight off. I thought him a bit hipped at Fosse, but the North Sea put him right, and I left him as jolly as a grig. By the way, what was the matter with him in the summer? I gathered that he had been seedy or something, and the old man can’t let him out of his sight… Let’s get in Angus and talk deer.’
Angus was ready to talk deer till all hours. I had fixed the 21st for the start of the season, though the beasts were in such forward condition that we might have begun four days earlier. Angus reported that he had already seen several stags clear of velvet. But he was inclined to be doleful about our neighbours. ‘My uncle Alexander is past prayin’ for,’ said Archie. ‘He lives for that forest of his, and he won’t have me there early in the season, for he says I have no judgement about beasts and won’t listen to the stalkers. In October, you see, he has me under his own eye. He refuses to let a stag be killed unless it’s a hummel or a diseased ancient. Result is, the place is crawlin’ with fine stags that have begun to go back and won’t perish till they’re fairly moulderin’. Poor notion of a stud has my uncle Alexander… What about Haripol? Who has it this year?’
When he heard he exclaimed delightedly. ‘I know old Claybody. Rather a good old fellow in his way, and uncommon free-handed. Rum old bird, too! He once introduced his son to me as “The Honourable Johnson Claybody”. Fairly wallows in his peerage. You know he wanted to take the title of Lord Oxford, because he had a boy goin’ up to Magdalen, but even the Heralds’ College jibbed at that. But he’ll never get up those Haripol hills. He’s a little fat puffin’ old man. I’m not very spry on my legs now, but compared to Claybody I’m a gazelle.’
‘He’ll maybe have veesitors,’ said Angus.
‘You bet he will. He’ll have the Lodge stuffed with young men, for there are various Honourable Claybody daughters. Don’t fancy they’ll be much good on the hill, though.’
‘They will not be good, Sir Archibald,’ said the melancholy Angus. ‘There will have been some of them on the hill already. They will be no better than towrists.’
‘Towrists’ I should explain were the poison in Angus’s cup. By that name he meant people who trespassed on a deer forest during, or shortly before, the stalking season, and had not the good manners to give him notice and ask his consent. He distinguished them sharply from what he called ‘muntaneers’, a class which he respected, for they were modest and civil folk who came usually with ropes and ice axes early in the spring, and were accustomed to feast off Angus’s ham and eggs and thaw their frozen limbs by Angus’s fire. If they came at other seasons it was after discussing their routes with Angus. They went where no deer could travel, and spent their time, as he said, ‘shamming themselves into shimneys’. But the ‘towrist’ was blatant and foolish and abundantly discourteous. He tramped, generally in a noisy party, over deer-ground, and, if remonstrated with, became truculent. A single member of the species could wreck the stalking on a beat for several days. ‘The next I see on Machray,’ said Angus, ‘I will be rolling a big stone on him.’ Some of the Haripol guests, it appeared, were of this malign breed, and had been wandering thoughtlessly over the forest, thereby wrecking their own sport – and mine.
‘They will have Alan Macnicol’s heart broke,’ he concluded. ‘And Alan was saying to me that they was afful bad shots. They was shooting at a big stone and missing it. And they will have little ponies to ride on up to the tops, for the creatures is no use at walking. I hope they will fall down and break their necks.’
‘They can’t all be bad shots,’ said Archie. ‘By the way, Dick, I forgot to tell you. You know Medina, Dominick Medina? You once told me you knew him. Well, I met him on the steamer, and he said he was going to put in a week with old Claybody.’
That piece of news took the light out of the day for me. If Medina was at Haripol it was most certainly with a purpose. I had thought little about the matter since I arrived at Machray, for the place had an atmosphere of impregnable seclusion, and I seemed to have shut a door on my recent life. I had fallen into a mood of content and whole-hearted absorption in the ritual of wild sport. But now my comfort vanished. I looked up at the grim wall of hills towards Haripol and wondered what mischief was hatching behind it.
I warned Angus and Kennedy and the gillies to keep a good look-out for trespassers. Whenever one was seen, they were to get their glasses on him and follow him and report his appearance and doings to me. Then I went out alone to shoot a brace of grouse for the pot, and considered the whole matter very carefully. I had an instinct that Medina had come to these parts to have a reckoning with me, and I was determined not to shirk it. I could not go on living under such a menace; I must face it and reach a settlement. To Mary, of course, I could say nothing, and I saw no use in telling either Archie or Greenslade. It was, metaphorically, and perhaps literally, my own funeral. But next morning I did not go fishing. Instead, I stayed at home and wrote out a full account of the whole affair up to Medina’s appearance at Haripol, a
nd I set down baldly what I believed to be his purpose. This was in case I went out one day and did not return. When I finished it, I put the document in my dispatch-box, and felt easier, as a man feels when he has made his will. I only hoped the time of waiting would not be prolonged.
The 21st was a glorious blue day, with a morning haze which promised heat. What wind there was came from the south-east, so I sent Archie out on the Corrie Easain beat, and went myself, with one gillie, to Clach Glas, which is the western peak on the north bank of the Aicill. I made a practice of doing my own stalking, and by this time I knew the ground well enough to do it safely. I saw two shootable stags, and managed to get within range of one of them, but spared him for the good of the forest, as he was a young beast whose head would improve. I had a happy and peaceful day, and found to my relief that I wasn’t worrying about the future. The clear air and the great spaces seemed to have given me the placid fatalism of an Arab.
When I returned I was greeted by Mary with the news that Archie had got a stag, and that she had followed most of his stalk through the big telescope. Archie himself arrived just before dinner, very cheerful and loquacious. He found that his game leg made him slow, but he declared that he was not in the least tired. At dinner we had to listen to every detail of his day, and we had a sweep on the beast’s weight, which Mary won. Afterwards in the smoking-room he told me more.
‘Those infernal tailors from Haripol were out today. Pretty wild shots they must be. When we were lunchin’ a spent bullet whistled over our heads – a long way off, to be sure, but I call it uncommon bad form. You should have heard Angus curse in Gaelic. Look here, Dick, I’ve a good mind to drop a line to old Claybody and ask him to caution his people. The odds are a million to one, of course, against their doin’ any harm, but there’s always that millionth chance. I had a feelin’ today as if the War had started over again.’