[CHAPTER XL.]
WOLVES, BEARS, AND OTHER ANIMALS.
Transylvania has often been nicknamed the Bärenland, and though bears and wolves do not exactly walk about the high-roads in broad daylight, as unsophisticated travellers are apt to expect, yet they are common enough features in the landscape, and no one can be many weeks in the country without hearing them mentioned as familiarly as foxes or grouse are spoken of at home.
The number of bears shot in Transylvania in the course of the year 1885 was about sixty. Eight of these fell to the share of the Crown-prince Rudolf of Austria, who for the last few years has rented a chasse at Gyergyó Szent Imre, in one of the most favorable bear-hunting neighborhoods.[69]
As to the wolves destroyed each year, they are not to be reckoned by dozens, nor even by scores, but by hundreds, and I was assured by a competent authority that between six and seven hundred is the number of those who last year perished by the hand of man.
It is the commonest thing in the world on market-days to see a group of shepherds in the ironmonger’s shop (where a store of common fire-arms is kept), in deep consultation as to the merits of the pistol or revolver they are in want of for scaring the wolves so constantly molesting their flocks; and occasionally a snapping and snarling wolf, or a pair of bear cubs, are brought in a cart to the town in quest of an amateur of such fierce pets.
Even in the neighborhood of Hermanstadt it is not safe to walk far into the country alone in very cold weather for fear of wolves, which can easily approach the town under cover of the forest, which runs unbroken up to the hills; and while I was at Hermanstadt a large gray wolf was reported to have been seen several nights in succession prowling about within the actual precincts of the lower town.
At one of the toll-bars marking the limits of the town, and whence stretches off a lonely plain towards the south, a large fierce dog is kept chained up; but he never retains his situation two years running, because he is invariably destroyed by wolves before the winter is out. “The dog at the Poplaka toll-bar has been eaten again,” is the matter-of-fact announcement one hears every year when the cold is rising, and which has long since lost all flavor of sensation or novelty; and one only wonders how any Hermanstadt dog can still be found infatuated enough to undertake this forlorn hope.
Up in the mountains, however, the wolves do not slink in stealthy groups of twos and threes, but assemble in such mighty packs that sometimes on the high pasturages the snow is found to be trampled down by the tread of many hundred feet, as though large droves of cattle had passed over the place. Officers who have been engaged in the work of going over the country, classifying all horses for purposes of national defence, have told me that in many out-of-the-way places up the hills they used to find the horses frequently bitten or scarred about the nose—as many keepsakes from the wolves, whose invariable habit it is first to spring at the horse’s head.
Many are the ruses which the wolf employs in order to induce a horse or foal to detach itself from a drove of grazing animals. Sometimes he will roll himself up into a shapeless mass, and lie thus immovable for hours on the ground, till some young inexperienced colt, bitten with curiosity, wanders from its mother’s side to investigate the strange bundle it espies at a distance. The wily murderer lets himself be approached without moving, and only then, when the hapless victim bends down to snuff the packet, he springs at the throat, and makes of it an easy prey.