Skye, Island of (Scotland) -- Description and travel
valued him because he was an authority in rifles and fowling-pieces,
and knew the warm shelving rocks on which bullet-headed seals slept,
and the cairns on the sea-shore in which otters lived; and because if
any special breed of dog was wanted he was sure to meet the demand.
He was a little, thick-set fellow, of great physical strength, and of
the most obliging nature; and he was called Angus-with-the-dogs,
because without Spoineag and Fruich at his heels, he was never seen.
The pipe was always in his mouth,--to him tobacco smoke was as much a
matter of course as peat reek is to a turf-hut.
[Sidenote: Waiting for Angus.]
One day, after Fellowes had gone to the Landlord's, where I was to
join him in a week or ten days, young M'Ian and myself waited for
Angus-with-the-dogs on one of the rising grounds at a little distance
from the house. Angus in his peregrinations had marked a cairn in
which he thought an otter would be found, and it was resolved that
this cairn should be visited on a specified day about noon, in the
hope that some little sport might be provided for the Sassenach.
About eleven A.M., therefore, on the specified day we lay on the
heather smoking. It was warm and sunny; M'Ian had thrown beside him
on the heather his gun and shot-belt, and lay back luxuriously on his
fragrant couch, meerschaum in mouth, his Glengary bonnet tilted
forward over his eyes, his left leg stretched out, his right drawn
up, and his brown hands clasped round the knee. Of my own position,
which was comfortable enough, I was not at the moment specially
cognisant; my attention being absorbed by the scenery around, which
was wild and strange. We lay on couches of purple heather, as I have
said; and behind were the sloping birch-woods--birch-woods always
remind one somehow of woods in their teens--which ran up to the bases
of white cliffs traversed only by the shepherd and the shadows of
hawks and clouds. The plateau on which we lay ran toward the sea,
and suddenly broke down to it in little ravines and gorges,
beautifully grassed and mossed, and plumed with bunches of ferns.
Occasionally a rivulet came laughing and dancing down from rocky
shelf to shelf. Of course, from the spot where we lay, this breaking
down of the hill-face was invisible, but it was in my mind's eye all
the same, for I had sailed along the coast and admired it a couple of
days before. Right in front flowed in Loch Eishart, with its islands
and white sea-birds. Down in the right-hand corner, reduced in size
by distance, the house sat on its knoll, like a white shell; and
beside it were barns and outhouses, the smoking turf-huts on the
shore, the clumps of birch-wood, the thread of a road which ran down
toward the stream from the house, crossed it by a bridge a little
beyond the turf-huts and the boat-shed, and then came up towards us
till it was lost in the woods. Right across the Loch were the round
red hills that rise above Broadford; and the entire range of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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