In Chapter 2 Duror says that he wishes he was Calum with a hunched-back and a “hellishly beautiful face and idiots mind”. He feels that if he “could cleanse the wood of his defiling presence” he would be alright and could see that no one lesser than him could be happier than him. I feel that Duror’s hate for the cone gatherers deepens and becomes more complicated. I think that Duror feels that since the cone gatherers are inferior to him they should not be happy if he cannot. Although he isn’t their boss, he wants to feel power over them.
To try and satisfy his craving for power and jealousy, he spreads rumors about the cone gatherers, and in particular, Calum. Before he spoke to Effie Morton about what he had supposedly seen, his conscience comes in to play and he wonders whether he should spread these vicious rumors. In the end he goes ahead with it and tells Effie, Lady Runcie-Campbell’s cook, that Calum is a pervert who exposes himself in the forest. An example of this is in Chapter 4 when the author says “now when he was going to lie again, this time knowing it would implicate evil, he felt that he was about to commit before her eyes an obscene gesture, such as he had falsely accused the dwarf of making.” Before he tells Lady Runcie-Campbell of this alledged sighting, they talk abut the forthcoming deer drive. Duror suggests to her that the cone gatherers should be used as beaters. She rang the cone gatherers boss, Mr Tulloch and asked if they could be spared and he asked if it was necessary since Calum was sensitive about issues such as hunting and Duror told her to say that they were necessary.
In Chapter 5, Duror took great pleasure in informing the cone gatherers that they were to be used as beaters in the drive. Neil was annoyed at this and told Duror that he was making them do things they didn’t particularly want to do. Neil knew that Calum was never asked to take part in the drives because of his sensibilities and accused Duror of deceiving them.
That afternoon the drive was a disaster. Captain Forgan, Lady Runcie-Campbell’s brother, shot a deer and Calum went running towards it to comfort it. Duror found this amusing and ran over to the pair with a knife in his hand. He threw Calum off the deer and slit the throat of the deer. He was covered in the animals blood which caused the others to think that Duror had hurt himself but when they discovered that he hadn’t, they began to think that the savageness of this attack was due to a mental disturbance of some sort. Duror had collapsed when he had killed the deer and the sight of blood was so common in his job that this couldn’t be the reason for his collapse.
In chapter 14 everyone realises that what Duror has been saying about Calum is just viscous slander and untrue. Calum is too simple to understand what they are meaning. The final chapter tells of Durors eventual insanity. Lady Runcie-Campbell’s son, Roderick gets stuck up a tree and the cone gatherers will only help him if Lady Runcie-Campbell comes down and asks them herself. When she heard this she did as they said and when she arrived she saw Calum’s dead body, with a smile on his face, hanging from one of the trees. The next thing she heard was a gunshot and she turned round to see that Duror had shot himself. I think that Duror had killed Calum because he was irritated that they had asked Lady Runcie-Campbell to request their help herself. Then when he had realised what he had done he knew that he couldn’t live with himself so he committed suicide. He had disrupted Neil’s life by killing his brother, who he loved and had more than disrupted Calum;s life – he had ended it.
