Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 02.djvu/212

190 puddle, where there were double tracks of animals; he examined them carefully and showed them to Olénin. He said very little; occasionally he made some remark in a whisper. The road over which they were walking was rutted by cart-wheels, and thickly overgrown with grass. The cork-elm and plane-tree forest on both sides of the road was so dense and so choked with underbrush that it was impossible to look through it. Nearly every tree was thickly overgrown to its top with wild grape-vines; and below, grew thick blackthorn bushes. Every small clearing was overrun with blackberry vines and reeds with their gray, wavy tops. Here and there large animal tracks and small tunnelled trails of pheasants led from the road into the thicket. The rankness of the vegetation in this forest, which had not been tracked by cattle, greatly impressed Olénin at every step he took, for he had never seen anything like it. This forest, the peril, the old man with his mysterious whisper, Maryánka with her strong, stately figure, and the mountains,—―all this appeared to Olénin like a dream.

"The dog has treed a pheasant," whispered the old man, looking around, and pulling his cap over his face. "Hide your mug, it is a pheasant!" He angrily waved his hand to Olénin and crept on, almost on his hands and knees. "It does not like a man's mug."

Olénin was some distance behind him, when the old man stopped and began to examine the tree. A cock called from the tree to the dog, which was barking at him, and Olénin noticed the pheasant. But just then a report, like a cannon, rang out from Eróshka's monstrous gun, and the cock flew up, dropping some of his feathers, and fell to the ground. Walking up to the old man, Olénin scared up another. Putting his gun to his shoulder, he aimed and fired. The pheasant circled upwards and then, catching in the branches, fell like a stone into the thicket.