War and Peace (94 page)

Near him stood his valet, Semyon Tchekmar, a veteran horseman, though now heavy in the saddle. Tchekmar held on a leash three wolfhounds of a special breed, spirited hounds, though they too had grown fat like their master and his horse. Two other keen old dogs were lying beside them not in a leash. A hundred paces further in the edge of the copse stood another groom of the count’s, Mitka, a reckless rider and passionate sportsman. The count had followed the old custom of drinking before hunting a silver goblet of spiced brandy; he had had a slight lunch and after that half a bottle of his favourite bordeaux.

Count Ilya Andreitch was rather flushed from the wine and the drive; his eyes, covered by moisture, were particularly bright, and sitting in the saddle wrapped up in his fur coat, he looked like a baby taken out for a drive.

After seeing after his duties, Tchekmar, with his thin face and sunken cheeks, looked towards his master, with whom he had lived on the best of terms for thirty years. Perceiving that he was in a genial humour, he anticipated a pleasant chat. A third person rode circumspectly—he had no doubt been cautioned—out of the wood, and stood still behind the count. This personage was a grey-bearded old man, wearing a woman’s gown and a high, peaked cap. It was the buffoon, Nastasya Ivanovna.

“Well, Nastasya Ivanovna,” whispered the count, winking at him, “you only scare off the game, and Danilo will give it you.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday,” said Nastasya Ivanovna.

“Sh!” hissed the count, and he turned to Semyon. “Have you seen Natalya Ilyinitchna?” he asked Semyon. “Where is she?”

“Her honour’s with Pyotr Ilyitch, behind the high grass at Zharvry,” answered Semyon, smiling. “Though she is a lady, she has a great love for the chase.”

“And you wonder at her riding, Semyon,… eh?” said the count, “for a man even it wouldn’t be amiss!”

“Who wouldn’t wonder! So daring, so smart!”

“And where’s Nikolasha? Above the Lyadovsky upland, eh?” the count asked still in a whisper.

“Yes, sir. His honour knows where he had best stand. He knows the ins and outs of hunting, so that Danilo and I are sometimes quite astonished at him,” said Semyon, who knew how to please his master.

“He’s a good, clever sportsman, eh? And what do you say to his riding, eh?”

“A perfect picture he is! How he drove the fox out of the Zavarzinsky thicket the other day. He galloped down from the ravine, it was a sight—the horse worth a thousand roubles, and the rider beyond all price. Yes, you would have to look a long while to find his match!”

“To look a long while …” repeated the count, obviously regretting that Semyon’s praises had come to so speedy a termination. “A long while,” he repeated, turning back the skirt of his coat and looking for his snuff-box.

“The other day they were coming out from Mass in all their glory, Mihail Sidoritch …” Semyon stopped short, hearing distinctly in the still air the rush of the hounds, with no more than two or three dogs giving tongue. With his head on one side, he listened, shaking a warning finger at his master. “They’re on the scent of the litter …” he whispered; “they have gone straight toward Lyadovsky upland.”

The count, with a smile still lingering on his face, looked straight before him along the path, and did not take a pinch from the snuff-box he held in his hand. The hounds’ cry was followed by the bass note of the hunting cry for a wolf sounded on Danilo’s horn. The pack joined the first three dogs, and the voices of the hounds could be heard in full cry with the peculiar note which serves to betoken that they are after a wolf. The whippers-in were not now hallooing, but urging on the hounds with cries of “Loo! loo! loo!” and above all the voices rose the voice of Danilo, passing from a deep note to piercing shrillness. Danilo’s voice seemed to fill the whole forest, to pierce beyond it, and echo far away in the open country.

After listening for a few seconds in silence, the count and his groom felt certain that the hounds had divided into two packs: one, the larger, was going off into the distance, in particularly hot cry; the other part of the pack was moving along the forest past the count, and it was with this pack that Danilo’s voice was heard urging the dogs on. The sounds from both packs melted into unison and broke apart again, but both were getting further away. Semyon sighed and stooped down to straighten the leash, in which a young dog had caught his leg. The count too sighed, and noticing the snuff-box in his hand, he opened it and took a pinch.

“Back!” cried Semyon to the dog, which had poked out beyond the bushes. The count started, and dropped the snuff-box. Nastasya Ivanovna got off his horse and began picking it up.

The count and Semyon watched him. All of a sudden, as so often happens, the sound of the hunt was in an instant close at hand, as though the baying dogs and Danilo’s cries were just upon them.

The count looked round, and on the right he saw Mitka, who was staring at the count with eyes starting out of his head. Lifting his cap, he pointed in front to the other side.

“Look out!” he shouted in a voice that showed the words had long been fretting him to be uttered. And letting go the dogs, he galloped towards the count.

The count and Semyon galloped out of the bushes, and on their left they saw a wolf. With a soft, rolling gait it moved at a slow amble further to their left into the very thicket in which they had been standing. The angry dogs whined, and pulling themselves free from the leash, flew by the horses’ hoofs after the wolf.

The wolf paused in his flight; awkwardly, like a man with a quinsy, he turned his heavy-browed head towards the dogs, and still with the same soft, rolling gait gave one bound and a second, and, waving its tail, disappeared into the bushes. At the same instant, with a cry like a wail, there sprang desperately out of the thicket opposite one hound, then a second and a third, and all the pack flew across the open ground towards the very spot where the wolf had vanished. The bushes were parted behind the dogs, and Danilo’s brown horse, dark with sweat, emerged from them. On its long back Danilo sat perched up and swaying forward. He had no cap on his grey hair, that fluttered in disorder above his red, perspiring face.

“Loo! loo! loo!…” he was shouting. When he caught sight of the count, there was a flash like lightning in his eyes.

“B—–!” he shouted, using a brutally coarse term of abuse and menacing the count with his lifted whip. “Let the wolf slip!… sportsmen indeed!” And as though scorning to waste more words on the confused and frightened count, he lashed the moist and heavy sides of his brown gelding with all the fury that had been ready for the count, and flew off after the dogs. The count stood like a man who has been thrashed, looking about him and trying to smile and call for Semyon to sympathise with his plight. But Semyon was not there; he had galloped round to cut the wolf off from the forest. The greyhounds, too, were running to and fro on both sides. But the wolf got off into the bushes, and not one of the party succeeded in coming across him.

Nikolay Rostov was standing meanwhile at his post waiting for the wolf. He was aware of what must be taking place within the copse from the rush of the pack coming closer and going further away, from the cries of the dogs, whose notes were familiar to him, from the nearness, and then greater remoteness, and sudden raising of the voices of the huntsmen. He knew that there were both young and also old wolves in the enclosure. He knew the hounds had divided into two packs, that in one place they were close on the wolf, and that something had gone wrong. Every second he expected the wolf on his side. He made a thousand different suppositions of how and at what spot the wolf would run out, and how he would set upon it. Hope was succeeded by despair. Several times he prayed to God that the wolf would rush out upon him. He prayed with that feeling of passion and compunction with which men pray in moments of intense emotion due to trivial causes. “Why, what is it to Thee,” he said to God, “to do this for me? I know Thou art great and that it’s a sin to pray to Thee about this, but for God’s sake do make the old wolf come out upon me, and make Karay fix his teeth in his throat and finish him before the eyes of ‘uncle,’ who is looking this way.” A thousand times over in that half-hour, with intent, strained, and uneasy eyes Rostov scanned the thickets at the edge of the copse with two scraggy oaks standing up above the undergrowth of aspen, and the ravine with its overhanging bank, and “uncle’s” cap peering out from behind a bush on the right. “No, that happiness is not to be,” thought Rostov, “yet what would it cost Him! It’s not to be! I’m always unlucky, at cards, in war, and everything.” Austerlitz and Dolohov flashed in distinct but rapid succession through his imagination. “Only once in my life to kill an old wolf; I ask for nothing beyond!” he thought, straining eyes and ears, looking from left to right, and back again, and listening to the slightest fluctuations in the sounds of the dogs. He looked again to the right and saw something running across the open ground towards him. “No, it can’t be!” thought Rostov, taking a deep breath, as a man does at the coming of what he has long been hoping for. The greatest piece of luck had come to him, and so simply, without noise, or flourish, or display to signalise it. Rostov could not believe his eyes, and this uncertainty lasted more than a second. The wolf was running forward; he leaped clumsily over a rut that lay across his path.

It was an old wolf with a grey back and full, reddish belly. He was
running without haste, plainly feeling secure of being unseen. Rostov held his breath and looked round at the dogs. They were lying and standing about, not seeing the wolf and quite unaware of him. Old Karay had his head turned round, and was angrily searching for a flea, snapping his yellow teeth on his haunches. “Loo! loo! loo!” Rostov whispered, pouting out his lips. The dogs leaped up, jingling the iron rings of the leashes, and pricked up their ears. Karay scratched his hind-leg and got up, pricking up his ears and wagging his tail, on which there were hanging matted locks of his coat.

“Loose them? or not loose them?” Nikolay said to himself as the wolf moved away from the copse towards him. All at once the whole physiognomy of the wolf was transformed. He started, seeing—probably for the first time—human eyes fixed upon him; and, turning his head a little towards Rostov, stood still, in doubt whether to go back or forward. “Ay! Never mind, forward!…” the wolf seemed to be saying to himself, and he pushed on ahead, without looking round, softly and not rapidly, with an easy but resolute movement. “Loo! loo!…” Nikolay cried in a voice not his own, and of its own accord his gallant horse galloped at breakneck pace downhill, and leaped over the watercourse to cut off the wolf’s retreat; the hounds dashed on even more swiftly, overtaking it.

Nikolay did not hear his own cry; he had no consciousness of galloping; he saw neither the dogs nor the ground over which he galloped. He saw nothing but the wolf, which, quickening its pace, was bounding in the same direction across the glade. Foremost of the hounds was the black and tan, broad-backed bitch, Milka, and she was getting close upon him. But the wolf turned a sidelong glance upon her, and instead of flying at him, as she always had done, Milka suddenly stopped short, her fore-legs held stiffly before her and her tail in the air.

“Loo! loo! loo!” shouted Nikolay.

The red hound, Lyubima, darted forward from behind Milka, dashed headlong at the wolf, and got hold of him by the hind-leg, but in the same second bounded away on the other side in terror. The wolf crouched, gnashed its teeth, rose again, and bounded forward, followed at a couple of yards’ distance by all the dogs: they did not try to get closer.

“He’ll get away! No, it’s impossible!” thought Nikolay, still shouting in a husky voice.

“Karay! Loo! loo!…” he kept shouting, looking for the old hound, who was his one hope now.

Karay, straining his old muscles to the utmost, and watching the wolf intently, was bounding clumsily away from the beast, to cut across his path in front of him. But it was plain from the swiftness of the wolf’s course and the slowness of the hounds that Karay was out in his reckoning. Nikolay saw the copse not far now ahead of him. If once the wolf reached it, he would escape to a certainty. But in front dogs and men came into sight, dashing almost straight towards the wolf. There was still hope. A long, young hound, not one of the Rostovs’—Nikolay did not recognise him—flew from in front straight at the wolf, and almost knocked him over. The wolf got up again with a surprising rapidity and flew at the young hound; his teeth clacked, and the hound, covered with blood from a gash in his side, thrust its head in the earth, squealing shrilly.

“Karay! old man!” Nikolay wailed.

The old dog, with the tufts of matted hair, quivering on his haunches, had succeeded, thanks to the delay, in cutting across the wolf’s line of advance, and was now five paces in front of him. The wolf stole a glance at Karay, as though aware of his danger, and tucking his tail further between his legs, he quickened his pace. But then—Nikolay could only see that something was happening with Karay—the hound had dashed instantly at the wolf and had rolled in a struggling heap with him into the watercourse before them.

The moment when Nikolay saw the dogs struggling with the wolf in the watercourse, saw the wolf’s grey coat under them, his outstretched hind-leg, his head gasping in terror, and his ears turned back (Karay had him by the throat)—the moment when Nikolay saw all this was the happiest moment of his life. He had already grasped the pommel of his saddle to dismount and stab the wolf, when suddenly the beast’s head was thrust up above the mass of dogs, then his fore-legs were on the bank of the watercourse. The wolf clacked his teeth (Karay had not hold of his throat now), leaped with his hind-legs out of the hollow, and with his tail between his legs, pushed forward, getting away from the dogs again. Karay, his hair starting up, had difficulty in getting out of the watercourse; he seemed to be bruised or wounded. “My God, why is this!” Nikolay shouted in despair. The uncle’s huntsman galloped across the line of the wolf’s advance from the other side, and again his hounds stopped the wolf, again he was hemmed in.