I was thinking yesterday of Mattli and his last wolf, as we moved forward through the night, and thereupon began to puzzle over a question which seems to have puzzled no one else, namely, how it comes about that this animal is extinct in all the Alpine region, notwithstanding its enormous area of inaccessible territory, whereas in relatively populous districts such as the Dordogne it is still common enough to be something of a nuisance, in spite of ceaseless persecution on the part of man. I concluded, perhaps wrongly, that the wolf has been extirpated hereabouts not so much by the human race as by hunger; his natural prey (hares, wildfowl, etc.) having grown much scarcer of late—scarcer than they are in Scandinavia or Russia, while sheep and goats and dogs, which he can still pick up in places like the Vosges or Apennines, are not so easy to capture during the severe alpine winter, being mostly kept within doors. If he could go to sleep like the bear, or had the cunning of the fox, he might have survived to this day.
At last we emerged on the level again and, passing the church of St. Martin, found ourselves under the lights of Ludesch. Never before had that village seemed so endlessly long.
Those gray, weather-beaten erratics of which I spoke have been gradually disappearing from the landscape since my Rosenegg days. They used to be quite a feature of the countryside. When you crossed our petrifying stream, for instance, you beheld a horde of them scattered over the slanting field below the road, and some were of prodigious size, bearing bushes and little trees on their backs. Not one of those is left; I know of only a single remaining block which is decorated with timber; you will never find it, though you may certainly pass a spot, not far from Jordan castle, where twenty-three can still be counted lying about—dwarfs, mostly, or half submerged in the earth. The peasant makes war on these things; he shatters them in pieces with dynamite or splits them with wedges; for they take up room, they interfere with his mowing operations, their stone is admirably adapted for building purposes. And here is another little puzzle. Sometimes, in a thick wood, one may stumble upon the conscientiously piled-up fragments of what used to be a block of this kind, all forgotten and overgrown with moss; why go to the trouble of breaking up this fractious material, and then do nothing with it? Mystery!
The wall of the road leading up from the Bludesch church of St. Nicholas towards Tiefis consists largely of the primitive rock of erratics which formerly strewed the surrounding land; so does that which leaves Tiefis in the direction of our own village.
Which reminds me of our last, and most disappointing, visit to the “innkeepress and his beautiful girl.” There was no question, that day, of the embrassez-moi on which Mr. R. has set his simple heart, for the baby was absent, having gone for a brief “Sommerfrische”—as if Tiefis were not fresh enough already—up to Thüringerberg, to stay with a sister of her mother’s, who comes from there. She would be back in a few days, we were told. A piece of downright bad luck for him! He seemed to be really upset; so much so, that I had to promise we should return again soon. Then he suddenly recalled my undertaking to show him over the Valduna asylum; it would be an agreeable diversion and fill up the time; we could run down to Bregenz too, as he had never seen a great inland water like the Lake of Constance.
My passion for idiots having waned of late, I was hoping he had forgotten about Valduna. But no. He may forget the past participle of every one of our irregular verbs; the prospect of an exhibition of three or four dozen lunatics is the kind of thing he can be trusted to remember. So be it. After all, there is no harm in going there; no harm whatever. The sight of those poor wretches may medicine his youthful bumptiousness and make him more contented with his own lot in life which, once a week or so, gives occasion for some ludicrously savage outburst.