ENDPAPERS
Another Part of the Forest
FOR anyone over four feet in height it is not easy to walk along a single-track railway line with either grace or speed; and it is harder than it used to be, now that the sleepers are of concrete and not wood and thus induce a tendency to skid if you are wearing hobnailed shoes. The
/1 trouble is that the distance between the sleepers is roughly three-fifths of a normal stride, so that in order to maintain a good rate of progress you have to take nearly twice as many steps as you naturally would; ,and as our ragged procession festina-ed !ewe along the line its staccato, teetering gait suggested some- thing out of a very early news-reel.
After a mile and a half we left the permanent way, clambered over a wire fence, lined out and began to climb the steep green face of the 3,400- foot hill whose upper slopes were veiled in cloud. Ptarmigan, our putative quarry, are never found much below 2,000 feet and their main habitat is generally much higher. They are charming and unpredictable birds. They live in a desolate world of their own, a world in which human beings intrude rarely; there may, I sup- Pose, be ptarmigan who live out their lives (usually terminated by an eagle, a peregrine or a fox) without ever seeing a man. Occasionally— presumably because of this unworldliness—a covey will allow you to walk right up to it, the birds making little short apprehensive runs with their heads up instead of rendering themselves f n• practical purposes invisible by squatting down among the rocks; but more often they will get up, well out of shot, and go swirling out to a great arc across some abyss to settle in a flurry of white wings on a particularly inacces- sible crag.
Excelsior When the line, about twenty strong, of guns a
and ghillies struggled on to the ridge which would l d us, at a gentler gradient, to the summits ahead, the prospects were unpromising. It was Pouring with rain, half a gale was blowing from t le wrong quarter, and the cloud was so thick that unless everyone kept within five yards of his neighbour the expedition would disintegrate. We groped our way forward, with frequent halts to adjust alignment in the murk. From time to time an old grouse got up, and as we got higher a few Ptarmigan, but the wind in our backs was so strong and the mist so thick that they were mostly lost to sight before we could shoot. No one was surprised to find, after four hours' walking, that t le pony from the lodge far below us had failed to reach the lunch-time rendezvous; but nobody Was upset, either, for we had our sandwiches With us and the burden of game of which the PonY's panniers would have relieved us was too light to worry about.
Bright Interval
BY now, at last, the wind had shifted the clouds; the sun shone palely on the grey-green
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mountains which tumbled on every side as far as the horizon. Greatly cheered (for the views you get are half the point of going after ptarmi- gan), we resumed our advance. The birds were sparse and wild and difficult, but when, another three hours later, we dropped steeply down to the lodge the bag of grouse and ptarmigan worked out at almost a brace for every hour's walking, which was not a bad result for so tempestuous a day.
Half the party, after the usual back-breaking journey by Land-Rover to the infinitely forlorn little station, caught a train which would take us back to our base, two stops down the line. The train was fairly full, and eight or nine of us, with almost as many dogs, subsided gratefully on to mailbags in the guard's van. It cannot be said that we presented a gracious spectacle as we sprawled. sodden and dishevelled, in a welter of raincoats, cartridge-belts and dog-leads among the bags and the boxes and the bicycles behind their protective grille; and it was natural that through this grille our fellow-passengers, as they went to or from the restaurant car, should stare at us with a wild surmise. One faMily party made a particularly prolonged scrutiny, even lifting up a small boy so that he could get a better view.
'Don't you think that was rather rude?' one of us asked when they at length moved on 'Not a bit of it,' said someone else. 'It's part of Junior's education. He's hoisting in the grouse- moor image.'
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