THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY
(mea culpa I’m afraid), followed by the first success of the day. I use that word in a qualified sense because after Chris and I had crawled, often on our bellies, for at least a quarter of a mile through bog and streams (‘there’ll be none of that easy West Coast point-and-shoot stuff here,’ he said with masochistic pride), I finally took two shots to dispatch a stag which Chris said had been unsuccessfully stalked four times in the previous week. Even then it almost got away, charging over the skyline, only for Chris to later find it just yards away. If I ever need to find the spot again, it should be easy: we were at the highest point on the estate, where the Rivers Dee, Spey and Tay all start together. While Chris waited for the stag pony to arrive,
Above: A quick getaway: yet another grouse lives to fly another day. Top right: Head stalker Chris Murphy looks for the stags that we can hear roaring. Bottom right: At last: Ellie returns with some feathered booty.
I headed off across the moor with assistant stalker Dan Ewart. If our stag had been deter- mined to die hard, then so were the grouse. I’ve never been adept at shooting high birds but low and fast has always been my forte: not this time. Maybe it was because I was drained from the stalk, maybe I’m going blind, maybe my hands were just too frozen, but after downing a bird in the first covey that reared up in front of us, I couldn’t hit a thing. Chris and I had joked earlier about how many cartridges I’d need: I reck- oned a maximum of four; he told me that his hard-won experience of past Macnab attempts suggested I should fill my pockets. He was right, and then some. Over the next
two hours my gun banged more often than a privvy door in the plague, all to no avail. I didn’t use the dozen cartridges I’d stuck in my pockets at Chris’s urging, but I may have got into double figures: I don’t know, I was too embarrassed to count. The birds weren’t that easy, but then they weren’t that tough either:
this wasn’t glorious failure, just failure. Finally, with the light beginning to fade, my feet aching like billy-ho, and the Editorial grumpiness meter threatening to whizz past the red zone and go straight to volcanic, we called it a day. And what a day it was. I may have only
completed half of my Macnab, I may have split my breeks and I may never want to get up close and personal with a peat hag ever again, but there’s something deeply reaffirming about the experience, even if it just the certain knowledge that my failure means I get to try again. It was also a useful reminder that life is
often even more vivid and vibrant than fiction. Buchan’s pesky trio may have had more success than I did, and may have etched themselves into history, but I refuse to believe they can have felt more fulfilled or more enervated by their jaunt on the hill and river than I did at Mar Lodge.
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