For the Right

by Karl Emil Franzos

They seem approaching, but the vast plain is delusive; they are yet miles away. The landscape, however, has left monotony behind, growing more changeful at every turn. The moorland has disappeared, with its sedgy pools, instead of which there is an abundance of rivulets, growing more limpid and more headlong as you proceed; for you are ascending steadily, your horizon enlarging. Cornfields are few and far between, wheat making room for the more hardy oats; while all about you there are great tracts of brownish uplands, where juniper bushes are plentiful and the heather will burst into sheets of bloom. Villages are becoming scarce--mere hamlets, too poor for a manor house, too poor almost for a church, and with cottages of the humblest, the public-house alone retaining its undesirable dimensions. Orchards are no longer to be seen, but beech woods increase; the forest encloses you, and soon even the beech is crowded out by the fir. The sky, wherever it appears through the jagged branches, is of a deeper blue, for there are no misty vapours here as in the lowlands; but the air is filled with a strange, crisp perfume, the resinous exhalations of pine wood. Every sense thus is alive to the change of scenery, and if you are a lover of your lowland home, despite its dreariness, you will be overtaken by a haunting sensation of fear of the unknown world you have entered.

But emerging from the pine wood presently, and looking back from the height you have gained, the very plain behind you has assumed another aspect, a strange loveliness enwrapping it. The old homely expanse is aglow with an emerald hue--a giant meadow seemingly--streaked with the silver of its flowing waters; a shining greensward, the brighter for its cottages; and far yonder, where the blue of the heavens seems mingling with the green of the earth, your own dwelling perchance, a fair jewel in a radiant setting.

But the far-off wall, with its towering blackness? It has resolved itself magically. To your right and to your left, and above you, there are round-domed mountains and bolder peaks rising atop of one another to an immeasurable height. That path up the pine wood has brought you into the heart of the Carpathians, and their strange beauty, weird and wild and unspeakably mysterious, is upon you suddenly.

Yet monotony is even here; the world seems a sea of swaying pines, and the eye has nothing to rest it from the gloomy green save the sky, vast and blue. The heart grows lonely and wistful, but scarcely attuned to tender thoughts as amid the voices of the plain. The spell of the forest wilds is upon it, bracing it up to its own sterner kind. Resistless and tossing, each torrent dashes through its rocky glen, breaking into clouds of spray about the boulders, and mantling the young pines in a shower of shining drops. And from the forest deeps strange music is heard of groaning branches and whispering tree tops, now wild and solemn, now murmuring as in dreams, never ceasing, but going on for ever like the song of the sea. And as you listen you are caught in a trance, and drawn deeper still into the witching region. Nature here does not captivate by little gifts and graces; but, having looked at you once with eyes of kindling beauty, wild, weird, and awful, you worship at her feet.

It is a charm both chaste and powerful, and, having known it once, you seek to know more. But not many are admitted to that delight, which is still reserved for the few--even as in the days when Taras Barabola repaired up yonder to unfurl his banner. Yet occasionally some lover of the wilder aspects of nature will quit the shores of the Theiss or the Fruth to seek entrance into the enchanted regions of that unknown world. The forest wilds of the Welyki Lys to this day are given over to bears, hajdamaks, and Huzuls, and the lowland folk aver that there is little to chose between either. But that is a libel.

Even a bear up yonder is as good-natured as a bear can be, not having made the closer acquaintance of man. A hunter by nature, he hates being hunted, and grows surly in consequence; nay, it must be owned that in the more inhabited parts he has quite lost his native bonhomie, growing cunning and spiteful, robbing more than his need, and killing for mere blood-thirstiness. Not so, however, up among the wilds. He is lord in possession there; behaving, accordingly, with a pride of his own, and not without generosity. Of course he will have his daily tribute, and fetches it too--now from this fold, now from that; but the shepherds and herdsmen quite understand this. There is no help against the lord of the soil, they say; but the bear, on the whole, is at least a convenient landlord, fetching himself what he wants, and not expecting you to carry it after him. Not fiercely as a robber, therefore, nor stealthily as a thief; but leisurely and with dignity, Master Bruin arrives at the pen, picks out his victim--the sheep, goat, or calf which takes his fancy--and walks away with it as quietly and unconcernedly as he came. And he behaves most fairly, not oppressing one unfortunate subject more than another, but visiting in succession all the pens and folds within a certain radius of his lair; so that he may be looked for at pretty regular intervals. The herdsmen have an idea that he acts from a positive sense of justice; while others, less credulous, are of opinion that the bear of the Carpathians is a great walker, and thus naturally finds himself now in this quarter, now in that, turning to the nearest sheep-fold when it is time for his dinner. That the queer biped he meets occasionally might also serve him for a meal, he generously ignores. If he falls in with a herdsman, he gives a growl: "With your leave, brother, there is room for us both." He growls too, though more angrily, on meeting any stranger, but rarely thinks it worth while to attack him; and if he comes across any one asleep he will have a sniff at him, but without a thought of hurting.

While the wolf, that low, ugly creature, is hated and hunted down everywhere, a strange feeling of respect prevents any native of the upper mountains from killing a bear. "The poor little father has none too easy a life of it," they say, "and it is not well to murder an honest fellow." There is a tale preserved in the forest of an Englishman who once arrived there with the notion of bear-hunting. But although he had muskets of wrought silver, and held them out as presents to any who would help him, not many were found wicked enough to join in the chase. "Indeed," say the people, "all who went were frozen to death, the bad Englishman first and foremost. It served him right for wishing to hunt the poor little father." The very outlaw, the homeless hajdamak, shares this feeling; and hunting for the pleasure of it, whatever he falls in with in the lower forest regions, he acts peaceably in the upper haunts. "We go shares with the bear up here," he says, "and he behaves well to us."

The Huzul also, that hybrid of Slavonic and Mongolian blood, who lives up yonder as a herdsman, hunting the wolf and the deer, and tilling such bits of ground as he can, is not nearly so bad as he is believed to be by his betters in the lowlands. His one great vice is an ingrained want of morality, his own share, handed down from his fathers, of original sin.

His ancestors, drifting away from the great wave of migration, unused to a settled home and personal property, knew neither Christianity nor the wedded estate. Their descendant has accepted all these fetters of lawlessness, but he wears them lightly, according to his nature. He has submitted to a settled dwelling, having a hut of his own, but he will not live in it except when he cannot help himself. From the time the snow begins to melt, until it lies again mountains deep for seven months in the year, the Huzul moves about with his cattle from pasture to pasture, from glen to glen, as though driven, not only by outward necessity, but also by a mysterious inward need. While the world is green--winter to him being the black time--he is never long on the soil of his own property. He must return at times to till his field, to sow and reap his oats--the hardest and most unwelcome of labour; he must do it, else he would die for want of food, but he never thinks of adding to his wealth by means of agriculture. Every lamb rejoices his heart, and he is proud of his foals; but if he enlarges his oat-field, it is only because of the downright necessity of meeting his wants, and nothing beyond.

Neither is he greatly advanced in his notions of personal property. To be sure there are certain fields, and pastures, and flocks, belonging to certain settlements, these consisting of three or four, sometimes even of ten or twelve families of the same kindred, and united under one head who rules by birthright. This chief appoints the sowing of the fields and the management of the sheep, but not a grain of oats, nor solitary lambkin belongs to him any more than to another. It is all common property. Indeed, there are even pastures and flocks which are the joint property of several settlements, so that a single lamb may happen to belong to several hundred owners. Such property is managed, and the proceeds are allotted at the meeting of the married men, who, though of different settlements, are yet related to one another; for such common ownership always springs from the fact that their forefathers formed one family, which, growing too large, had divided for want of space. There is no personal property then, save wearing apparel and arms; everything else belongs to the family, which means to the clan. The student of political economy, it will be seen, could enrich his knowledge among the Huzuls!