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"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

— Maxwell Scott, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

CULLODEN BATTLEFIELD, Scotland — Here's the premise: A Scottish prince with an eye on the crown led a rebellion deep into England in 1745, suffered some dissention in his ranks and retreated to this open, wind-swept patch of grass for what turned out to be the last pitched battle in Britain. It was the last, because when his hardscrabble army of kilted highlanders blitzed the government lines on foot, the Redcoat musketry stood fast and salted them with lead. The English then killed survivors, raided villages in search of rebels and later built a picket fence in London with the defeated soldiers' swords.

And the leader of the insurrection, Charles Edward Stuart — Bonnie Prince Charlie, to history — had a price on his head surpassing, in the exchange rate of the time, what Osama bin Laden presently has on his. So he fled.

That flight north to the Isle of Skye has become the stuff of Scottish lore, the way Yanks recall Paul Revere's ride. The prince with the audacity to storm towards London became a fugitive, ambling his way across his native land with a king's ransom awaiting anyone willing to betray him.

The liqueur Drambuie traces its origins to the prince's journey of survival, as the drink is whiskey blended with spices the Prince's apothecary is said to have devised. Did Charles really offer the recipe to clan leaders who harbored him on his way to exile in France? Who knows.

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It's a great yarn, and it's why Bacardi, which distributes Drambuie, brought a gaggle of amateur American athletes to an old battlefield in Scotland — the launch point for a 10-stage adventure race it calls the Drambuie Pursuit. Ten American teams of four began it on this evening in late April, but first, they had to look at the swaying, knee-high grass and imagine bleeding out in this field.

In describing the patchwork rebellion, a tour guide asked whether there was anyone of Irish descent in the group. A couple of hands went up. "It was you, I'm afraid, who couldn't keep up with the Highlanders," she said.

The group laughs, and someone muttered, "We'll see about that tomorrow."

Slings and arrows

Scott Logan — who now works for Current TV in California, but is a native Scot — likes the Bonnie Prince Charlie story, but for one fact: "It's about us getting our asses kicked."

He said this in a Manhattan bar a couple of hours before the teams fly to Glasgow from Newark, N.J. No one openly acknowledged it at the time, but it was the beginning of competition. The rest of Logan's team consisted of three men who jump out of airplanes to fight forest fires for a living; the smart money seemed to be on them and on a couple of other squads. But it would require fortitude to withstand the rigors of travel and then succeed in an archery contest, a speedboat race, a sprint, an uphill bike race, an uphill footrace, a downhill footrace, a white water rafting race, a dune buggy race, a canoe race and then yet another footrace.

Still, this was part athletic event, part reality TV show and all party. Some of the guys from an Ohio team called the Four Princes decided the group of strangers was too uptight and smuggled a couple bottles of Drambuie onto the bus to pass around on the way to the airport. Thus began a series of events that dulled some teams' competitive advantage. At least one of the competitors spent most of her time at the airport hurling into various stalls; one, actor Charlie O'Connell, arrived in Scotland to learn that his luggage had been forwarded instead to Alberta; and a late night in Edinburgh of free drinks and haggis rolls and dancing to a ska band called Big Hand in a dive bar called Whistle Binkies surely didn't exactly fortify some of the more intemperate teams, though watching Portland, Ore., competitor Mason Davis bounce on the dance floor, was to see the manic bright side of jetlag.

The next day, it was to the battlefield, then through the Highlands, passing castles and impossibly long puddles such as Loch Ness, that fill great seams along faultlines. The teams arrived at a castle called Eilean Donan, which counts its history back nearly 1,500 years, to learn they in fact would not be camping that night, as planned, because rain and 50 mph winds the previous day had shredded the camp site. They were given tutorials on safety, then handed bows and arrows to fire at targets as the sun sank over the ocean. A Texan named Phil Lewis scored 76 of a possible 80 points, but the Current TV team edged the field to take the early advantage.

"Bad weather wiping out Sunday," Logan announced. "The competition's over, we win. Let's go drinking."

A Day of No Rest

No such luck for Logan. The next morning — clear, cool and ideal — the competitors lined the banks at the Kyle of Localsh, all in drysuits and bright orange helmets. They were to race to the waiting inflatable Zapcat speedboats and ride around a course marked with buoys; one boat driver describe the competitors' role as that of "dynamic ballast."

"I couldn't sleep," said Mequel DeVaughn, of Dublin, Ohio. "I kept playing scenes from 'Braveheart' in my head. It's messed up, man."

Said Davis, the dancer: "I'm so jacked." He woke up by throwing himself out of bed and doing pushups.

At a signal, the competitors waddle-waded to the boats, threw themselves in, and tried to become helpful cargo. Round and round they spun, swapping leads until finally pulling one by one back to the shore, for the final rider to tag a teammate for a sprint. In a pack they dashed down the stony beach, through a public square, and then out of sight behind Saucy Mary's Lodge.

That led to a backstreet footrace, then to an uphill bicycle chase and to the foot of the centerpiece of the Pursuit: Boch Baeg, and a calf-burning clamber up a muddy, loamy hillside that sank underfoot with each step, hugging a runner's shoes as would a mattress. This led past streams and over a fence and up and up and along rocks and up and finally to the top of a mound that overlooked sky and mountain and water and ... a line of tenacious ants that eventually turned into people.

"Just straight uphill," said Adam Goldstein, of Atlanta, the first runner to summit. "I should have brought my soccer cleats."

As Goldstein waited for the rest of his Men's Journal-sponsored team, the Current TV smokejumpers — Alex Abols, Brian Cresto and Steve Stroud — became the first team to clock in together. Abols arrived first, and screamed to his teammates: "Come hard with every breath!" A helicopter thub-thub-thubbed overhead, offering vantage to a videographer.

Gradually each team scaled the 700-or-so-foot vertical rise, though bringing up the rear was DeVaughn, who had aggravated an old hamstring injury and had to be partially lugged up the hill by his teammates and the actor Jerry O'Connell, who had biked but decided to run the hill for fun with the rest of his team.

Nearly unnoticed in a ravine near the summit was the shaggy, rotting carcass of a red stag. Somehow it seemed a reminder the stakes for most of what inhabits the hills.

One of the track officials, Duncan Cleary, hearing of the deer, guessed that it was the remains of an animal that had been there months earlier. Seeing pictures, he revised himself.

"It's got skin, still," he said. "Must be a new one."

And it had quite the handsome pair of antlers, free to anyone enterprising enough to claim it.

"I don't know what the law is," he said. "I do know that if you hit one while driving, you can't eat it. But if you're the car driving behind the car that hits it, you can."

That would seem to eliminate some of the incentive to aim for a deer.

"Aye," he agreed. "But you could get people driving around in twos."

Sprint to the Finish

After their performance on the mountain, it would have taken a serous stumble in the final stages for anyone to catch up to the Current TV foursome. They managed to negotiate the mountainbike trek through the forest, and the white water rapids, and the canoeing stages without calamity. Their points gave them a head-start on the final sprint through the northern city of Inverness — and all that remained was for them to lug a small crate containing a bottle of liqueur to the finish.

They finished as a group, Abols carrying the box, his fellow smokejumpers a couple of paces back, and Logan, grimacing as if he'd swallowed hemlock, running with his hands on his hips. They crossed the finish line almost in a group hug. Gradually the other teams followed, none surprised that the toughest guys in the field and the Scotsman had pulled it off.

They received medals, posed for photos and returned to their hotel, where they ordered celebratory pints of Guinness at the bar, and after they sat, were asked whether they felt any deeper connection to a certain long-dead criminal prince.

"There were some flashbacks that I had," Abols said. "The mountain bike, for instance. I kind of felt like I was on a horse, and trees were just whizzing by. Helicopters buzzing are over you, and people are chasing you, and know you've just got to keep going, and you don't want to look at what's behind you." Then he seemed to catch himself describing his overactive imagination. "It's kind of stupid," he added. "But it puts you there."

"That's not a flashback, dude," Cresto chided. "It's called mud in your eyeball."

Click here to meet the teams and competitors