An uglier and more perilous brood of spirits were the _Urisks_ who haunted the misty mountains, with Ben Venue for their Brocken. Then every lake had its malignant _kelpie_, that in the Highlands usually takes the form of a water-bull, or horse, to be avoided like any loathly dragon. I have mentioned such a monster on the Tay; and Loch Vennachar has its own legend of the same kind, how on its banks a horse appeared among a band of children, so pretty, and to all seeming so gentle, that one of them ventured to mount it, then another and another, the creature drawing out its back like a telescope till the whole laughing party were astride, when it plunged into the water, carrying down all but the one who, in such stories, is bound to escape for telling the tale.
I fancy that kelpies, banshees, brownies, and the like uncanny creatures are not so well-known in Perthshire to-day as in the Western Highlands; but here, too, old folks, rather than young ones, may go warily by certain spots after dark. In the middle of last century a young lad whom a German tourist took as guide from Callander was able to cheer the way by eerie stories, one of a whisky smuggler accepting the invitation of an unearthly spirit to dance with her for an hour or so, as it seemed, then on reaching home he found his wife turned grey and his young children grown up. Even yet, upon the Highland line, you may find the Scottish character not all one grey shepherd’s plaid of stern theology and hard-headed shrewdness.
Ben Ledi, “the sacred mount,” was an ancient scene of pagan rites such as those which Roderick Dhu’s weird chaplain mingled with the ordinances of Christianity. I shall never forget a day I spent at its foot, that black Twelfth of August, through which a prolonged thunderstorm raged over Scotland, striking down members of more than one shooting party, on moors overcast by so awful darkness that Benjamin Franklin himself might have heard the voice of offended mountain spirits. Has the reader ever come in for a thunderstorm in the Highlands? Here is the late Mr. A. I. Shand’s account of such an experience as often gives a certain zest of danger to a sportsman’s beat.
You hear the muttering growl of distant thunder; you see the storm-clouds gathering ominously over the lowering head of the Boar of Badenoch or the Sow of Athol: the storm bursts, the rain comes down in torrents, and, before you have been well soaked to the skin, each stream and tiny burn is in foaming spate. Many a torrent has to be breasted waist-deep, or maybe shoulder-high, before you get into dry garments at the shooting-lodge. Still more perilous it is if you are belated and without a knowledgeable guide in the mist that envelops you in its fleecy folds, either thickening insensibly into palpable darkness, or coming down in a rush with appalling suddenness. Coming with a rush, I say, and I speak by book. I remember one bright afternoon, below the Tap o’ Noth, on an Aberdeenshire moor, and when walking up to a point, we had little time to look up at the phenomenon of a sudden sun-eclipse. What we did see was a dense wall of vapour descending on the dogs, who were drawing on a point, some twenty yards ahead. It was a race against time. I got forward to score a right and left. One of the birds we did pick up, the other was lost beyond groping for in a darkness that might be felt. Of course experiences like these are comparatively rare and I do not pretend there is real danger on the moors; I only say there is an inspiring suspicion of it. There is undeniable romance, more enjoyable in the recollection than in the reality, when you feel you are abroad as to the points of the compass; when you are “turned round,” like the lost sportsman on the American prairies; when the whistle of the curlew, the crow of the grouse, the bellowing of the amorous harts in the rutting season, sound strangely uncanny out of the watery cloud. You can understand how the fervid imagination of the Celt, nursed on superstitions in a savage solitude, peopled the gloomy wilderness with brownies and spectres, and heard the wings and weird shrieks of witches in the air, when the skein of wild geese was flying inland.