“You can if you like, but he only bought Tummie after the war. I should call him ‘Colonel’ if I were you.”

Chester Royde sighed his relief as he threw a leg across the hill pony that was to bear him to the grouse-teeming moor of Drumcockie.

Alas, for the high hopes of Ben Nevis! His dearest moor failed him. There were some birds. There could not fail to be some birds on Drumcockie. But compared with the number of birds there ought to have been the few that whirred toward the butts and death were nothing.

“What the devil are the beaters playing at, Duncan?” he demanded wrathfully, his eagle’s beak darkening to the tint of an Anglican prelate’s evening apron.

Big Duncan Macdonald, who looked like a major prophet in tweeds, shook his head.

“I’m thinking it’s some of these hikers, Ben Nevis.”

“You think it’s what?” the chieftain gasped.

“Hikers.”

“Hikers? Hikers on Drumcockie?”

“They’re after frightening every bird in the neighbourhood,” he declared, with a muttered imprecation in Gaelic.

“You’re not seriously telling me, Duncan, that some of these abominable hikers have dared to defile Drumcockie on the Twelfth of August?”

“There were a party of sixteen of them camping in Strathdiddle last night.”

“In defiance of these notice-boards I’ve just had freshly painted?”

“My grandson Willie says they were camping right round the notice-board on the north bank of the loch.”

Mac ’ic Eachainn glared across Drumcockie Moor away to where the fair expanse of Loch Hoo crowned the head of Strathdiddle with gleaming silver.

“Why wasn’t I told of this outrage before, Duncan?”

“Because I was not so anxious to spoil your eye, Ben Nevis. You should not have hit a bird this morning if you were after hearing about those hikers in Strathdiddle. I was hoping no harm would have been done, but there you are. While we were shooting Clacknaclock these hikers were at their devilment on Drumcockie.”

“Duncan,” his chief asked, “how long have you been in my service?”

“Thirty-two years last June, Ben Nevis.”

“In the whole of that time have you ever known me go back on my word?”

“No, I don’t believe you ever went back on your word, Ben Nevis.”

“Then when I tell you that whatever it costs me I am determined to rid my land of hikers you know I mean what I say.”

“You said the very same thing about rabbits, Ben Nevis, three years back,” his old henchman reminded him.

“Hikers don’t breed like rabbits.”

“But you cannot trap hikers, Ben Nevis.”