Their focus was on the deer, and I knew that they had not seen me in my elevated position. I altered the angle of my line of fire, and lowered my head to bring George fully into my sights. I held him there for several long moments, remembering how he had humiliated me in front of Ciorstaidh, my finger dangerously close to lifting the trigger and releasing the bolt that would take his life, just as my father’s had been taken by someone in his father’s employ. But every fibre of my being fought against it, and in the end I removed the bolt and released the tension from the crossbow.
I rolled out of sight to lie on my back, staring up at the pewter sky, and cursed my luck. Another few seconds and I’d have loosed my shot and the beast would be lying dead in the valley. But then the hunting party would almost certainly have stumbled upon me as I went down to perform the gralloch. So perhaps Lady Luck had favoured me after all.
A single shot rang out in the cold and wet of the late morning and I rolled over and crawled back to my vantage point. One of the hunters had shot the single stag in the group, and in that moment I realised that they were not shooting for food. They were after the trophy. A set of antlers.
But whoever had fired was a poor shot. The beast had been hit high up and towards his back end. He had fallen as the other deer scattered, but was thrashing now and struggling to get back to his feet. Head and front legs first, like a horse. A second shot missed altogether, and the animal was off and running, weaving and distressed, hunched over and clearly in pain. Up the slope and away through the heather. A third shot was fired, and in the time it took the first shooter to reload his flintlock the stag was out of sight.
All caution dispensed with, they were up and after him, running through the peat bog, splashing through the soft, wet ground. One of them fell, and picked himself up dripping with peaty brown water.
I watched them as they went up and over the rise, George and the stalker well ahead of the others. But there they stopped, surveying the wilderness that lay ahead. A deep valley strewn with boulders, the hills rising steep on both sides. The valley floor was strength-sapping marsh, and the primal landscape beyond was quickly lost in the smirr that drifted through the hills.
From where I lay I could not see what they saw, but it was clear to me that they had lost sight of the stag. The stragglers caught them up on the rise, and there was a short and heated debate before they turned reluctantly and headed back the way they had come.
I could scarcely believe it. My father would have tracked a wounded animal to the ends of the earth to deliver it from pain. And it was clear to me that the poor beast was in agony as he stumbled off into the next valley.
I waited until they had gone back down the glen before breaking cover, then ran down the slope to the place the stag had fallen. The peat bog was churned up where his hooves had fought for grip to get him back on his feet. There was blood in the grass. Dark red, almost black. My heart went out to him. If he had to die, then the least he deserved was a quick dispatch. Only to wound him, then leave him to die in wretched torment, was unforgivable.
I knew what I must do, and set off at a trot in pursuit of him.
Beyond the rise, I picked up his spoor. Although there was a good deal of blood at first, it gradually became less apparent, the wound coagulating, and I was hard pushed to spot any at all. But I knew that the animal would be bleeding inside, and the thought drove me on through the mist and rain, stumbling now, weakened by my hunger and the cold. I looked for broken heather roots and hoofprints in the peat marsh, dropping down to a desperately slow pace, knowing that every wasted moment meant more pain.
After a time I began to despair, not even certain that the water-filled hoofprints I saw were his.
I was close to giving up when I saw him. He had fallen down in a hollow by a small loch. I could hear his distress in the shallow bark of his breathing. I knew that the loss of blood would have starved him of oxygen. He would be dizzy and weak, and in considerable pain if the bullet had clipped the liver.
But I also knew that if he saw me coming he would panic and try to get back on his feet. And if I got too close, those antlers could be lethal. I dropped to one knee and stayed stock-still. He hadn’t seen me, and I was still downwind.
Very slowly I approached him from the rear. One soft, careful step at a time I gained on him, until I saw the steam rising from his coat, and his stertorous breathing filled my ears. I laid down my crossbow and quiver and took out my father’s long hunting knife. I would have to be quick and accurate.
Close enough now to smell him, I was on him in a single move, my knee pushed hard into the back of his neck, pulling his antlers towards me with my left hand. I reached around under his chin with my knife to draw the blade across his throat, severing both the jugular vein and the carotid artery. What little life there was left in his heart pumped the last of his blood out on to the grass.
I slid off him, to lie in the hollow by his head and watch his big doe eyes cloud over, just as my father’s had done. He looked at me now, his life draining away, his pain dying with him. And all I could feel was guilt at the length of time it had taken me to find him.
When he was gone I got to my knees and rolled him on to his back. I grasped the skin of the scrotum and pulled it away from his body to cut it off, and remembered what my father always said when he performed this first, ritual act of the gralloch. You’ll no be needin’ these nae mair. And I ached again at his loss, and the loss too of this fine animal. I was sick of death.
But I forced myself to concentrate now, remembering how my father did this. It was vital, he always said, that the guts be removed intact. Any spillage would contaminate the meat.
I made a small incision and inserted two fingers, palm up, to stop the blade of my knife from catching the intestines, and slid it up towards the base of the sternum, opening up the abdominal wall. And so the gralloch began.
I worked in concentrated silence, with only the sound of my own breathing for company. It was hard, stomach-churning work, and I tried not to think too much about how this had once been a proud, sentient creature.
The fat of the deer was thick and soft when still warm, but it solidified in the cold. It covered my hands and forearms, gore from the cavity congealing in it so that it seemed as if I wore bright red gloves. I grabbed handfuls of sphagnum to try to clean it off, but it was an almost impossible task.
Finally the organs and intestines of the beast lay steaming in the grass and I rested for a while on my knees, leaning forward with my elbows planted in the peat, my forehead buried in the grass. I wanted to weep. But there was no time for self-pity. And just as I had seen my father do before me, I used mosses to wipe out the cavity, and rolled the creature over on to its back. I removed the coil of rope from my shoulder and tied it around the antlers, and along the top of the nose to loop around the jaws, hoping this would keep the head straight and stop the antlers catching on every rock and heather root as I dragged it.
But I had not anticipated just how weak I was. Even with all its insides removed, the beast was unimaginably heavy. I looped the rope around my chest beneath my armpits so that I could lean my whole body weight forward to pull it over the uneven ground, but I managed no more than two hundred yards before falling to my knees, physically and mentally spent. There was no way I could get the beast home.
Tears flowed then, and I gave full vent to my frustration and despair, knowing that both God and my father would be witness to my failure. My anguish echoed around the glen in the rain.
Ten minutes or more must have passed before I started to think what would my father have done. He would never have accepted defeat. Whatever the problem, he used to say, there was always an answer. And when the answer came to me it was simple. If I couldn’t take the whole animal, then I would take a part of it.