Genre:

Essay, Travelogue

Subjects:

Hunting, Natural History, Darwinism, Language, War

    After shooting a cormorant while on a hunting trip in the remote Outer Hebrides, the narrator finds its 'crop gorged with the herring fry' and reflects how 'in that stern and lonely region every living thing within ken, from man himself downward, seemed absorbed in the pursuit and destruction of weaker creatures'. The 'laird' then tells him that while hunting sea-otters in the Borders is merely 'a chase', 'here it is a battle', and this martial language ('battle raged', 'canine auxiliaries', 'execution', 'conflict', 'victory') continues in the narrator's description of the brutal hunt that follows. (909)