Chapter XXI: The Heather on Fire!

On this night Callum and I were loitering in the glen, among the ruins of our once-peaceful and contented mountain hamlet; but oppressed by sadness, on witnessing the new desolation of the place, we wandered three or four miles away, and there older scenes of barbarity awaited us.

We sat down on some piles of stones that were half shrouded by the rising dog-grass, the moss, and the long feathery bracken. These marked the site of a few huts. Here once dwelt a brave little community named the Mac Ellars, one of whom had been my tutor, and here I had attended his little school, bringing each day with me, like other boys, a peat, as a contribution to his fire; for this is the old Highland custom, and the urchin who failed to do so was denied the privilege of warming his kilted legs for that day. Here often had I played the truant, and been threatened by my mother with _the Druid_--that venerable bugbear of the Highland urchin.

The Mac Ellars were all brave and hardy men, whose progenitors had occupied their 'holdings' since the days of Lachlan Mohr; and it was with them that Callum made the famous riot in Glen Ora, when burning the effigies of a certain English historian, and his miserable Scottish imitator, for their falsehoods and absurd antipathy to the clansmen and their national characteristics. But the youth of the clachan, twelve sturdy young lads, had been cajoled by a noble marquis and the duchess, his mother, into the ranks of the Sutherland Highlanders, and had marched to fight the Russians: _then_ their cottages were levelled, and their aged parents were driven forth to beg, to starve, or die--tidings, no doubt, but ill-calculated to rouse the patriotism or fan the _amor patriæ_ of the poor Celtic soldier, when chewing his green coffee in the frozen trenches of Sebastopol, or sinking under disease, with other victims of treachery and mismanagement, in the frightful hospital at Scutari; but fortunately for our Government, the poor clansman is animated by a love of home, which neither time can efface nor tyranny destroy. Thus were the Mac Ellars rooted out--the young sent to storm Sebastopol--the old to starve in the Lowlands, while the marquis and his _passé_ mother were in a state of fervid Uncle Tommery, and, inspired by Mrs. Stowe's romance, were the leaders and patrons of anti-slavery meetings in the South, and fustian addresses to the women of America.

The ruined cottages which are met with at every few miles, amid the depopulated portions of our Highlands, dotting those vast glens which are silent and voiceless now as the most savage wilds of Hudson's Bay, or the great desert of Zahara, are well calculated to excite emotions of melancholy, as being the last relics of an old and departed race.

The wild gooseberry-bushes straggling among the stones; the old well, half choked by sand or weeds; the half-flattened fences; the garden-flowers growing rank among the encroaching heather, all told us the visual melancholy tale; and Callum and I sat in silence on the mossy stones, watching the daylight dying away beyond the distant sea, and full of our own sad and bitter thoughts.

He seemed wholly intent on polishing the butt of a steel Highland pistol, and while he did so, there hovered a dark and sombre aspect of ferocity on his brow.

We were silent, I have said, for both were too much oppressed to speak. Suddenly a black cock appeared on a fragment of rock near us, and clapped his wings as if in defiance. Quick as lightning Callum levelled the pistol and shot him dead; a moment the outstpread pinions beat the heather, and then lay still, while the pistol-shot was pealing among the echoes of the wilderness. My fosterer leisurely reloaded and brought the bird to me; it was large, weighing more than five pounds, its sable plumage glazed all over with a shining blue, and its stomach gorged with bilberries.

'I hope the report may not reach the ear of some rascally keeper,' said I, throwing a hasty glance about me; 'if so, we shall be accused of poaching. It was a risk, Callum, to shoot that bird just now.'

'It is the last shot I may ever have on a Highland mountain,' said Callum Dhu, with a fierce sigh; 'and with little regret would I have put the same ball into the fat brisket of Sir Horace himself, if he stood within twelve paces of me, on this red heather to-night.'

'For heaven's sake, Callum, do not speak thus,' said I; 'Sir Horace is less to blame than his evil mentor, Snaggs--I believe that in heart he is rather amiable.'

'Listen, Co-dhalta!' retorted Callum, turning upon me, and gazing with a full and angry frown. 'You love this man's daughter, and I like it as little as the good lady your mother (now, God rest her, in her grave) would have done. You love one who despises you--and yet your blood is as red as any in Scotland!'

'She does not despise me!' I responded, almost fiercely.

'Yet loving her is folly.'

'A folly that makes me happy.'

'A folly that makes you miserable! Will you remember her only as the daughter of one who has the lives of Gillespie's wife and child, and of the widow of the Oa-Dearg to answer for?'

'Sir Horace is no worse than the canting Marquis, or a hundred other proprietors in the North.'

'That is saying but little--there are many great men in Scotland still, deserving the dagger of Kirkpatrick and the bullet of Bothwellhaugh--and great is the pity that such pretty things have gone out of fashion. The best tune Rory Dall ever played men will tire of; and so I am tired of this Lowlander's tyranny.'

'He is no Lowlander, Callum,' said I, anxiously observing the fierce expression of my companion.

'He is an Englishman, which is almost as bad.'

I burst into a fit of laughter at this remark.

'Ah--you laugh,' said Callum, grimly; 'let us see whose laugh will be loudest to-morrow. He has cleared the glen of men to make way for game--let us see what he will gain by that--the club-footed ouzel.'

'How?' I asked, glancing in alarm at the pistol on which he was carefully placing a percussion cap.

'This very night I shall fire the heather.'

'For heaven's sake, Callum,' said I, 'beware what you do; for the consequent destruction of life and property may be terrible.'

'I care not--these lords and holiday-chiefs are destroying the people--_let the people destroy the game that brings them gold_. I will fire the heather, I tell you!' he added, in a fierce Gaelic whisper; 'by that blessed star which led the wise men to the cradle of God, I have sworn to do so, and it shall be done, come of it what may!'

I was about to speak again, when the clatter of hoofs rang on the mountain-path, and Mr. Snaggs passed us on his shaggy-coated cob. Anger swelled my breast on seeing him; but he bowed to us with an ironical smile, and we saw--or thought we saw--that his eyes were brilliant with malice at the success of that "ingenious ferocity" with which he had extirpated the peasantry of the district. He rode slowly up the slope of the great Ben, and the outlines of his ungainly figure and barrel-bellied charger appeared in dark relief between us and the yellow flush that bathed the western sky.

'What errand takes him to the Craig-na-tuirc to-night?' I remarked.

'The devil only knows: perhaps to see the desolation he has made, and whether any of our people have lit a fire in the glens below. There he goes--may evil follow, and destruction dog him close! may the curse of the poor on whom he tramples, and the scorn of the rich whom he worships, be his lot! I'll show them a flame on Ben Ora to-night that will startle all the Western Highlands!'

Callum drew forth his powder-horn, and after casting a keen but furtive glance around him in the dusk, and after seeing Mr. Snaggs fairly disappear in a hollow of the hills, he shook out the contents, laying across the narrow mouth of the glen a train on the soft dry heather and its bed of turf and decayed moss below. Careless of the event, and now resigned to whatever might follow, I observed him in moody silence, and not without feeling within me that longing for revenge which is so curiously mingled in the Celtic nature, with a wild sense of justice and of injury.

'This is a crime against the law,' said I, in a low voice, remembering that _muirburning_ is a serious offence in Scotland, and that the Acts passed by the Parliaments of the first, third, fourth, and fifth Jameses concerning it, are alike stringent and severe.

'Curse upon the laws,' grumbled Callum; 'if none were made, they would never be violated,' and with these words he emptied the last contents of his horn. Again he looked round him.

The sun had set long since; the tints of the vast mountain had turned from purple to black, and no living thing seemed to be stirring in that intense solitude. Callum stooped, and fired his pistol at the train. The powder flashed, and rose like a fiery serpent along the grass; the dry summer-moss, the decayed leaves and dead ferns ignited like tinder, and in a moment the thick heath and its bed of turf and peat below were wrapped in smoke and flame--a flame that spread on every hand, deepening and extending, as it rolled, like a devouring and encroaching tide, mounting up the sides of the glen before the soft west wind that blew from the dark waves of the salt lake.

Fiercely it crackled, smouldered, and burned, in those places where the bracken or whins, the burr-docks, brambles, rank weeds, and gorse grew thick; but in others it rolled steadily on with great rapidity, spreading and widening in the form of a vast semi-circle, as if it would embrace the whole country in its grasp. As it mounted into the higher portions of the landscape, and seized on the thickets of silver birch and the resinous mountain-pine, the conflagration began to crackle, roar, and hiss, and its flames to shoot aloft and brighten against the sky like the wavering beams of the Northern Lights, tinging the clouds with pink and purple hues.

Now sheep and cattle, horses, rabbits, foxes, and fuimarts, with herds of frantic deer, fled before the flames; and screaming in their terror and confusion, the muirfowl flew hither and thither, or hung overhead among the vapour that shrouded the starry sky. The scene was strange, wild, and terrible; the more so that amid all this general alarm of nature there was not heard the voice of man in wonder or in fear; but the glens had been swept of their people, and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air alone remained.

With astonishment and somewhat of awe, I gazed on this strange and striking scene, while Callum Dhu surveyed it with a grim smile of triumph and derision on his weather-beaten face, which was reddened by the distant glow.

This was one of the most dreadful instances of muirburning that ever occurred in Scotland: the flames travelled at the rate of one hundred and fifty yards a minute, and soon embraced a front of nearly sixteen miles in length, being four miles more than that tide of fire which lately devoured the moors of Strathaven.

The whole of the muirlands--covered with short dry summer heather, the thickets of fir and the game preserves round the base of Ben Ora, from the mouth of the glen where we sat to the deep dark gorge of Garchoine, from the shore of the loch on the east to the hazel wood of Coilchro on the west, where the narrow path to St. Colme's chapel overhangs the foaming sea--a semicircle, as I have said, of sixteen miles--were sheeted in red and yellow flame. Above the mighty wreaths of smoke which rose from the blazing and falling plantations, and from the remains of old primeval forests, towered the huge mountain--the monarch of the western hills--like a dark and wonderous dome. At its base lay the loch gleaming in light, and seeming, in this nocturnal blaze, like a mighty mirror zoned by the smoke and fire, which gradually crept from the low districts upward to the summit of the craigs and hills, where it played in streaks of deep and fiery red, or flashed upward in forky and lambent flames before it died away in vapour.

In the deep and naked ravines, and those places over which the fire had passed, sweeping like a burning tide, the nests and lairs of the game, with every trace of animal and vegetable life, passed away, leaving only the bare black roots of the turf and heather, while vast columns of smoke hung motionless, like giants in mid-air as if the fires of the Day of Doom had sent them forth; and through these murky masses the broad round moon at times peered dimly and darkly out, like Fingal's shield, half hidden and half seen.

'Down, Mac Innon, down!' cried Callum, as a herd of terrified deer came rushing like a living torrent down a narrow ravine, which was threaded by a mountain stream, up the margin of which we were now ascending, as being the safest pathway through this land of fire: 'Hoigh! look at Mac Gilonie's dun cattle, how they come thundering down with the sparks at their heels!'

These words were barely uttered, when the frantic herd--three hundred and more--were upon us, with all their branching antlers lashing the air; but as we threw ourselves flat on our faces among the long bracken and dog-grass, this four-footed tempest swept lightly over us, and disappeared towards the seashore.

'There they go towards the Atlantic--dun deer and red foxes, fat hares and long-eared rabbits, fuimarts, otters, and everything! By the blood that is in us, Sir Horace, but it is mighty little shooting you or yours will have hereabout for these some years to come! The people have gone towards the sea, and your devilish game have followed them. But see,' added Callum; 'what is that--a man mounted on a deer?'

'No, no--a pony.'

'How he gallops! Dioul! my fine fellow, take care of your neck.'

'It is Snaggs!' said I.

'Snaggs--and he rides like fury--up hill too! now the pony falls--'

'He is down!'

'Up again--on foot, and he runs like a sow possessed by a devil towards the Craig-na-tuirc, with the fire rolling at his heels,' said Callum, rubbing his hands in fierce glee.

'Fire behind and a precipice in front.'

'Dioul--we are giving him claw for claw at last!'

'But we must save him, Callum--he will be scorched to death or dashed to pieces.'

A fierce laugh was his only reply. While all this passed in less time than I have taken to record it, we dashed along the stony ravine, guided by the rivulet, and though half-blinded by smoke, reached the Ora, which was there overhung by the Craig-na-tuirc. At that moment a wild and despairing cry for succour rang in the air above us.

'Ay, bay to the moon, false wolf--but there are few ears now in Glen Ora to hear you!' growled Callum through his thick, rough beard, as we began rapidly to clamber up the brow of the precipice, the summit of which was shrouded by smoke, and streaked with fire like the crater of a volcano.