Bonnie Dundee (23 page)

In the lowlands that we left behind us it was spring – did I not say that the apple blossom was breaking at Glenogilvie? – but the country that we marched through seemed as though it had never heard of spring. We trudged and stumbled our way up through the Tummel and across the flank of Ben Alder – for the most part we had to go afoot, leading our horses; we were worse off than the Atholl men, who had no horses to see to – and beyond Rannoch the land itself seemed to hate us; a dark land with a strange feeling of emptiness, as though it had never known the tread of a man’s foot nor the sound of a man’s voice before (maybe it had not) and resented us accordingly. It flung at us every weapon that it could summon up; steep slopes of slipping scree, gullies that were over their banks in snow water running deep and fast enough to carry horse and man away; the sudden yielding of frozen earth into the bog beneath, so that horses floundered and sank and had to be shot and left there. And when all else failed, the mist came down from the high corries, closing in the world to a few feet of scree or
bog-cotton, coming even between each man and the next man ahead of him in the column. And all the while the cold ate into our very bones.

At night we bivouacked in the open, a few miles short of Loch Treig, in the lee of a skein of rocky outcrops that broke like bare bones through the sour mountain grass; and woke – those of us that had slept at all – with the ice of our own frozen breath like hoarfrost on our unshaved chins, and our limbs as stiff as though we had died in the night. I was better off than most, for I had Caspar; Caspar trotting at my heels when I went afoot, riding across my saddle-bow when it was possible to ride. His paws were red-raw with the hard and frozen earth, when we made that night’s camp; but he had slept inside my buff coat, so that we gave each other what little warmth we had, and so made more of it, I and the wee dog. The wee lion-hearted dog.

Dundee was a hard leader, as he always had been; but as always he demanded no more from us than he did from himself. He lay down on the same frozen ground as we did, and ate the same iron ration of stale bannock from his saddle-bag, and carried no more of comfort than we in the rolled up cloak strapped behind his saddle. And so we kept going without overmuch of complaining. Even the Highland men only grumbled among themselves in their own tongue, and looked at him with a respectful eye.

That morning, the Atholl man who acted as our guide put round the word that we would be in Lochaber by nightfall. ‘If we live so long,’ somebody said through chapped and blackened lips. But our hearts lifted somewhat within us.

By the time we started the long climb over the southern spur of Ben Nevis, we had forgotten we had left
Pitlochry only the day before, and felt as though we had grown old among the mountains. And eh! the smallness of us: small like a trickle of ants climbing up the empty vastness of the mountainside! But it was the last stretch. Once over the skyline that towered so high and far off above us, we should have won through!

I was just thinking that when I realised that Jock was walking lame. I spoke to Pate Paterson, and pulled aside from the column and dismounted to find out what was amiss, Caspar standing to watch me, and glad of the pause, as the rest went by. The trouble was easily traced: a small sharp stone picked up from the last stretch of scree in his off fore-hoof. I got out my knife and cleared it easy enough, the old lad slobbering at my shoulder the while. But by the time I had finished, the troop was way up ahead, and the last of the Atholl Highlanders loping by. I swung Jock to the right, further uphill, and touched in my spurs to overhaul my proper place near the head of the column.

I was watching the gold and crimson of the standard that made a shout of brilliant colour against the vast winter-bleached hillside, fool that I was, and not looking where I was going…

But indeed I do not think there was anything to see.

Suddenly there was a crackling, and the solid ground was gone from beneath us as the frozen surface gave, and Jock plunged forward with a squeal of terror, and next instant was floundering in one of the small deadly bog-patches, as had happened to other men and horses on that march.

I flung myself out of the saddle, and found firm – or maybe it was but frozen – ground beneath me; and flinging the bridle over his head, began to pull, shouting to him, ‘Easy now – come up! Up!’ Caspar, who had also jumped clear, standing anxiously beside me.

But Jock was floundering deeper and deeper with every moment. I have heard it said that some of these pots have no bottom to them. He could almost reach firm ground with his forehooves; but his hind legs were sinking down and down. I yelled after the column – I do not know what, some useless cry for help. And then, above Jock’s squealing and threshing and the pounding of my own heart, I heard the beat of light-running feet – feet in brogues, not riding boots – odd to have noticed that – and one of the Highlanders was beside me, crying in the high-pitched voice of his people, ‘Hold on! We will be needing something under his forefeet.’ And I was aware without looking, that he had drawn his broadsword, and was slashing at the young heather, diving in to thrust the stuff under Jock’s flailing hooves.

But the terrified beast scattered the bundles as fast as they were gathered. I leaned back, putting out every ounce of strength I possessed, and praying that the headgear would not break under the strain. The Highlander was beside me, hauling at Jock’s mane, but the foul footing gave, and he was himself up to his knees with only just time to scramble clear before the hungry bog claimed him also; and I could feel the ground beginning to break away under my own braced heels.

And there were hoof-beats coming up behind me, and Pate Paterson’s voice said, ‘Ye’ll have to shoot him.’

‘I’ll not—’ I gasped.

‘You’re not the first that’s had to do it.’

‘This is different!’ I shouted stupidly. Could he not see? This was Jock!

‘Shoot him, or I will.’ It was not Pate, now, but Corporal Paterson giving the order.

I snatched an agonised sideways glance, and saw his
hand already going to his holster. ‘No!’ I yelled. ‘
Wait!
’ Och, but God knows what he was to wait for. Jock was almost haunch-deep in the black ooze. His head was up, but his eyes, wild and white-showing, were filled with despair; clemmed and exhausted as he had been before, he was giving up the fight; and once that happened the last hope would be gone.

‘Jock, ye old de’il!’ I was almost sobbing. ‘Come up, wi’ ye!’ At any moment would come the roar of Pate’s pistol behind me. And then the miracle happened!

I told you before that somewhere in Caspar’s tangled ancestry there must have been a strain of cattle dog, and whiles and whiles he thought he was a cattle dog still. Now, the moment of sorest need, the old skill and the old knowledge of his forefathers came upon him. Whether or no he understood the true state of things, he understood that there was desperate need his friend Jock should be moved forward in the direction that I was dragging him, and that Jock was not moving forward but only floundering in the same spot; and next instant he had darted out on to the quaking surface of the bog, springing, light as he was, from one frozen tussock to another where a man or even a bigger dog would have sunk. He was barking in sharp command, darting in and out with gadfly nips to the horse’s haunches, as I have seen cattle dogs nip at the hocks of a wilful heifer.

And somehow the shrill torment at his haunches got through to Jock as nothing else could do and, mad to get free of the yapping and nipping onslaught, he gave a terrible cry that was nearer to a human shriek than a horse’s, and put out the last dregs of his strength that none of us, nor himself, had known that he had yet had in him. There was a long moment of desperate, convulsive struggle, a slipping back and a wild heaving
forward; and with eyes starting from his head and the tendons of his neck and shoulders standing clear as though he had been flayed, with me hauling at his headgear and the Highlander hanging on to his mane, he came up with a hideous sucking noise, leaving a kind of ragged black wound bubbling behind him in the frozen hillside.

Caspar all but went in himself as the crust broke up behind Jock’s escaping backlash; but he managed to swerve aside and come leaping and floundering from tussock to tussock, back to the safety of firm ground.

Jock stood with hanging head and heaving flanks, shuddering from crest to tail, the black ooze dripping from him. Caspar shook himself so that the black drops flew in all directions. Corporal Pate Paterson returned his pistol to his holster, and when I looked round, he was grinning. ‘Insubordination, Trooper Herriot,’ said he. ‘Insubordination – give that poor brute a rub down, and catch up wi’ the rest of us. You’ll not likely lose sight of us on this braeside, but dinna go wandering into any more bog-holes on the way.’ And he heeled his horse from a stand into a canter, and was gone after the rest.

I had my arm over Jock’s neck that was streaked with the black sweat of terror as well as bog ooze. Across it, I looked at the Highlander, and he looked at me. He was about my own age, and short for his breed; a stocky, sandy-haired chiel with the bandiest legs I ever saw in anybody not bred on horseback. Both of us still panting for breath, we grinned at each other with chapped lips. I do not think I ever remembered to thank him, nor did there ever seem to be any need. He picked up his broadsword from where it lay among the heather roots, and sheathed it at his side, and together
we began to rub down both Jock and Caspar with handfuls of moorland grass, and then, when I had taken off my buff coat and flung it over Jock’s back, we struggled on, and hardly a word spoken between us all the while.

When we drew level with the Highlanders at the rear of the column, he checked. ‘My name is Alisdair Gordon,’ said he, with the air of one conferring an honour.

‘Mine is Hugh Herriot,’ said I; and we struck hands; and he fell in with his own kind, while I remounted and gentled Jock up towards my place close behind that red and gold standard.

And that was how I first came to know Alisdair Gordon, who was to be my friend through the weeks that followed.

I mind Claverhouse looked round as I urged Jock back into place behind him; and his face was grey-white to the lips. But there was the shade of a smile far back in his eyes. ‘That’s a good dog you have there,’ he said, with a flick of a glance at Caspar sprawled across my saddlebow.

A little further on the slope grew too steep for riding spent horses, and we must dismount and go on foot yet again. Somehow we lurched and stumbled our way up that last slope and came over the skyline that had so long cut the drifting grey cloud-roof above us; and checked to breathe the horses – and looked down, scarce believing it, to where far, far below us, the shining waters of Spean and Roy came together and flowed down through the greenness of Lochaber. And smelled, or seemed to smell even up there on the bitter roof of the world, the springtime and the soft air that came from the West Coast.

Philip of Amryclose, standing beside the remount he
had ridden since he lost his own horse the day before, put aside the fringed corner of the standard that was blowing across his face, and said in a voice of triumph and wonder and a sort of quiet laughter, ‘What was Hannibal to us?’

I have always remembered that, and he must have remembered it too, for afterwards he put it in his book, making it sound heroic, which was not how it sounded at the time.

By dusk we were back in the world of men; a world where lambs bleated and smoke curled from turf roofs and hawthorn was in flower; and folks came running out to meet us as we drew near to the clachan at the foot of the glen.

SIR EWAN CAMERON,
Lochiel himself, came out to greet us from his own tall grey half-fortress house nearby.

They do not grow men the like of that any more. He was tall as Keppoch, but of a finer breed, and carried himself like a king stag; and though he was close on sixty, his mane of hair and his great curling moustache were black as a raven’s wing. Bright eyes, he had, and an iron mouth; and a gentle and courteous way with him beyond what I ever knew in any Highlander before or since. Yet for all that, so the story goes, fighting General Monck when he was a young man, he tore an English soldier’s throat out wolf-like with his teeth.

A man once seeing Lochiel would not be forgetting him again.

Between him and Claverhouse it was a friendship at first sight. You could see it. They were like comrades in arms of twenty years’ standing.

Eh well, I am wandering from my story.

Lochiel gave Dundee the use of a house near-hand his own, but Claverhouse made his quarters as he always had done, among the rest of us, in and around the clachan by the burn. The house had its uses, though, as a gathering and council place for him and all the chiefs who were already in Glen Roy and coming in more thickly as the days went by.

We were kept hard at it all through those days, as Claverhouse set about rough-training his growing war-host, accustoming them to stand firm in the face of
charging cavalry and the like, which is not a thing that the Highland men are used to, for it is not their way of fighting, not their way at all. But it was MacKay’s way and the Government Redcoats’ way, and so it must become their way too.

At the end of a week there were many still to come, but our scouts in Atholl country brought word that MacKay had sent to Edinburgh calling for more troops, and his reinforcements were coming up through the Atholl Forest to Inverness. So we could wait no longer, and the rest must just e’en follow on when they arrived in Glen Roy.

On the twenty-fifth day of May, Claverhouse reviewed all those that had arrived, along with ourselves and the Atholl men, on the common above the Spean. And all the yellow broom was in flower, filling the morning with its honey-and-almond scent to mingle with the smell of men and horses, and there was Claverhouse, sitting his great sorrel on the hummock that formed the highest point in that wide upland stretch, his friend Dunfermline at his side, and Philip of Amryclose holding the standard proud and high; and myself, the General’s galloper, close behind him. Caspar I had left, as I did when need be, guarding my sleeping place in the clachan below us. And before us and a wee thing lower down the braeside, the Highland war-host went by.