The present counties of Caithness and Sutherland A together made up the old Province of Cait or Cat, so called after the name of one of the seven legendary sons of _Cruithne_, the eponymous hero who represented the Picts of Alban, as the whole mainland north of the Forth was then called, and whose seven sons' names were said to stand for its seven main divisions,[1] _Cait_ for Caithness and Sutherland, _Ce_ for Keith or Mar, _Cirig_ for Magh-Circinn or Mearns, _Fib_ for Fife, _Fidach_ (Woody) for Moray, _Fotla_ for Ath-Fodla or Athol, and _Fortrenn_ for Menteith. Immediately to the south of Cat lay the great province of Moray including Ross, and, in the extreme west, a part of north Argyll; and the boundary between Cat and Ross was approximately the tidal River Oykel, called by the Norse Ekkjal, the northern and perhaps also the southern bank of which probably formed the ranges of hills known in the time of the earliest Norse jarls as Ekkjals-bakki. Everywhere else Cat was bounded by the open sea, of which the Norse soon became masters, namely on the west by the Minch, on the north by the North Atlantic and Pentland Firth, and on the east and south by the North Sea; and the great valley of the Oykel and the Dornoch Firth made Cat almost into an island. Like Caesar's Gaul, Cat was "divided into three parts"; first, _Ness_, which was co-extensive with the modern county of Caithness, a treeless land, excellent in crops and highly cultivated in the north-east, but elsewhere mainly made up of peat mosses, flagstones and flatness, save in its western and south-western borderland of hills; secondly, to the west of Ness, _Strathnavern_, a land of dales and hills, and, especially in its western parts, of peaks; and, thirdly, to the south of Strathnavern, _Sudrland_, or the Southland, a riviera of pastoral links and fertile ploughland, sheltered on the north by its own forests and hills, and sloping, throughout its whole length from the Oykel to the Ord of Caithness, towards the _Breithisjorthr_, Broadfjord, or Moray Firth, its southern sea.[2] Save in north-east Ness, and in favoured spots elsewhere, also below the 500 feet level, the land of Cat was a land of heath and woods[3] and rocks, studded, especially in the west, with lochs abounding in trout, a vast area of rolling moors, intersected by spacious straths, each with its salmon river, a land of solitary silences, where red deer and elk abounded, and in which the wild boar and wolf ranged freely, the last wolf being killed in Glen Loth within twelve miles of Dunrobin at a date between 1690 and 1700.[4] No race of hunters or fishermen ever surpassed the Picts in their craft as such.