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.