You hear the muttering growl of distant thunder; you see the storm-clouds gathering ominously over the lowering head of the Boar of Badenoch or the Sow of Athol: the storm bursts, the rain comes down in torrents, and, before you have been well soaked to the skin, each stream and tiny burn is in foaming spate. Many a torrent has to be breasted waist-deep, or maybe shoulder-high, before you get into dry garments at the shooting-lodge. Still more perilous it is if you are belated and without a knowledgeable guide in the mist that envelops you in its fleecy folds, either thickening insensibly into palpable darkness, or coming down in a rush with appalling suddenness. Coming with a rush, I say, and I speak by book. I remember one bright afternoon, below the Tap o’ Noth, on an Aberdeenshire moor, and when walking up to a point, we had little time to look up at the phenomenon of a sudden sun-eclipse. What we did see was a dense wall of vapour descending on the dogs, who were drawing on a point, some twenty yards ahead. It was a race against time. I got forward to score a right and left. One of the birds we did pick up, the other was lost beyond groping for in a darkness that might be felt. Of course experiences like these are comparatively rare and I do not pretend there is real danger on the moors; I only say there is an inspiring suspicion of it. There is undeniable romance, more enjoyable in the recollection than in the reality, when you feel you are abroad as to the points of the compass; when you are “turned round,” like the lost sportsman on the American prairies; when the whistle of the curlew, the crow of the grouse, the bellowing of the amorous harts in the rutting season, sound strangely uncanny out of the watery cloud. You can understand how the fervid imagination of the Celt, nursed on superstitions in a savage solitude, peopled the gloomy wilderness with brownies and spectres, and heard the wings and weird shrieks of witches in the air, when the skein of wild geese was flying inland.