Even our frozen strath here has its modern legend, which may be told in English, and out of which, I am sure, a novelist could make a good short story, or a pleasant opening chapter of a romance.  What is the mysterious art by which these things are done?  What makes the well-told story seem real, rich with life, actual, engrossing?  It is the secret of genius, of the novelist’s art, and the writer who cannot practise the art might as well try to discover the Philosopher’s Stone, or to “harp fish out of the water.”  However, let me tell the legend as simply as may be, and as it was told to me.

The strath runs due north, the river flowing from a great loch to the Northern sea.  All around are low, undulating hills, brown with heather, and as lonely almost as the Sahara.  On the horizon to the south rise the mountains, Ben this and Ben that, real mountains of beautiful outline, though no higher than some three thousand feet.  Before the country was divided into moors and forests, tenanted by makers of patent corkscrews, and boilers of patent soap, before the rivers were distributed into beats, marked off by white and red posts, there lived over to the south, under the mountains, a sportsman of athletic frame and adventurous disposition.  His name I have forgotten, but we may call him Dick Lindsay.  It is told of him that he once found a poacher in the forest, and, being unable to catch the intruder, fired his rifle, not at him, but in his neighbourhood, whereon the poacher, deliberately kneeling down, took a long shot at Dick.  How the duel ended, and whether either party flew a flag of truce, history does not record.

At all events, one stormy day in late September, Dick had stalked and wounded a stag on the hills to the south-east of the strath.  Here, if only one were a novelist, one could weave several pages of valuable copy out of the stalk.  The stag made for the strath here, and Dick, who had no gillie, but was an independent sportsman of the old school, pursued on foot.  Plunging down the low, birch-clad hills, the stag found the flooded river before him, black and swollen with rain.  He took the water, crossing by the big pool, which looked almost like a little loch, tempestuous under a north wind blowing up stream, and covered with small white, vicious crests.  The stag crossed and staggered up the bank, where he stood panting.  It is not a humane thing to leave a deer to die slowly of a rifle bullet, and Dick, reaching the pool, hesitated not, but threw off his clothes, took his skene between his teeth, plunged in, and swam the river.

All naked as he was he cut the stag’s throat in the usual manner, and gralloched him with all the skill of Bucklaw.  This was very well, and very well it would be to add a description of the stag at bay; but as I never happened to see a stag at bay, I omit all that.  Dick had achieved success, but his clothes were on one side of a roaring river in spate, and he and the dead stag were on the other.