Page:The power of the dog.djvu/85

 used to traverse the country from one sheep farm to another, and days were organised for attacks upon special cairns in which foxes were known to be. The fox hunter himself kept a strong, varmint breed of terrier, and the shepherds and keepers on each estate did the same, so that when an onslaught was organised upon Reynard the stiffest and hardest duty fell to the terriers, for they were expected to go into the cairns and tackle the inmates single handed, deep in the bowels of the rocks, where no man, and indeed no other dog, could enter because of the narrowness of the passages. The terrier generally selected for this stern conflict was not the white one, who was regarded as weaker than his brethren with more colour in their coats---though we think that in this his breeders did him an injustice." In those days sandy and brindled dogs were looked upon as the hardier, but one or two families in the Isle of Skye made a habit of preserving the white or sandy and destroying the brindles. Among these were the Macleods, Lairds of Drynoch. As a daughter of Norman Macleod, born in 1800, was wont to declare that her father and grandfather kept terriers of this colour, we are taken back into the early part of the Eighteenth century. This seems conclusive, but so much conflicting evidence has been brought forward during the last two or three years that it is difficult to unravel the truth from amid the tangled threads of controversy. Probably most of the modern dogs are largely indebted to terriers