Frederick Whishaw

“ From the spot where she had stood upon the bank a tiny stream of crystal water trickled through the grass and flowers and found its way back to the parent river.
"How terrible!" said Liuba. "Oh, how I hope I shall never be a rusalka!" and a great rush of longing came over the little bankrupt soul for that baptism of which it knew nothing save its own great need and desire for the gift, and away she floated once more over woods, meadows, and rivers, wailing and crying, "Oh, who will baptize me, baptize me! Christian men, have pity upon a soul that wanders and weeps, and baptize me!" ”

“ It was a hot day, one of the last we should see, for this was what, Vainka says, the humans call "old woman's summer," which comes after the real summer and lasts but a few days. Perhaps I was asleep: I may have been taking forty winks, for about this time we bears begin to do a trifle of yawning and napping at odd moments, in preparation for the winter function; but suddenly a truly awe-inspiring noise startled the delicious silence of the forest and brought me out of the land of dreams and upon my feet in a moment. The noise was produced by humans or devils, that much was certain. ”

“ The next moment znaharka and bear were both rising to the surface of the river Neva, beneath whose cool waters they had plunged in company. Old Tatiana could swim like a duck and soon struck out for the best landing place; the bear, like a sensible creature, following her lead. But the old woman, trained to swim in these waters from childhood, quickly outstripped her companion, and was ready, with her sickle in her hand, when that half-drowned individual arrived. ”

“ One shot as they stand, says pitiless Ivan, and another as they rise—unless I prefer to hazard a cartridge after one of yonder cranes. Crane me no cranes: it is goose or nothing; give me the gun, Ivan!
There! the deed is done, for good or for evil. The goose who stood to receive my shot lived on, and I trust still lives; his feathers are thick and tough, and I hope in mercy that if he is hit at all his plumage has turned aside or suffocated the shot, and that he is not much hurt. He is gone, anyhow, flying strongly. The goose which rose to receive fire will rise no more. He is dead ”

“ It must not be for one moment supposed that we, in the exuberance of our happiness, and in the all-accepting, unquestioning, all-enjoying spirit of the British schoolboy, cared a farthing for the depth or width of the very vilest hole that time and horseshoes ever wore in a Russian road; on the contrary, we loved the sensation of being sent flying up into the air every other minute, and if we came down upon the top of one another or of the luckless driver on his hard box-seat, or even into the six-inch dust of the road in the rear of the telyega, why, I believe we liked it all the better. ”

“ Issuing from the dark fringe of the forest, which lay but a short fifty yards away, came a procession alarming enough to frighten, out of his very wits, a man with five times the courage of Radion; first a bear—a big one—and at his heels two wolves. Behind the wolves came a wild shape—half human, but with the head of a bear. The procession moved slowly in Radion's direction, who, his limbs being fixed and rigid with terror, was entirely unable to move. Not so the herd. ”

“ For instance, to compare us physically, I am taller than many, and broader, stronger, braver, fleeter, more majestic than the best of them. A human is a mere toy in my hands, as I have proved over and over again—why, there was old Ivan the keeper, only last month, he—but I am digressing. Ha ha! I can't help laughing, though, when I recall poor Ivan's face as I hugged him—my! how his tongue did stick out!
Again, if we are compared intellectually, I very much doubt whether we bears are so inferior as my friends the humans suppose. We do not talk their language—true! ”

“ If the fish are on the feed, really on the feed, in that wonderful basin, I believe you might catch any number while the appetite of the community lasted; there is no lack of them. No possible amount of angling could produce the smallest visible effect upon the numbers of the thousands we saw that night, when the basin boiled and splashed again with the play of them. A paradise indeed for anglers is this Finland paradise of the Voksa, and, alas! a paradise lost. ”

“ How can I tell that some dreadful wild beast is not, at this instant, feeling his way down to the waters of the lake, in order to allay his thirst after having feasted upon our poor ponies, behind there in the wood? I can imagine an interview between a ferocious bear or two gaunt wolves and our faithful little quadrupeds, whose one idea in life is to do their duty and eat the breakfast, each day, that the gods provide. ”

“ To think that a crafty human being should have taken the trouble to cater for me, lie in wait for me—gun and all—actually beguile me within easy range of his fire-spitter, and then fall asleep as I lay absolutely at his mercy there—well, it was too rich for words! My supper that night was superlative—two courses—for even man tastes delicious when stolen, so to say, in this manner! ”

“ The discredited wise-woman now took to roaming the woods, armed with her sickle, in hopes of meeting and, by some fortunate combination of circumstances in which cursing and cunning and violence were all to play a part, compassing the death of her arch-enemy, the ruiner of her position and prospects, the hated, the accursed, the demoniac bear. Strangely enough, Tatiana still believed in herself though the rest of the village had learned to doubt her powers, and she was not without hope that a second curse, if personally applied, might yet prove efficacious. ”

“ I can hear your voice for I am a spirit, but mortal men cannot distinguish your speech, and if they hear anything they say, 'Listen to the whispering of the wind in the tree-top!' or, 'Do you hear how the breeze sighs this evening among the reeds in the stream?' Do you not know that you have but seven years in which to perform your hopeless task, and that after that you are at liberty to come down among us here in the cool waters? ”

“ Then at length the spirit of the assembled population returned to them, and, as though with one accord, the entire crowd gave vent to a shriek of relief and rage; men began to finger their scythes and women their rakes, and the whole assembly moved a step or two towards the intruder. Then Bruin began to think that discretion was, perhaps, after all, the better part of valour, and, with a few savage snarls and grunts, he retired into the forest, stepping upon a sleeping baby as he withdrew, and causing the child to wake and scream with pain or fright. ”

“ I don't care much for tough, grown-up humans; but I gave him a touch sufficient to knock the breath out of his body, and ate him all the same. I always take the opportunity to pay off old scores; and here was a double one.
However, taking one thing with another, I am really not quite sure that I do not dislike wolves even more than men: I certainly despise them more. A man will, as a rule, stand up to an enemy, even to a superior creature like myself; whereas a wolf will never fight until he is wounded so badly that he cannot run away. ”

“ Vainka goes to town (St. Petersburg) in order to amuse the people by dancing on his hind legs, pretending to wrestle with his master, and other foolery, and with—I blush to record it—with a ring through his nostrils, to which a chain is attached. Poor dear old Vainka—his spirit is completely broken; he has actually learned to tolerate human-kind, and declares that they only require to be known in order to be appreciated, and that he does not think he could exist now without the applause which his performances call forth from the vulgar brutes of humans who have degraded him. ”

“ Thousands of years at Erinofka, with no terrestrial cares to weigh me down; face to face and heart to heart with Nature, learning her secrets day long; a life-atom among myriads of others; a little part of an infinite whole; harmless, free, careless, contented, in fellowship with bird and beast and insect, and with every form of life that has a vested interest in wood and moor and wet morass. ”

“ Fifty yards or more in front of me the waters, but lately released from their entire subjection to the yoke of winter, may be heard softly lapping the shore in a series of gentle kisses, stolen in the darkness; for it is but three in the morning—if that, and I can see nothing but the broad wing of Night still stretched over land and lake. On either side of the shalashka there extends, I believe, a spur of moorland; behind is the forest: never far away in a Russian landscape. ”

“ The night and the place and the circumstances are about as full of poetry as such things can be; my very soul seems steeped in mysticism, and the witchery of the surroundings has made a poet of me to my very backbone; but—well, they did not give us time to eat at Wiborg, nor at St. Andrea, nor anywhere else, and the very word "supper" is sufficient to send poetry to the winds and to convert the poet into the ravening wolf until the leeway of the appetite has been made up. ”

“ Down comes fate upon the thoughtless reveller; a turn of the wrist with the right, and a swift upward motion of the left arm, and anything there may chance to be busying itself at the baited end of the stick is my own. What do I see? A big crawfish? It is indeed a big crawfish, and with it a second and yet a third, true Sairki monsters, all three of them, seething and glistening in their dark brown armour at the bottom of the net, and laying hold angrily of each other wherever they can fasten a claw, as though each were chastising his companions for having brought him into this mess. ”

“ One morning, not long after the pastuch had set out with his cattle for the day's wandering over moor and grass-land, a man arrived from a village distant some seven or eight miles through the forest, accompanied by a bull whose appearance filled the minds of those who witnessed its arrival with astonishment and some awe. If they had not already known that old Vasilice, the late lord of the herd, was in his grave, or rather in the stomachs of two grey demon-wolves of the forest, they would have said that this new bull was Vasilice redivivus. ”

“ We shall be kind to you, never fear, and you shall dance and sport your time away instead of wandering and whining over land and sea, and all for the sake of something which may not be worth the finding! And you shall learn to captivate the hated human beings who would not listen to your voice, and you shall entice them down and strangle them—strangle them! ”

“ We offered those fish the choicest delicacies that London makers could produce; we tempted them with phantoms so fascinating that one would suppose any fish of decently discriminative powers would rise from its moist bed and come out, at night, to feed upon them as they lay on the table within the very house. We dangled these tempting morsels over the very spots where they were known to lie; but for two days did these Voksa monsters sulk and turn their faces steadfastly from us. ”

“ The speculator may find himself possessor of salmon enough, as the result of but one cast, to feed a regiment for a week, or—if not one of the favoured of Fortune—may purchase a dozen "hauls" of the net and go away empty-handed. If so, he is sure to see, as he floats dejectedly away, a vast quantity of fish landed at the very next haul after his departure; he will see their silver sides gleaming in the sun from a distance, and he will give his opinion as to the reliability of the goddess who holds the scales. ”

“ After a moment or two of that intense waiting which every sportsman knows and loves—while the birds, hidden somewhere in the heather or greenery, are eyeing their human and canine disturbers, and wondering what is best to be done, whether to run or fly, or remain crouching—there came the usual pulse-fluttering rustle, and up and away went three superb young blackcock, nearly full grown, two to Jemmie's side, one to my own. ”

“ They are sure to do justice to it, for this is their favourite feeding-ground—all over this marsh, so Ivan says. It is growing lighter. The conglomeration of sounds of life seems to have startled the Night, and reminded her that she must hurry away and attend to her duties in another hemisphere. She is gradually withdrawing her soft wings—those dark and motherly wings which have guarded so well her little ones for many a long silent hour. Go in peace, Mother Night, for the broad Sun will take good care of your bantlings during your absence. ”

“ The noise immediately aroused us, for it recalled a similar sound which we had good cause to remember, and carried us back to that dreadful day when our poor mother had been done to death, together with little Katia. On peeping through the hole we soon perceived that we were besieged by two men—both of whom were peasants. One of these held a fire-stick, and the sight of it put my heart all of a quake; for I confess, though I fear nothing else in the world, I am terribly frightened of that dreadful, death-spitting stick, called gun. ”