CHAPTER VIII.
HUNTING WITH DOGS.
Refitting—Our mongrels—Shipping our spoils—Visitors—Stepan’s yarns—The hedgehog—Legend of the bracken—The Euxine in a fury—Trebogging—Traces of Tscherkess villages—Enormous boars—Their feeding grounds—Lose a bear—Impenetrable thickets hiding the proximity of big game—A rare day’s sport—Shooting in the moonlight—An expedition—Fever—Precautions against it—Unsuccessful sport and hard fare.
After our twenty-four hours of unsuccessful labour recorded in my last chapter, we were too tired and too tattered to take the field again next day. So we spent it in drying our clothes, mending and washing them, constructing fresh mocassins from the hide of one of our boars, and generally preparing for a campaign of another kind against our enemies the bears and boars.
In this campaign we were to be assisted by a canine force, consisting of three mangy curs belonging to Stepan, and one utterly useless beast, the property of the neighbouring Cossack station. Stepan’s trio were, in their way, the three ugliest half-starved mongrels that ever were possessed with the pluck of a gamecock and the unreasoning devotion that never shows itself in anything but a dog. Why they should have been Stepan’s faithful slaves no human reasoning could explain. They could have picked up more by themselves than he could give them. Poor fellow, he never had any great abundance for himself. They had to sleep outside the shanty, were kicked if they put their noses inside, and were devoured by the mange, which their master never seemed to think of curing. As for breed they had none, or perhaps I should say they had a touch of every breed in them. Zizda was said to be in some way connected with a race which they called ‘harlequin;’ and if oddity of shape, oddness of eyes, and a general unevenness of colour and outline, entitle a dog to the name, old Zizda was a veritable harlequin. He was a large dog with huge paws, a very square head, wall eyes, a capital nose, and indomitable pluck, which had from time to time earned him the innumerable scars with which he was marked from tail to muzzle. The other two were utter mongrels, but staunch supporters of old Zizda in any emergency. They were an old bitch called Lufra, and a young dog, Orla, or ‘The Eagle.’ I cannot refrain from giving the dogs’ names, because they were such real heroes in the chase, and good servants to me.
The first duty of our day of rest, then, was to feed our pack—a duty often forgotten, and appreciated by the dogs now as an unprecedented attention from us. This done, we busied ourselves in getting the skins of the game we had killed ready to send away, as a boat had been seen passing a day or two before, and having been signalled to, had promised, if possible, to call on its way back from Sotcha. It called to-day, took our skins on to Kertch, and left us a good supply of tobacco, the want of which we had hitherto keenly felt.
Another visitor turned up to-day to our utter surprise (for visitors are rare at Golovinsky)—the head gardener from the Grand Duke Michael’s forest of Ardenne, who had been out hunting for two days and taken nothing. With him was a Greek from a colony somewhere near, who complained bitterly that though he and his fellow colonists had spent most of their nights about harvest-time on platforms or trees, to shoot at and scare the bears and boars, these gentry had completely destroyed the crop of ‘koukourooz’ (maize), on which the Greek villagers greatly depend. When I found that in spite of the number of guns in the trees, not one bear or boar had been killed, I was not so much surprised at Bruin coming to look upon the noise as merely a military salute intended in his honour, which in no way interfered with his appetite.
From time to time during the day I managed to extract a little information from the taciturn Stepan, but his lonely life has made him so reserved as to be almost inaccessible to the wiles of the inquirer. He is a Tscherkess who has abjured Mahometanism without apparently adopting any other faith; so of his religion he had little to tell. About his village and the life in it he said little more, and of the Tscherkess wars he absolutely refused to speak—though on that topic he evidently had more to say—from what seemed to me a fear lest any words of his being repeated might get him into trouble. So we fell back upon natural history, and on this topic he was fairly fluent.
Amongst other things he told me of some quaint habits of the hedgehog—for I presume it was the hedgehog and not the porcupine he meant; for the word he used for the beast was one which I did not know, being Tscherkess patois of some kind. But from his description the animal was either one or the other; and as the porcupine is only supposed, I think, to inhabit the Persian border of the Caucasus, the animal of Stepan’s story was probably a hedgehog. He described a hedgehog perfectly, and then added that there were two kinds in the Caucasus, one with head and feet like a pig, the other with head and feet like a hound. It was one of the latter which he noticed one day under an apple-tree in the forest, collecting and carrying off the fallen fruit by rolling over it (so he described it) until she had impaled an apple on one of her spines. She then impaled another on the other side of her body, and thus laden, retired for some time, to return without her load, for two more apples. This sounds very unlikely to me, but as the fellow had no object in inventing the story, and invariably told me the truth as far as I could discover, I give it, as well as other yarns from the same source, for what it is worth. Of the same beast the Cossacks and Stepan assert that he kills snakes by seizing their tails in his jaws and then rolling on them, turning a somersault over them, in fact, so as to drive the spines into them.
I heard too, to-day, a quaint superstition about the common bracken, which abounds here, and on the roots of which the swine feed when there are no chestnuts or berries to be had. The Circassians say there is one moment in one night of the year (alas, my authority had forgotten which night), at the very stroke of midnight, when this plant blooms. The flower lasts but a few moments, in the which if any one has the good fortune to gather and preserve it, he obtains omniscience thenceforth. Talking of such things as the foregoing, and making fresh mocassins for the morrow, the day soon passed, and we rolled ourselves up in our rugs and were happy, though we went to bed almost dinnerless.