“Well,” said Fred, “you know we’ve been two months now under canvas, so we thought we would try a week of civilisation. But we’ve had rare sport enough, fishing in river and fishing in lake, and shooting almost whatever we came across – rabbits, leverets, pigeons, plovers, anything.”
“Bad boys,” said Chisholm. “But never mind, we’re off to-morrow.”
“Where away?”
“To the Highlands, the stern Scottish Highlands,” said Chisholm. “I’m promised a week among the deer. You’re hard enough for that now, Frank.”
“What a ubiquitous trio we are, to be sure!” said Fred.
They certainly seemed so, reader; for two days after the foregoing conversation they were dining at a quiet little hotel in Beauley, and by four of the clock next morning they were on their way to the house of Duncan McPhee, the head keeper of the great forest of Cairntree, one of the wildest tracts of country in the wild North. Though termed a forest, it is only partially wooded; for gigantic hills, bare and rugged, tower skywards every here and there from amidst the pine-trees, and there are, too, vast tracts of bare brae or moorland, covered only with heather, the home of the grouse and the ptarmigan. Deer abound in this forest in countless herds; but, saving the houses of the keepers, you might journey for days in all directions without seeing the smoke from a single habitation.
Early as our heroes were abroad, Duncan and his dogs were there to meet them. But their first day was a blank, and they returned very tired and somewhat disheartened to the keeper’s house, where, putting up with Highland fare, they determined to stay all night. The next day they were rewarded with the sight of deer in hundreds, but that was all; the deer were too wild and wary to reach. More than once that day, as some noble stag stood for a moment on knoll or brae-top, scenting the wind, then dashing wildly off adown the glen, the words of Walter Scott came to Frank’s mind —
“The crested leader, proud and high,
Tossed his beamed frontlet to the sky,
A moment gazed adown the dale,
A moment snuffed the tainted gale;
Then, as the headmost foe appeared.
With one brave bound the copse he cleared,
And stretching forward free and far,
Sought the wild heaths of Uam Var.”
But the third was a never-to-be-forgotten day, for Frank brought down his first stag, and it was a “royal.” Luck seemed to set in after this. It never rains but it pours, you know, and nobody had any reason to be dissatisfied with that week spent among the red deer in the wilds of Cairntree.
I wish I had space wherein to tell you of one-half of the delightful sporting adventures our heroes had during the many months Frank was “bein’ broke,” or of the many happy, pleasant days they had to look back to, when afterwards sojourning with wild beasts and wilder men – of days spent among the partridges, or with the cockers at work, or following the pheasants. They all agreed that there was but little true sport attached to pheasant-shooting, the birds are so tame.
“It’s just like shooting hens,” Chisholm remarked.
But perhaps their dearest recollections went back to the time they spent in duck shooting. These were days they might have marked in their diaries with a red cross – spent entirely under canvas they were, in true gipsy fashion; for although the season was autumn, the weather was still bright and warm, and the nights just cool enough to be pleasant. By marshes or lonely moorlands, by inland lakes and ponds, or by wooded friths and estuaries, following up the wild-fowl never failed to give them the very greatest of pleasure and sport. In these adventures their chief companion was a dog of the Irish water-spaniel type, and Pattie by name. Red all over was Pattie, and one mass of ringlets, which even a whole day’s swimming in sea or river failed to unravel; he even had a fringe or top-knot over his bonnie brow, which quite set off his peculiar style of beauty. Pattie’s style of beauty was what would be designated in Scotland “the daft.” Mind, you couldn’t help loving Pattie – I defy you not to love him if you tried; but he had such queer ways, and such a funny face, that you couldn’t look at him long without laughing. Pattie was truly Irish, but grand at his work nevertheless, whether retrieving a dead duck or a maimed one. When plunging into the water after the latter, “Be quiet wid yer skraiching,” Pattie would seem to say. “Sure I’ll fetch you out, and you’ll never feel it at all, at all.” But you ought to have seen Pattie coming up out of the river with a dead duck that he probably had had to swim a long distance against the tide for; there was a pride in his beaming eye that my pen would attempt in vain to depict. “What do ye think av me now?” Pattie would seem to say.
But summer and autumn and the first months of winter wore away, and, after spending a whole fortnight at the white hare-shooting among the mountains of Perthshire – and harder work I defy you to find – Frank was at last declared thoroughly broken in, completely hardened off.
“A man,” said Chisholm, “that can stand a week or two among white hares, and not feel too tired to sleep at night, is fit for anything. Now, boys,” he added, “what do you say to a run right away up to the polar ice-fields?”
“I’m in,” said Fred quietly.
“Oh!” said Chisholm, “you’re always in for anything. If I asked you to take a trip to the moon you’d jump at it.”
“Or over it,” said Fred, smiling, “like the cow in the poem of ‘Hey, diddle diddle;’ but are you in earnest about the ice-fields?”
“Downright.”
“Well,” said Frank, with assumed modesty, “if you think I’m ‘broke’ enough, please I’d like to go too.”
“Bravo!” cried Chisholm O’Grahame, “that settles the question.”
They made arrangements to sail in a seal-and-whale ship in February. They got an introduction to a captain of one of these, and he gladly undertook to convey them to Greenland and back, “free, gratis, and for nothing, except the pleasure of their company, and the skins and blubber they would no doubt kill.” That was how the captain expressed it. “But, mind you,” he said, “you’ll have to rough it a bit.”
“We don’t mind that,” said Chisholm.
Before he left for the far distant north, Frank Willoughby spent some weeks at General Lyell’s castle. Happy, happy weeks they were, and how quickly, too, they fled away! I could make you feel very sentimental and “gushive,” reader, if I told you all that passed between the lovely young Eenie and our hero Frank, but I never tell tales out of school, so there. I may just say, however, that, when the last moment did come, poor Eenie could hardly breathe the fond “good bye” for the tears that she could not repress.
The General’s adieu was a hearty one.
“Good-bye,” he said, “keep up a good heart, and,” he added laughingly, as he patted Frank on the back, “remember —
“‘None but the brave deserve the fair.’”
Chapter Four
Part II – The Polar Ice-Fields
Outward bound – Night in the Pack – The Aurora – The awful Silence of the Ice-fields – Seals! Seals! – The Battle with the Bladder-noses – Jack in the Box with a Vengeance – A Fight with Walruses
The good ship Grampus slipped away from her moorings on the 13th of February, 18 – , and steamed slowly seaward from the port of Peterhead, North Britain, hound for the wild and desolate regions that surround the pole. She steamed slowly away in the very teeth of a breeze of winds that might have frightened a man of less daring and pluck than Captain Anderson, for the sea was grey and stormy, the sky was leaden and threatening, and the very sea-birds that screamed around the vessel’s bows seemed to warn him that there was danger on the deep. But the Captain heeded them not. He had said he would sail on this day, and he did,