Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [22]
“What are you shouting for? Pfui! I’m not afraid of you! I’m not afraid of mere generals, Your Excellency! I’m especially not afraid of retired generals! So please shut your mouth!”
“What an extraordinary fellow he is! Walks around and messes everything up! It’s enough to try the patience of an angel.”
“Stop shouting, general! If you have to shout at someone, shout at Mange. He’s afraid of generals. You can’t unnerve a real huntsman! You might as well admit you don’t know how to fire a gun!”
“Enough, sir! One word from me, and there’s a dozen thrown back in my face!” the general said, and then he turned to Vanya. “Vanya, dear boy, give me my powder horn!”
“What made you ask that soldier of fortune to go hunting with you?” the doctor asked Yegor Yegorich.
“Had to, my dear fellow,” replied Yegor Yegorich. “Simply had to take him. I owe him eight thousand.… Yes, my dear boy, all those accursed debts of mine …”
Yegor Yegorich left the sentence unfinished and waved his hand.
“Is it true you are jealous of me?”
Yegor Yegorich turned away and aimed at a high-flying kite.
“Lost it, you little whippersnapper!” came the rumbling roar of the general. “Lost it, and it cost a hundred rubles! You’re a little pig, that’s what you are!”
Yegor Yegorich went over to the general and asked what the matter was. It appeared that Vanya had lost the general’s cartridge bag. A search was undertaken, and the hunt was broken off. The search lasted an hour and a quarter, and was crowned with success. With the cartridge bag recovered, the hunters sat down for a rest.
The second group of quail hunters was also having its troubles. Within this group Mikhey Yegorich behaved as badly as the doctor, and perhaps worse. He knocked the guns out of their hands, quarreled violently, thrashed the dogs, scattered powder around, and in a word—the devil knows what he wasn’t up to! After some unsuccessful shooting at quail Kardamonov and his dogs went after a young kite. They winged it, but were never able to retrieve it. Captain Kardamanov, second class, killed a marmot with a stone.
“Gentlemen, let us dissect the marmot,” suggested Nekrichikhvostov,1 clerk to the marshal of the nobility.
So the hunters sat down in the grass, took out their penknives, and began to dissect the creature.
“I can’t find anything in this marmot,” Nekrichikhvostov complained when the marmot had been cut to ribbons. “It doesn’t have a heart. It has entrails, though. Know what, gentlemen? Let us go on to the marshes. What can we shoot here? Quail isn’t game. We ought to be going after woodcock and snipe. Shall we go?”
The hunters rose and wandered lazily in the direction of their carriages. When they were close to the carriages, they fired a volley at the local pigeons and killed one.
“Tallyho! Your Excellency! Yegorich!” shouted the members of the second group when they caught sight of the first group sitting down and resting.
The general and Yegor Yegorich looked round. The second group were waving their caps.
“What on earth are you doing that for?” Yegor Yegorich shouted.
“Success! We’ve killed a bustard! Come quickly!”
The first group simply refused to believe they had killed a bustard and went straight off to the carriages. Once inside the carriages, they decided to leave the quail in peace and agreed to follow an itinerary which would take them three miles farther on—into the marshes.
“I get all burned up when I’m hunting,” the general confided to the doctor when the troikas had brought them a mile or so away from the hayfield. “I get all burned up! I wouldn’t spare my own father! Please forgive an old man, eh?”
“Hm.”
“Sweet old rogue,” Yegor Yegorich whispered into the doctor’s ear. “He says that because it’s the fashion nowadays to marry off your daughter to a doctor. He’s a sly excellency, he is! Hee-hee-hee!…”
“We’re coming to the wide-open spaces,” Vanya said.
“So we are. Plenty of ’em.”
“What’s that?”
“Gentlemen, where is Bolva?” Mange said, wondering where he had gone.
They all stared at