Moreover we are in the domain of the eagle, the raven, and the corbie. They are seldom long silent there. And that sudden call on the wind? ... what but the Merry Folk, _Clann Aighean Siubhlach_, the Wandering Deer-Clan, passing like drifting shadows over white heather-pastures lost to view? It is long since the love-belling of the stags made musical the mountain-side: was not ‘the Silence of the Deer’ the first sign of winter come again? But that cry was the cry of hunger--a _guth accaimeach_, a sobbing voice, as once I heard a prosaic roadmender unprosaically and with kindly sympathy allude to the winter-bleat of the snow-famished deer. And that other bleating: of sheep left upon the hills, and overtaken by the White Weather. How goes the sound, the translated echo of their mournful iteration, that is now a long ululation of lament and now a rising and falling bleating as of confused words? The same roadmender I speak of said--after himself lamenting in sympathy _tha’m fuachd a muigh’s a staigh an diugh ..._ ‘the cold is outside and inside to-day’--that it went like this: _Tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr’s gun fhios againn!_... ‘We are astray, we are astray, we are astray and have lost our bearings!’ Up here everything may have a snow-change ‘into something rich and rare.’ It was in a hill-solitude, in white weather such as this, that, for example, I heard from an old shepherd names for the eagle, the corbie, and the ptarmigan that I had not elsewhere heard, nor have seen in print, though for long now I have been collecting all whenever and wherever chance permits the Gaelic and Lowland names of birds and animals. The corbie he called _An t-Eun Acarachd_, the Merciless, literally, ‘the bird without compassion,’ no doubt with thought of its love for young lambs or its savage lust for the eyes of stricken or dying sheep. The ptarmigan he called _An t-Eun_ (_Adhar_ or _Aidhre_), the bird of the snow or frost--though this is but a variant, of course, of the more familiar _Sneacag_ or _Eun-an-Sneachel_. When he spoke of the eagle simply as _An t-Eun Mòr_, the great bird, that seemed less noteworthy, but when he added, _Abù! An t-Eun Mòr Abù_, I was puzzled. I thought he meant _aboo_ to simulate the _Iolair’s_ cry, though it sounded much more like the muffled hoot of the great owl than the eagle’s screech. He said he remembered that was the eagle’s name in an old tale he had often heard his mother tell when he was a child. I never thought of it as _Abù_, however, till one day I came upon this word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered as being an ancient war-cry of the Gael. Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills: to live still among these desolate mountains, around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs, in the scream of the golden eagle. The old man had a special bird-name for most of the birds he spoke of or about which I asked him. Doubtless