'I remember reading something about an earlier incident in the newspapers,' said Faro encouragingly. 'A young fellow staying at the castle, was it not?'
The doctor nodded. 'An actor. Philip Gray, you may have seen him on the stage in Edinburgh. I only heard his Shakespearean monologues one evening at the Castle. But I was most impressed.'
'You attended him when he was injured?'
'I examined his body, if that's what you mean,' said the doctor grimly. 'Death by misadventure. His horse had thrown him, he had a fractured skull. Of course, he had no right to be in the grazing pastures at all. Guests are always warned that the cattle are dangerous.'
'But he had ignored the warning?'
The doctor sighed. 'I understood that the, er, guest he was out riding with had dared him to venture out and bring back the horns from a beast the shooting party had wounded earlier that week.'
'Not a very sensible thing to do from all accounts,' Faro volunteered.
'As he soon found out,' said the doctor grimly. 'You know what these young fellows are like, must prove themselves. Sense of honour and all that nonsense. The beast wasn't too badly wounded to charge him and gore him to death.' He shook his head. 'It's this damned archaic system to blame. Sportsmen they call themselves. Rounding up the beasts and choosing their target. All of them having a go at it with their arrows first. Shouldn't be allowed. One man, one bullet - that's the humane way.'
He paused and sighed. 'The poor lad made it to the copse over there, same place they found Elrigg.'
'An odd coincidence?'
Dr Brand ignored his interruption. 'Elrigg might have survived: he had severe but not fatal neck and head injuries sustained in the fall and was probably unconscious.'
He paused like a man who had a lot more to say on that subject but had remembered in time that his passenger was a stranger. He shrugged. 'Perhaps he never regained consciousness when the cow got him. One can only hope so, anyway.'
'Cow? I thought only the bulls were dangerous.'
The doctor smiled. 'The cow is just as dangerous if she has just dropped a calf. This is the time of year and they often choose a sheltered place, away from the herd. Like the copse. There'd been a stalking party out from the castle the day before the accident, it was deer and birds they were interested in but that would make a cow very nervous.
'That's my theory, anyway. These animals have their own laws, far older and wiser than man's. I was brought up on a farm. We were used to taking in newborn orphaned animals and raising them by hand. Tried it once when I first came here. Found this newborn calf, abandoned or orphaned, I thought. It was getting dark, a freezing cold night, so I wrapped it in a blanket hoping to keep it alive till next day when I'd see if its mother had come back for it.'
He paused and sighed deeply. 'I was young and idealistic then, couldn't bear the thought of an animal suffering. I soon learned my lesson,' he added harshly.
'Did she charge you too?'
'No. But when I went back the next day to see how the wee creature was,' he shuddered, 'there was nothing left of it but a few bones and bits of skin. But the hoofmarks were visible where it had lain. Looked as if there had been a stampede and it had been trampled into the earth. Their sense of smell is acute and if a calf is handled by a human the other animals detect the smell and kill it.'
'But surely -'
'I know what you're going to say, but you're quite wrong. I had made the crucial mistake of humans interfering with wild creatures. I had mismanaged my rescue attempt and turned the calf into an alien from the herd. They had their own ways of dealing with that,' he added grimly.
'Make no mistake about these animals. They are quite unique, they have a society evolved though hundreds - perhaps thousands of years. The herd is under complete control of one beast. Only the fittest and the strongest in the herd ever becomes king bull. And during the two or three years until he is successfully challenged and defeated in combat by a younger rival, he reigns supreme and sires all the calves that are born.'
As he talked, he let the reins go slack and the horse, finding this an agreeable change of pace, ambled slowly along.
'I've been fascinated by their behaviour for years. I've watched them, through a telescope - from my house over there,' he added pointing to the east of the village. 'Once I saw a young bull come out of the herd, it was the bellowing that drew me. I saw him pawing the ground, the old bull doing likewise. They charged - and this time it was a fight to the death.'
'You say they've been here for thousands of years - where did they come from?'
'No one can answer that. Bones which might belong to them have been found in the hillfort, so they provided meat for prehistoric man. At one time they were thought to be related to the Highland cattle, a sort of albino relative. But that has been disproved.'
'How have they managed to survive without inbreeding with other domestic cattle?'
'Because they've never been domestic. It's possible that being white they were regarded as sacred - kept for some ancient religious ritual. They've never been known to throw a coloured or even partly coloured calf. As for their survival, who knows? It is against all the odds since the cows are poor breeders, suckle their calves for long periods. Nature's way of preventing the herd increasing rapidly.'
'I'm surprised that they survived the moss troopers and the Border reivers. I understood
