This plan was hailed with joy by all concerned; and it need only be added that Nancy and Boris were duly married, and took up their abode at Karapselka, as the parents of the bride had suggested and as destiny decreed.
CHAPTER XXI.
NANCY AND THE BIG BEAR.
There was, as Colonel Drury had promised, plenty for Boris to do at Karapselka; so much so, indeed, that the hunter scarcely was aware of the flight of time, so happily did the days and the weeks and the months come and go. Nancy was the sweetest of young wives, and in her company Boris soon forgot his disgrace, and the sorrow and regret which the quarrel with the Tsar still caused him whenever he recalled it. Away from drills and service and the countless engagements and amusements of city life, the bear-hunter soon recovered all his old passion for the life of the forest. From morn till night he was afoot, tracking, hunting upon his trusty snow-shoes, stalking capercailzie or blackcock among the rime-embroidered pine trees, and revelling in the free and wholesome air of his oldest friend, the forest. Nancy often accompanied him on his excursions, when the distance was not too great; and the evenings passed as happily as mutually agreeable society could make them.
During these months and even years of peaceful life at Karapselka, Boris had many adventures with those animals which had furnished him his original title, as well as with wolves. In these adventures he found that his old skill in the chase was in no wise diminished, nor his nerve shaken, nor his strength and activity abated; he was still the bear-hunter all over. Sometimes it appeared to him that all his military career and his many adventures by land and sea were nothing more than a dream, and that he was back in Dubinka chasing the wild animals as a paid employé of his liege lord, the owner of the land and village in which he lived. But a word from Nancy, or a look into her sweet face, soon put matters into shape, and he knew himself for what he was—a once-favoured servant and soldier of the Tsar, now living under a cloud; a state of affairs which should have made him very miserable, whereas there was no denying the fact that he was nothing of the sort, but, on the contrary, exceedingly well content with his present lot.
One day, when they had been married for the better part of a year, Boris and Nancy met with an adventure which might have had fatal consequences for both of them.
Boris had allowed his wife to accompany him, as he often did, into the woods, driving in their comfortable kibitka, or covered sledge, to a point at a distance of a few miles from the house, and thence proceeding on snow-shoes for a mile or two further in pursuit of hares or foxes, or perhaps with an eye to a partridge or two to replenish the larder.
The day was magnificent—one of those glorious February days when the sun is bright but not warm, and the air rare and invigorating; when every pine is a marvel of subtile filigree-work in silver rime, and the snow beneath one's feet is dazzling with innumerable ice-gems, and has so hard a crust upon it that it will bear the weight of a man.