Sketches from a Hunter's Album Read Online

Shoot them black grouse as much as you like, but be sure and see you change your bailiff often.’

On the evening of the fourth day Polutykin sent for me. I was sorry to have to say goodbye to the old man. Together with Kalinych I took my place in the cart.

‘Well, goodbye, Khor, and keep well,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Fedya.’

‘Goodbye, sir, goodbye, and don’t forget us.’

We drove off. Dawn had just set fire to the sky.

‘It’s going to be beautiful weather tomorrow,’ I said, looking at the bright sky.

‘No, there’ll be rain,’ Kalinych contradicted. ‘Look how the ducks are splashing about, and the grass has got a strong smell.’

We drove through bushy undergrowth. Kalinych began to sing in a low voice, bouncing up and down on the driver’s seat and gazing all the while at the dawn.

The next day I was gone from under Polutykin’s hospitable roof.

YERMOLAY AND THE MILLER’S WIFE

IN the evening the hunter Yermolay and I set off for ‘cover’. But perhaps not all my readers know what ‘cover’ means. Pray listen, gentlemen.

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.