What I had taken for a wood turned out to be a dark, round hillock. “Then where on earth am I?” I repeated again, aloud, halted for the third time, and looked inquiringly at my piebald-yellow gun-dog Dianka, decidedly the cleverest of all the four-legged creation. But the cleverest of all the four-legged creation only wagged its tail, gave a sad twinkle of its tired eyes and had no sort of practical advice to offer. I felt ashamed in front of it, and set off ahead in desperation, as if I had suddenly guessed which way to go, skirted the hill, and found myself in a gentle hollow in the midst of cultivation. A strange feeling immediately came over me. The hollow was like an almost symmetrical cauldron with sloping sides. At the bottom of it rose, bolt upright, several large white stones, which seemed to have crept down there for a secret conclave, and the whole place had such a deaf-and-dumb feeling, the sky hung so flatly and gloomily above it, that my heart shrank. Some little creature was squeaking faintly and plaintively among the stones. I hastily came out again on to the hillock. Hitherto I had not given up all hope of finding the way home; but here I finally convinced myself that I was completely lost and, no longer attempting to recognize the surrounding landscape, which was almost completely sunk in darkness, boldly set a straight course by the stars. . . . I went on in this way for about half an hour, plodding forward with difficulty. It seemed to me that I had never been in such a desert in all my life; there was not a twinkle of light to be seen, not a sound to be heard. One sloping hill succeeded another, fields stretched endlessly one after another, bushes fairly started up from the earth under my nose. I was still walking, and already preparing to lie down somewhere until morning came, when suddenly I felt myself on the edge of a fearful precipice.
I quickly withdrew my foot in mid-air, and, through the hardly penetrable darkness of the night, I made out, far below me, an enormous plain. A broad river bounded it in a receding arc; steely gleams of water, flashing faintly here and there, marked its course. The hill on which I was standing dropped sharply in an almost perpendicular cliff; its massive outline showed up blackly against the bluishness of the airy void, and just below me, in the angle of cliff and plain, beside the river, which at this point stood in a dark and motionless mirror, right at the foot of the hill, two fires close beside each other were blazing redly and smoking. Around them, people were stirring, shadows were swaying, and sometimes the front half of a curly head was brightly illuminated. . . .
At last I recognized where I was. This field rejoices, in our neighborhood, in the name of Bezhin meadow. . . . But to return home was quite impossible, especially by night; my legs were foundering beneath me from exhaustion. I decided to go down to the fires and, in company with the people whom I had seen, and took to be drovers, to wait for the dawn. I got safely down, but had not yet let go of the last branch I had seized, when suddenly two big white shaggy dogs hurled themselves at me, barking evilly. The ringing voices of children sounded from around the fires; and two or three boys rose quickly from the ground. I shouted back in answer to their questioning cries. They ran towards me, at once calling off the dogs, who were particularly surprised by the sight of my Dianka, and I went up to them.
I was wrong in taking the people sitting round the fires for drovers. They were just peasant-lads from the neighboring village, who were minding horses. In the hot summer weather it is the custom in our part of the world to turn the horses out at night to graze in the fields: in daytime the flies and bluebottles would give them no peace. Taking the horses out towards evening time, and driving them back at dawn, is a great treat for the peasant-lads. Sitting bareheaded and in old coats on the liveliest nags, they dash off with gay shouts and cries, waving arms and legs, jumping high in the air and laughing at the tops of their voices. The light dust rises in a yellow pillar and blows along the road; from afar you can hear the jolly clatter of hooves, the horses gallop with ears pricked; in front of them all, with tail up, continuously changing his pace, gallops a shaggy sorrel with his tangled mane full of burrs.
I told the boys that I had lost my way, and sat down beside them. They asked me whence I had come, grew silent and made room for me. We talked for a while. I lay down beneath a bush which had been eaten bare, and began to look around me. It was a marvellous picture: around the fires a circle of reddish, reflected light trembled and seemed to die away into the darkness; at times the flame blazed up and scattered swift gleams beyond the edges of the circle; a thin tongue of light licked the bare willow-twigs and disappeared in a flash—long, sharp shadows, bursting in for a moment in their turn, ran right up to the fires: it was the war of darkness with light. Sometimes, when the flame burnt lower and the circle of light narrowed, from the nearer darkness there would suddenly emerge a horse’s head, a bay head with crooked markings, or a plain gray one, and would give us an attentive, dull look, while busily munching the long grass, then would drop back again and immediately vanish. But one could still hear the horse munching and snorting away. From the lighted circle it was difficult to make out what was happening in the shadows, and therefore everything close at hand seemed hidden by a blackish curtain; but farther off, towards the horizon, long shapes could be discerned dimly as hills and woods. The clear, dark sky stood, solemn and immeasurably high above us, in all its mysterious magnificence. It caught one deliciously at the heart to breathe that unmistakable, languorous, cool breath—the breath of a summer night in Russia. Around us there was hardly a sound to be heard . . . only sometimes, from the nearby river, the sudden loud splash of a big fish, and the low murmuring of the rushes on the bank, hardly stirred by the touch of a ripple . . . only the fires crackling away faintly.
The boys sat round them, and with them the two dogs which had so much wanted to eat me up. They were still unable to reconcile themselves to my presence, and, sleepily narrowing their eyes and looking sideways at the fire, gave an occasional growl which had an extraordinary accent of self-importance, began with a growl and finished with a faint whine, as if regretting the impossibility of doing as they wished. The boys were five in all: Fedya, Pavel, Ilyusha, Kostya, and Vanya. (I learned their names as they talked, and propose now to make the reader acquainted with them.)
The first, and eldest of them all, Fedya, seemed to be about fourteen. He was a well-built lad, with handsome, fine, smallish features, fair, curly hair, bright eyes, and a permanent smile that was half-jolly, half-absent. By all appearances he came of a well-to-do family and had ridden out to the field, not because he had to, but just for the fun of it. He wore a gay cotton shirt with a yellow pattern; a small, new overcoat, thrown on carelessly, stayed with difficulty on his narrow shoulders; from his blue belt hung a comb. His boots, with very low tops, were really his—not his father’s. The second boy, Pavel, had a shock of black hair, gray eyes, broad cheek-bones, a pale, pock-marked face, a large but regular mouth, an enormous pot-head, and an awkward, stocky body. He was an unprepossessing lad, there were no two ways about it, but all the same I liked him: he had an intelligent, direct look, and there was a note of strength in his voice. His dress was nothing to be proud of: it consisted simply of a plain blouse and a patched pair of trousers. The face of the third, Ilyusha, was rather nondescript: hook-nosed, long, short-sighted, it expressed a certain dull, sickly concentration; his tight lips never moved, his contracted brows never parted—he seemed all the time to be keeping his eyes narrowed against the fire. His yellow, almost white, hair stuck out in sharp tufts from beneath a low felt cap, which now and again he took in both hands and rammed down on his ears. He wore a new pair of rope-slippers and leggings; a stout cord, wound three times round his waist, elaborately fastened his neat black smock. He and Pavel looked no more than twelve. The fourth lad, Kostya, was about ten, and excited my curiosity by his sad and thoughtful look. His face was small, thin, freckled, sharp-chinned as a squirrel’s; I could hardly make out his lips; but a strange impression was produced by his big, black, liquidly brilliant eyes; it was as if they wanted to say something for which no tongue—or at least not
his—had any words. He was small and punily built and rather poorly dressed. The last one, Vanya, I had at first not even noticed; he was lying on the ground, quietly curled up under a sheet of matting, and only occasionally stuck out from beneath it his reddish, curly head. This lad was no more than seven.
So I lay under a bush to one side and looked at the boys. A small pot hung over one of the fires; in it potatoes were cooking. Pavel was keeping an eye on them and, on his knees, was prodding with a splinter in the boiling water. Fedya lay propped on his elbow, with the skirts of his coat thrown open. Ilyusha sat beside Kostya, his eyes still narrowed and intense; Kostya, with slightly drooping head, was gazing far away into the distance. Vanya never stirred beneath his matting. I pretended to be asleep. Gradually the boys got talking again.
At first they chatted of this and that, of to-morrow’s duties, of the horses; but suddenly Fedya turned to Ilyusha, and, as if resuming an interrupted conversation, put a question to him.
“Well, so you really did see the ghost?”
“No, I never saw him; you can’t see him,” answered Ilyusha, in a low, hoarse voice, the sound of which went to perfection with the expression on his face. “But I heard him, and I wasn’t the only one, either.”
“But where does he walk?” asked Pavel.
“In the old paper-mill.”
“Do you really work in a paper-mill?”
“Certainly we do. My brother Avdyushka and I work in the pulping-rooms.”
“I say!—factory workers! . . .”
“Well, how was it that you heard him?” asked Fedya.
“It was like this. It happened to me and my brother Avdyushka and Fyodor from Mikheyev and Squinting Ivashka and the other Ivashka, the one from Red Hills, and Ivashka from Sukhorukov, too—and other boys were there as well; there were about ten of us boys altogether—the whole shift, all complete. Well, it happened that we spent the night in the paper-mill, that is, it didn’t happen just like that, but Nazarov, the foreman, kept us in: ‘What’s the use,’ he says, ‘of you traipsing all the way home, my lads? There’s plenty of work to-morrow, so you’d better not go home.’ So we stayed and all lay down together, and Avdyushka started off and said: ‘Well, boys,’ he says: ‘suppose the ghost comes? . . .’ and he didn’t finish saying it, Avdyushka didn’t, when suddenly somebody started walking, over our heads; we were lying downstairs, and he was walking up aloft by the wheel. We listen: he walks, the planks fairly bend and creak beneath him; he passes over our heads; suddenly the water beside the wheel begins to ripple and ripple and knock and knock against the wheel and the wheel begins to turn; and yet the flanges of the water-inlet were closed. We were amazed—who could have lifted them and let the water through? Anyway the wheel turned and turned and then stopped. Then he walked again, to the door up aloft, and started coming downstairs, down he came, as if there was no hurry about it; the treads fairly groaned beneath him, too; well, he came up to our door, and waited and waited—then suddenly the door flew wide open. We started up, and stared—there was nothing there. Suddenly, look, the net on one of the tubs began to move, came up, dropped and floated and floated about in the air as if someone was stirring with it, then went back to its place. Then the hook of another tub came off its nail, then went back on to the nail again. Then someone seemed to go to the door and suddenly started coughing and sort of bleating, like a sheep, and quite loud, too. . . . We had all fallen into a heap together and each of us was trying to get underneath the others . . . Goodness, how scared we were!”
“Just fancy!” said Pavel. “Why did he start coughing, though?”
“I don’t know; perhaps because of the damp.”
They were all silent for a while.
“Well,” asked Fedya, “are the potatoes done?”
Pavel felt them.
“No, they’re not done yet. . . . Do you hear the splash?” he added, turning his face in the direction of the river. “Must be a pike. . . . There was a shooting star.”
“Now I’ll tell you a story, boys,” said Kostya in his little tiny voice. “Listen to the story that I heard father tell the other day.”
“Well, we’re listening,” said Fedya with a protective, condescending look.
“You know Gavrila, the village carpenter?”
“Yes.”
“But d’you know why he is always so glum and silent? This is why he is so glum; once he went, father said, he went into the forest, to gather nuts, so he went into the forest to gather nuts, and lost his way. He walked on and on, boys—but no, he couldn’t find the way; and night was already on him. So he sat down under a tree; all right, he said, I’ll wait for the morning—he sat down and dozed off to sleep. So he dozed off to sleep, and suddenly he heard someone calling him. He looked—there was nobody. He dozes off to sleep again—and again they call him. He looks again, he looks; and in front of him on a branch sits a water-fairy, swinging, and calling him, and laughing, and dying of laughter, and the moon was shining bright, so bright and clear it shone, that you could see everything. So she called him, and she was so bright as she sat on the branch, and so white, like a dace or a gudgeon—or is it a carp, which is that whitish, silvery color? And so, boys, Gavrila the carpenter fairly died of fright, but she, why, she just laughed and went on beckoning him to her with her hand. So Gavrila got up and started to do as the water-fairy said, but God must have warned him: he made the sign of the Cross. . . . But how difficult that was for him to do! It seemed that his hand was just like stone and would not stir. . . . Oh, it was the devil and all! . . . Well, when he made the sign of the Cross, the fairy stopped laughing and suddenly began to cry. She cried, boys, she wiped her eyes with her hair, and her hair was as green as hemp. So Gavrila looked and looked at her and began to ask her: ‘What are you crying for, you green thing of the forest?’ And the water-fairy said to him: ‘If you hadn’t crossed yourself,’ she says, ‘you would have lived with me merrily for ever; but I am crying and grieving because you crossed yourself; and I won’t grieve alone, either: you too shall grieve for ever.’ Then she vanished, and Gavrila understood at once how to get out of the forest. And ever since then he has been going about all glum.”
“Well!” said Fedya after a short pause. “But how could such an evil thing of the forest harm a Christian soul—after all, he didn’t obey her?”
“Yes, you well may ask,” said Kostya. “And Gavrila said that she had a thin, sad little voice, like a toad’s.”
“Did your father tell that story himself?” continued Fedya.
“Yes. I was lying on the shelf and heard it all.”
“What a strange thing! Why should he be glum? . . . She must have liked him, since she called him.”
“She liked him all right,” agreed Ilyusha. “Of course, she wanted to tickle him, that’s what she wanted. That’s their way, these water-fairies.”
“There ought to be water-fairies here, too,” observed Fedya.
“No,” answered Kostya; “not in a wholesome, open spot like this. The only thing is, though, that the river is near.”
They were all silent. Suddenly, away in the distance, came a drawn-out, ringing, almost plaintive sound, one of those mysterious night-sounds which issue out sometimes from the depth of silence, rise, hang in the air and slowly die away at last. You listen more intently—there is nothing there, but the resonance remains. It seemed that someone had cried out, far, far away, right under the horizon, and that then someone else answered from the forest with a thin, sharp laugh, and that a low whistle went hissing down the river. The boys exchanged glances, and trembled.
“The power of the Cross be with us!” whispered Ilyusha.
“Oh, you lot of crows!” exclaimed Pavel. “What are you jumping at? Look, the potatoes are done.” They all went up to the pot and began to eat the steaming potatoes. Only Vanya never stirred. “What’s the matter with you?” said Pavel.
Still Vanya never stirred from under his matting. The pot was soon quite empty.
“Have you heard, boys,” began Ilyusha, “what happened with us the other day at Varnavitsy?”
“At the dam?” asked Fedya.
“Yes, yes, at the broken dam. There’s a haunted place for you—haunted, and airless, too. All around it is broken ground, and the ravines are full of snakes.”
“Well, what happened? Tell us. . . .”
“This is what happened. You may not know it, Fedya, but there’s a drowned man buried there. He was drowned long, long ago, when the pool was still deep; only his grave still shows, and even that, hardly: just a little mound. . . . Well, the other day, the agent sends for the kennelman Ermil, and says: ‘Go to the post office, Ermil.’ Ermil is always driving to the post; his dogs all starve to death: somehow or other he can’t keep them alive—never could, and yet he’s a good kennelman, everybody says so. So Ermil went to the post and stayed too long in town and, when he drove back, he was tight. It was night, and bright moonlight. . . . So Ermil rides across the dam: that’s how his way took him. He rides across, Ermil the kennelman does, and sees, on the drowned man’s grave, a pretty, curly, white lamb, walking. So Ermil thinks: well, I’ll take him—why should he be left like that? So he goes down and takes the lamb in his arms. And the lamb doesn’t mind a bit. So Ermil comes up to his horse, but the horse shies away from him, and snorts, and shakes his head; but he quietens him down, mounts with the lamb, and rides off holding the lamb in front of him. He looks at the lamb, and the lamb looks him straight in the eyes. Ermil the kennelman feels there is something uncanny about him. Why, he thinks, I don’t ever remember a lamb looking a chap in the eyes like that; but never mind; and he begins to stroke the fleece, and say: ‘Baa-lamb, baa-lamb!’ But then the lamb suddenly bares his teeth and answers him back: ‘Baa-lamb, baa-lamb. . . .’”
A Sportsman's Notebook Page 13