Sketches from a Hunter's Album (5 page)

In the springtime, a quarter of an hour before sundown, you go into a wood with your gun but without your dog. You seek out a place for yourself somewhere close by a thicket, look around you, inspect the firing mechanism on your gun and exchange winks with your companion. A quarter of an hour passes. The sun sinks below the horizon, but it is still light in the wood; the air is fresh and translucent; there is the spirited chatter of birds; the young grass glows with a happy emerald brilliance. You wait. The interior of the wood gradually darkens; the crimson rays of an evening sunset slowly slide across the roots and trunks of the trees, rise higher and higher, moving from the lower, still almost bare, branches to the motionless tips of the sleep-enfolded trees. Then the very tips grow faint; the pink sky becomes a dark blue. The woodland scent increases, accompanied by slight wafts of a warm dampness; the breeze that has flown into the wood around you begins to die down. The birds fall asleep – not all at once, but by types: first the finches fall silent, a few instants later the robins, after them the yellow buntings. The wood grows darker and darker. The trees fuse into large blackening masses; the first small stars emerge diffidently in the blue sky. The birds are all asleep. Only the redstarts and little woodpeckers continue to make an occasional sleepy whistling… Then they are quiet as well. Once again the ringing voice of the chiff-chaff resounds overhead; somewhere or other an oriole gives a sad cry and a nightingale offers the first trills of its song. Your heart is heavy with anticipation, and suddenly – but only hunters will know what I mean – suddenly the deep quiet is broken by a special kind of croaking and hissing, there
is a measured beat of rapidly flapping wings – and a woodcock, beautifully inclining its long beak, flies out from behind a dark birch into your line of fire.

That is what is meant by ‘standing in cover'.

In such a fashion, Yermolay and I set off for ‘cover'; but forgive me, gentlemen: I must first of all acquaint you with Yermolay.

Imagine to yourself a man of about forty-five, tall and lean, with a long delicate nose, a narrow forehead, little grey eyes, dishevelled hair and wide, scornful lips. This man used to go about winter and summer in a yellowish nankeen coat of German cut, but belted with a sash; he wore wide blue trousers and a cap edged with astrakhan which had been given him, on a jovial occasion, by a bankrupt landowner. Two bags were fixed to the sash, one in front, which had been artfully twisted into two halves for powder and bird-shot, and the other behind – for game; his cotton wadding Yermolay used to extract from his own, seemingly inexhaustible cap. With the money earned by him from selling his game he could easily have purchased a cartridge belt and pouch, but the thought of making such a purchase never even so much as entered his head, and he continued to load his gun in his customary fashion, arousing astonishment in onlookers by the skill with which he avoided the danger of overpouring or mixing the shot and the powder. His gun had a single barrel, with a flintlock, endowed, moreover, with the awful habit of ‘kicking' brutally, as a result of which Yermolay's right cheek was always more swollen than his left. How he managed to hit anything with this gun even a wiseacre might be at a loss to explain, but hit he did.

He also had a setter, a most remarkable creature named Valetka. Yermolay never fed him. ‘Likely I'd start feeding a dog,' he would argue, ‘since a dog's a clever animal and'll find his food on his own.' And so it was, in fact: although Valetka astonished even indifferent passers-by with his unusual thinness, he lived and lived a long time; despite his miserable condition, he never even once got lost and displayed no desire to abandon his master. Once, when he was young, he disappeared for a day or two, carried away by love; but that foolishness soon took leave of him. Valetka's most remarkable characteristic was an incomprehensible indifference to everything under the sun. If I had not been talking about a dog, I would have used the word ‘disillusionment'. He usually sat with his short tail
tucked underneath him, frowning, shuddering from time to time and never smiling. (It is well known that dogs are capable of smiling, and even of smiling very charmingly.) He was extremely ugly, and there was not a single idle house-serf who let pass an opportunity of laughing venomously at his appearance; but Valetka endured all these taunts, and even blows, with astonishing composure. He provided particular satisfaction for cooks, who immediately dropped whatever they were doing and dashed after him with shouts and swearing whenever through a weakness common not only to dogs, he used to stick his famished muzzle through the half-open door of the enticingly warm and sweet-smelling kitchen. Out hunting, he distinguished himself by his tirelessness and possessed a good scent; but if he happened to catch up with a wounded hare, he at once gobbled the whole lot down with pleasure, right to the last little bone, in some cool, shady place under a leafy bush and at a respectful distance from Yermolay who swore at him in any and every dialect, known and unknown.

Yermolay belonged to one of my neighbours, a landowner of the old school. Landowners of the old school dislike ‘wildfowl' and stick to domestic poultry. It is only on unusual occasions, such as birthdays, name-days and elections, that the cooks of old-time landowners embark on preparing long-beaked birds and, succumbing to a high state of excitement, as do all Russians when they have no clear idea of what they are doing, they invent such fancy accompaniments for the birds that guests for the most part study the dishes set in front of them with attentiveness and curiosity, but can in no wise resolve to taste them. Yermolay was under orders to supply the master's kitchen once a month with a couple of brace of grouse and partridge, but he was otherwise permitted to live where and how he wanted. He had been rejected as a man unfit for any kind of real work – a ‘no-good', as we say in the Oryol region. Naturally, he was given no powder and shot, following precisely the same principles as he adopted in not feeding his dog. Yermolay was a man of the most unusual kind: free and easy as a bird, garrulous to a fair extent, to all appearances scatter-brained and awkward; he had a strong liking for drink, could never settle in one place, when on the move he ambled and swayed from side to side – and, ambling and swaying, he would polish off between thirty and forty miles a day. He had
been involved in a most extraordinary variety of adventures, spending nights in marshes, up trees, on roofs, beneath bridges, more than once under lock and key in attics, cellars and barns, relieved of his gun, his dog, his most essential clothing, receiving forceful and prolonged beatings – and yet after a short time he would return home clothed, with his gun and with his dog. One could not call him a happy man, although he was almost always in a reasonably good humour; generally, he looked a trifle eccentric.

Yermolay enjoyed passing the time of day with any congenial character, especially over a drink, but never for very long: he would soon get up and be on his way. ‘And where are you off to, you devil? It's night outside.' ‘I'm for Chaplino.' ‘What's the good of you traipsin' off to Chaplino, more'n seven miles away?' ‘I'm for spending the night there with the peasant Sofron.' ‘Spend the night here.' ‘No, that's impossible.' And Yermolay would be off with his Valetka into the dark night, through bushes and ditches, and the peasant Sofron would most likely not let him into his yard – what's more, might bash him one on the neck ‘for being such a disturbance to honest folk'.

Yet no one could compare with Yermolay in skill at catching fish in the springtime flood-water or in grabbing crayfish with his bare hands, in scenting out game, luring quail, training hawks, capturing nightingales with ‘woodsprite pipe' song or ‘cuckoo's fly-by'.
*
Of one thing he was incapable: training dogs. He lacked the patience for it.

He also had a wife. He would visit her once a week. She lived in a scrappy, partly collapsed little hut, managed somehow or other, never knew from one day to the next whether she would have enough to eat and, in general, endured a bitter fate. Yermolay, that carefree and good-natured fellow, treated her roughly and coarsely, assumed a threatening and severe air in his own home – and his poor wife had no idea of how to indulge him, shuddered at his glance, bought drink for him with her last copeck and dutifully covered him with her own sheepskin coat when he, collapsing majestically on the
stove, fell into a Herculean sleep. I myself had occasion more than once to notice in him involuntary signs of a certain morose ferocity. I disliked the expression on his face when he used to kill a winged bird by biting into it. But Yermolay never remained at home longer than a day: and once outside his home territory he again turned into ‘Yermolka', as he was known by nickname for a good sixty odd miles around and as he used to call himself on occasion. The meanest house-serf felt himself superior to this tramp – and perhaps precisely for this reason always treated him in a friendly fashion; while peasants at first took pleasure in driving him away and trapping him like a hare in the field, but later they let him go with a blessing and, once they were acquainted with this eccentric fellow, kept their hands off him, even giving him bread and striking up a conversation with him… This was the fellow I chose as my hunting companion, and it was with him that I set off for ‘cover' in a large birch wood on the bank of the Ista.

Many Russian rivers, after the pattern of the Volga, have one hilly bank and the other of meadowland; the Ista also. This small river winds in an exceedingly capricious fashion, crawling like a snake, never flowing straight for five hundred yards at a time, and in certain places, from the top of a steep hill, one can see six or seven miles of dams, ponds, watermills and kitchen gardens surrounded by willows and flocks of geese. There is a multitude of fish in the Ista, especially bullyheads (in hot weather peasants lift them out by hand from beneath the overhanging bushes). Little sandpipers whistle and flit to and fro along the stony banks which are dotted with outlets for cold, sparkling spring water; wild ducks swim out into the centre of ponds and look guardedly about them; herons stand up stiffly in the shade, in the inlets and below the river's steep sides.

We stood in cover for about an hour, shot a couple of brace of woodcock and, wishing to try our luck again before sunrise (one can go out for cover in the morning as well), decided to spend the night at the nearest mill. We made our way out of the wood and went down the hill. The river was rolling along, its surface dark-blue waves; the air thickened under the pressure of the night-time moisture. We knocked at the mill gates. Dogs began to yelp in the yard.

‘Who's there?' called a husky and sleepy voice.

‘Hunters. Let us in for the night.'

There was no answer.

‘We'll pay.'

‘I'll go and tell the master… Aw, damn you dogs! Nothing awful's happenin' to you!'

We heard the workman enter the hut; soon he returned to the gates.

‘No, the master says, he won't give orders to let you in.'

‘Why won't he?'

‘He's frightened. You're hunters – soon as you're in here you'll likely set fire to the mill. Just look at them firing-pieces you got there!'

‘What nonsense!'

‘The year afore last this mill of ours burned down. Cattle-dealers spent the night here and some way or another, you know, they set fire to it.'

‘Anyway, friend, we're not spending the night outside!'

‘Spend it anyway you know…' He went off with a clattering of boots.

Yermolay dispatched after him a variety of unpleasant expressions. ‘Let's go into the village,' he said, finally, with a sigh. But it was more than a mile to the village.

‘We'll spend the night here,' I said. ‘It's warm outside, and the miller'll let us have some straw if we pay him.'

Yermolay tacitly agreed. We began knocking on the gates again.

‘What d'you need now?' the workman's voice called again. ‘I've told you – you can't come in.'

We explained to him what we wanted. He went off to consult his master and came back with him. The wicket-gate creaked. The miller appeared, a tall man with a plump face, bull-necked, and large and round of stomach. He agreed to my suggestion.

A hundred paces from the mill stood a structure with a roof, but open on all four sides. Straw and hay were brought out to us there; the workman set up a samovar on the grass beside the river and, squatting on his haunches, began blowing busily up the samovar's chimney. The charcoal flared up and brightly illumined his youthful face. The miller ran off to waken his wife and eventually proposed that I should spend the night in the hut; but I preferred to remain out
in the open air. The miller's wife brought us some milk, eggs, potatoes and bread. Soon the samovar was bubbling and we set about having some tea. It was windless and mists were rising from the river; corncrakes were crying in the vicinity; from the direction of the mill-wheels came such faint noises as the drip-drip of water from the paddles and the seepage of water through the cross-beams of the dam. We built a small fire. While Yermolay baked potatoes in the ashes, I managed to doze off.

A light-voiced, suppressed whispering awoke me. I raised my head: before the fire, on an upturned tub, the miller's wife was sitting and conversing with my hunting companion. Earlier I had recognized, by her dress, movements and way of speaking, that she was a former house-serf – not from among the peasantry or the bourgeoisie; but it was only now that I could take a good look at her features. She appeared to be about thirty; her thin, pale face still contained traces of a remarkable beauty; I was particularly taken by her eyes, so large and melancholy. She leaned her elbows on her knees and placed her face in her hands. Yermolay sat with his back to me and was engaged in laying sticks on the fire.

‘There's sickness again among the cattle in Zheltukhina,' the miller's wife was saying. ‘Both of father Ivan's cows have died… Lord have mercy on us!'