"What does that mean?" cried Adolphe, one leg in the air.
"That signifies, the boar is making right for us."
"Does it? Then I am up;" and, with the agility of a cat, he was in an instant safely lodged in the branches. "Ah! my friend! how different it feels up here—the sickness is quite gone off, hand me the gun."
"In the name of Fortune," said I, "hold your coward tongue—here's the boar;" for I could now hear his snorting and loud breathing in the copse hard by.
"Do you hear him?" said Adolphe from his perch, his cheeks as green as the leaves which covered him.
"Hear him?" I exclaimed, "yes, I partly see him. What a monster! How he tears the ground!—how he bleeds and gnaws his burning wounds!—every hair of his back stands up, smoke and perspiration flow from his nostrils, and his eyes, glaring with agony and concentrated rage, look as if they would start from their sockets!"
On came the beaters, and in a few minutes the panting beast burst from his thicket, and rushed across the open; my eye was on every movement, and, firing both barrels, the contents struck him full in front. It was his death-blow, but the vital principle was yet unsubdued; and, summoning up all his dying energies—those which despair alone can give—he came at me with a force that I could never have withstood. Fortunately the Parisian's gun was close to me, and the charge stopped him in full career. This was the coup de grâce. He still, however, by one grand effort, stood nobly on his haunches, opened his monstrous mouth, all red with blood, gave out one sharp deep groan of agony from his stifled lungs, and, falling upon his side, after many a wild convulsion, at length stretched his massive and exhausted frame slowly out in death.
"Hurrah! Adolphe! you rascally acorn! shout, you badaud! give the death-whoop, and come down!"
"Is he really dead?"