Ben Nevis charged ahead of the others, and five of the hikers dived for their cameras to get snapshots of this magnificent specimen of the native fauna striding through the heather in the sun’s eye. One young woman with smoked glasses and very short green corduroy shorts whose fat flaming thighs looked as if they were melting at the knees held up her hand when the Chieftain was almost on top of the party and asked him to stand still for a moment while she altered the focus of her Kodak.

“Who is in command of this party?” Ben Nevis bellowed.

The hikers looked at one another. The spirit of comradeship which had animated them ever since they had got out of the train from London at Perth and hiked their way to the bonny banks of Loch Hoo had made a leader superfluous.

“Who is in command of this party?” Ben Nevis bellowed again.

The loudness of his voice had by now convincd the hikers that the first specimen of the native fauna they had seen between Perth and Inverness was angry about something. They turned to the only member of the party over twenty-four. This was a dark desiccated little man of anything between forty and fifty with legs as thin and hairy as a spider’s and the eyes of a kindly old maid, the sort of eyes one so often sees in confirmed scoutmasters.

“I am the Secretary of the N.U.H., sir,” he told Ben Nevis in a prim voice. “Were you wanting information about anything?”

“I don’t know what the N.U.H. is, but you must be aware that you are …”

“Excuse me, sir, the initials N.U.H. stand for National Union of Hikers. We are now a very large organization with branches in every one of our great cities. My name is Prew, Sydney Prew. I’m afraid I haven’t a card with me. One disembarrasses oneself of such urban paraphernalia, does one not, when one takes to the open road?”

The combination of some peculiarly irritating quality in the timbre of Mr Prew’s spinsterish voice, of the sight of his own armed forces closing in upon the hikers and a dozen beaters advancing upon them from the rear, and of the recollection of his ruined Twelfth of August was too much for Donald MacDonald, the Twenty-third of Ben Nevis. He was suddenly seized with an access of rage that must have been similar to the convulsion which had seized his ancestor Hector of the Great Jaw when in the year 1482 he speared eleven Macintoshes beside Loch na Craosnaich and drowned them in it one after another. Grasping the secretary of the N.U.H. by the collar of his khaki shirt, he shook him as a conscientious housemaid shakes a mat.