Peasant Tales of Russia

by Vasilii Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko

"Shall I take your last piece?" he said, left the crust lying on the table and departed.

Another day he met a hunter in the forest and would probably have passed him with an ordinary greeting, had not the latter pointed his gun at him.

Then a cloud came before Ivan's eyes; he rushed at the stranger and tore him down. His breath was soon choked out of him, and no one knew how long his body lay in the forest before the wolves devoured it. He had brought his death on himself. The fugitive was glad to get rid of his convict's garb and now wore a coat of sheepskin. He also had a gun to protect himself from wild beasts. If his hair had only been longer, he had no need to go out of people's way.

O Liberty! His conscience was silent; no recollection of the blood which he had shed stirred in him, or if it did occur to his mind, it troubled him as little as it troubles a beast of prey. Men had always been the old vagabond's worst enemies. He had grown up like a hungry, young dog, a mark for missiles and kicks. He received little to eat and many blows, and when hunger drove him to steal, he received more blows. In the house of correction the priest spoke to him of the sufferings of Christ, of repentance and reform. He listened gloomily and returned to his cell. "Christ is gracious to sinners," he thought, "but who has ever been gracious to me?"

After he had shed blood once, his soul seemed to become covered with a hard crust. He became like an animal, escaped from prison when he could, and no longer had a home. Since then his eyebrows were closely contracted over his gloomy eyes, and he was filled with bitter hatred against the whole world. He only longed for one thing, the solitude of field and forest, for liberty and loneliness, where he felt no one near him.

Still farther and farther he roamed between the grey scarred tree-trunks. Through the carpet of pine-needles over which his foot passed, there were springing here and there pointed little leaves and the first grass-blades. The squirrels had already ventured out of their warm nests into the sunshine and sprang briskly and blithely from branch to branch, as though they would make fun of the old vagabond. The sky sent down soft spring showers, or brief thunder-storms, or expanded itself in blue serenity as though it would warm the earth on its bosom. Ivan wandered through dark ravines, where noisy rivulets streamed down on all sides, and in the perpetual shadow the snow still lay white and untouched.

The farther he went, the louder and merrier foamed and bubbled the tides of spring. O Liberty!

When the fugitive was tired, he could find a shelter anywhere. He would fling himself down where he liked, cross his hands under his head, and look up at the sky till his eyes closed of themselves. The wounds on his legs caused by the iron fetters began to heal; no one who met him would have guessed who he was. But the primeval forest seemed quite deserted; no tree bore the mark of an axe, and none had been felled. Here a black scorched pine-tree had been blasted by the lightning; there a half-decayed one, whose top was entangled in its neighbour's branches, had collapsed from sheer old age. This solitude had been profaned by no one's foot; here was real freedom.

Only now and then he encountered wild animals. Once a bear came within gun-shot, but the old man spared his life. "You have nothing to give me now," he thought. "Your skin is no use in summer. Come again in winter." And he shouted at the animal in such a terrible voice, that it trotted off with its tail drawn in.

Sometimes he heard the howling of the wolves in the distance; in the deep silence it sounded weird and terrifying. It filled the old man with a strange feeling, not fear, but in his innermost being something seemed to howl and moan in sympathy with the beasts of prey. Was he not indeed like a wolf among men? Cowering by the fires he made, he would gaze for hours into the red glowing embers. The flames roared and strained towards the dark sky as though they would make themselves free; the fresh brushwood crackled and emitted clouds of blue whirling smoke; the birch-trunk over which the sparks danced, contracted itself as though in a spasm, till it finally flared up in a sheet of fire, and the solitary man felt ever more painfully conscious that he too was every one's enemy, and was only tolerated in this wilderness like those creatures whose howling so strangely thrilled his heart. The darkness which seemed to press from all sides on the fire looked between the grey pine-trunks on the gloomy face of the convict, and listened to his moody murmuring.