Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/42

30 weak, whom he despises and persecutes, and the strong, whom he fears.

During our days on the river my hunter's heart was thrilled with watching, in the early morning hours and during the dusk of evening, the flocks of wild duck and the V's of honking geese going north in their spring migration. They usually flew easily and low, calling to one another with notes that betokened no distrust. One could even distinguish the sounds of the heavier wings of the geese and swans mingled with the quicker rhythms of duck and teal. They flew without fear, as they had not experienced danger in the marshy jungles of Siam and Burma; only now they were nearing attractive feeding grounds where death awaited some of them. There across the railroad stretched the marshes, where hunters crouched and awaited their advent and where, through all the weeks of spring, individual birds are summoned by the hunter on their last flight and tumble or sail with wounded breast and wing to earth and death.

But such thoughts steal into the mind only here in town, when one is sitting at a desk with telephone and electric reading lamp by one's side and with the jangling of cars and the threatening klaxons of the motors intruding from the street; but out there, where the long lines of geese string over the river, the hunter has no such scruples. His eyes only count the birds and narrow down to fix his aim.

As I watched the very first flocks from our steamer's deck, I resolved, just as soon as my work should permit, to go out for a hunt. I never left home without a shotgun and a rifle, and a long sojourn in the Ussurian country had taught me that a hunter with less than three hundred shells is no hunter at all but only a pitiable dilettante. Consequently I had with me my 12-gauge Sauer, my