War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [331]
“Good girl, Milushka!” Nikolai cried triumphantly. It seemed that Milka was about to hit the hare and snatch him up, but she drew level and missed him. The hare leaped aside. Again the beautiful Yerza was on the hare and hovering right over his tail, as if measuring so as not to miss this time and take him by the haunch.
“Yerzinka! Dearie!” wailed Ilagin in a voice not his own. Yerza did not heed his prayer. At the very moment she was expected to seize the hare, he swerved and flew out to the boundary between the green fields and the stubble. Again Yerza and Milka, like a team of horses, straightened up and sped after the hare; it was easier for him to run along the boundary, and dogs could not close in on him so quickly.
“Rugai! Rugayushka! Right you are!” a new voice cried just then, and Rugai, the uncle’s red, hunchbacked dog, stretching out, then arching his back, caught up with the first pair of dogs, went ahead of them, raced with a terrible selflessness right onto the hare, knocked him from the boundary into the green field, raced on still more fiercely over the muddy green growth, sinking up to his knees, and one could only see him go rolling head over heels, dirtying his back in the mud, together with the hare. The dogs surrounded him in a star. A moment later everyone was standing by the crowding dogs. The happy uncle dismounted alone and cut off the hare’s foot. Shaking the hare to make the blood run down, he looked around uneasily, his eyes darting, not knowing where to put his arms and legs, and spoke, himself not knowing what or to whom. “There’s a right good piece of work…There’s a dog…outran them all, a thousand roubles or one—right you are!” he said, gasping and looking around angrily, as if scolding someone, as if they were all his enemies, as if they had all offended him, and he had only now finally managed to vindicate himself. “There’s your thousand-ruble dogs for you—right you are!”
“Catch, Rugai!” he said, tossing him the cutoff paw with dirt stuck to it. “You earned it—right you are!”
“She’s worn out, she ran him down three times by herself,” Nikolai said, also not listening to anyone and not caring whether anyone was listening to him.
“He cut in!” Ilagin’s groom was saying.
“She almost had him, and after that any mongrel could have caught him!” Ilagin was saying at the same time, red-faced, trying to catch his breath after the galloping and excitement. At the same time, Natasha, without pausing for breath, let out a joyful and rapturous shriek, so shrill that it made their ears ring. With this shriek she expressed everything the other hunters had expressed with their simultaneous talk. And this shriek was so odd that she herself would have been embarrassed at such wild shrieking, and they all would have been surprised at it, if it had happened at any other time. The uncle strapped up the hare, flipped it nimbly and deftly across his horse’s croup, as if reproaching them all by this flipping, and, mounting his chestnut with such a look as though he did not even want to speak with anyone, rode off. Everyone else but he, sad and offended, rode along and only after a long time could they recover their former sham indifference. For a long time they kept glancing at the red Rugai, who, his hunched back dirty with mud, jingling his collar, trotted behind the uncle’s horse’s legs with the calm look of a conqueror.
“So I’m just like all the rest, when it’s not a matter of the chase. Well, but when it is, watch out!” was, as it seemed to Nikolai, what the dog’s look said.
When, a long time later, the uncle rode up to Nikolai and began speaking to him, Nikolai felt flattered that, after all that had