'The deer! It ran away! As soon as I reached here, it bolted!' He appeared distraught at the very idea. He had an image in his head: how it should be. He knew what he wanted; the deer wasn't for taking a chance. 'They're wild animals, after all', she commented wisely. He drew her a withering look as he muttered 'you don't say' just quietly enough for her not to hear. 'What was that you just said?' 'I said "why don't you stay", I was speaking to the deer, dear.' Clearly she didn't believe him, but she wasn't in the mood for a contretemps: she just wanted to get down off this hill, out of the cold and into the nice warm car. She wasn't interested in deer, she was not having fun, and he - as usual - didn't care to notice these facts. He was too busy running about a bloody Highland moor on one of the coldest and wettest days of the year in search of a bloody red deer stag to photograph. 'What's up now?' he asked her, and without giving her a chance to answer, he informed her that 'this is the great Scottish outdoors, and it's on our doorstep. It's beautiful, a true wilderness less than 20 miles from civilisation. Tourists come from all over the world to see this, to smell this...' 'To freeze like this. To get bleeding soaked like this.' Her interruption was ignored; he continued to talk. 'This is stunning. Look at the colours. Look at the mountains. Look at the lochs. Listen to the wind blowing through the trees and the gorse. Smell the peat. Breath in the clean air. Absorb it. It's part of us, and we're part of it. Imagine Rob Roy MacGregor hiding from the authorities in these very hills. You can touch the history; it is everywhere around us. Don't you see that. Don't you sense the history and the wildlife and the landscape and all that this is, and how beautiful it all is? Can't you see how fortunate we are to have been born here and to be part of all of this?' His words did little to appease her or relieve her suffering: 'Yes, I agree with all that you say. I love this place as much as you do; as much as anyone does. But, this hill was here yesterday; it was here last month, last year, last century; it will still be here in the spring when the weather is warmer and before the gorse and ferns get too high or the midges come to life. Rob Roy may have run about these hills in all weathers stealing the Duke's sheep and hiding from the law: but he had no choice. We have a choice. We have a nice warm car, and there is a nice warm pub down in the village. I can appreciate the landscape and its history, but I'd rather do it in front of a roaring fire with a glass of Macallan in my hand.' At last he could empathise with her: put that way, a glass of Macallan and an open fire suddenly sounded more appealling than a frozen hilltop without any deer.