Romantic legends of Spain

by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“Which way went the boar?” asked the baron as he sprang upon his steed without touching the stirrups or unstringing his bow. “By the glen which runs to the foot of those hills,” they answered him. Without hearing the last word, the impetuous hunter buried his golden spur in the flank of the horse, who bounded away at full gallop. Behind him departed all the rest.

The dwellers in the hamlet, who had been the first to give the alarm and who, at the approach of the terrible beast, had taken refuge in their huts, timidly thrust out their heads from behind their window-shutters, and when they saw that the infernal troop had disappeared among the foliage of the woods, they crossed themselves in silence.

VII.

Teobaldo rode in advance of all. His steed, swifter by nature or more severely goaded than those of the retainers, followed so close to the quarry that twice or thrice the baron, dropping his bridle upon the neck of the fiery courser, had stood up in his stirrups and drawn the bow to his shoulder to wound his prey. But the boar, whom he saw only at intervals among the tangled thickets, would again vanish from view to reappear just out of reach of the arrow.

So he pursued the chase hour after hour, traversing the ravines of the valley and the stony bed of the stream, until, plunging into a deep forest, he lost his way in its shadowy defiles, his eyes ever fixed on the coveted game he constantly expected to overtake, only to find himself constantly mocked by its marvellous agility.

VIII.

At last, he had his chance; he extended his arm and let fly the shaft, which plunged, quivering, into the loin of the terrible beast that gave a leap and a frightful snort.—“Dead!” exclaims the hunter with a shout of glee, driving his spur for the hundredth time into the bloody flank of his horse. “Dead! in vain he flees. The trail of his flowing blood marks his way.” And so speaking, Teobaldo commenced to sound upon his bugle the signal of triumph that his retinue might hear.

At that instant his steed stopped short, its legs gave way, a slight tremor shook its strained muscles, it fell flat to the ground, shooting out from its swollen nostrils, bathed in foam, a rill of blood.

It had died of exhaustion, died when the pace of the wounded boar was beginning to slacken, when but one more effort was needed to run the quarry down.

IX.