-Xxii-

He was obliged, then, to set out at daybreak, his teeth chattering with cold, mounted upon the gentle little donkey, and serving as a target for the hunters’ jests, because he was dressed in a manner utterly unsuitable for the occasion, without sheepskin jacket, or leather gaiters, or broad-brimmed hat, or offensive or defensive weapons of any kind. The day dawned cloudless and magnificent: upon the grass sparkled the crystals of the hoarfrost; the earth shivered with cold and smoked faintly at the first caress of the sun; the brisk, athletic tread of the huntsmen rang out martially upon the ground hardened by frost.

From the shooting-ground, which they reached around nine o’clock, they scattered across the mountain. Julián, not knowing what to do with himself, remained glued to Don Eugenio, and saw him perform two sporting feats and bag two young partridges, still warm with freshly extinguished life. It should be noted that Don Eugenio enjoyed no reputation as a skillful shot; wherefore, when the hunters met at noon to dine in a secluded holm-oak grove, the parish priest of Naya invoked Julián’s testimony to vouch that he had seen him shoot them on the wing.

“And what is shooting on the wing, Don Julián?” they all asked him.

As the chaplain remained at a loss when so insidious a question was put to him, it occurred to the hunters that it would be capital sport to give Julián a gun and a dog and let him try to shoot something. Wrench it as he might, he had to submit. To him was assigned Chonito, an indefatigable cross-bred pointer with a split muzzle, the most eager and staunch of all the dogs with the party.

“As soon as you see the dog point,” Don Eugenio explained to the novice hunter, who scarcely knew how to hold the lethal weapon, “you get ready and encourage him to flush... and when the partridges rise, you take aim and fire as they level off... Why, it is the easiest thing in the world...”

Chonito trotted with his nose glued to the ground, his flanks trembling with impatience, now and then turning his head to make sure the hunter was following him. Suddenly he broke into a trot toward a clump of heather, and instantly froze into a sculptural attitude, tense and motionless as though cast in bronze to stand upon a pedestal.

“Now!” exclaimed the priest of Naya. “Hey, Julián, bid him flush!”

“Go in, Chonito, go in,” murmured the chaplain languidly.

The dog, surprised by the gentle tone of the command, hesitated; at last he sprang into the heather, and that very instant a whirr of wings was heard, and the covey scattered in all directions.

“Now, confound you, now! Fire!” shouted Don Eugenio.

Julián pulled the trigger... The birds flew swiftly and were out of sight in a second. Chonito, perplexed, looked at the man who had fired, at the gun, and at the ground: the noble beast seemed to ask with his eyes where the wounded partridge lay, that he might retrieve it.

Half an hour later the scene was repeated, and Chonito’s disappointment as well. Nor was it the last, for further on, in a cultivated field, the dog flushed a covey so numerous, so close, and offering so easy a shot that it was almost impossible not to bring down two or three partridges by firing into the brown. Once more Julián fired. The pointer barked with enthusiasm and delight... But not a partridge fell. Then Chonito, fixing upon the chaplain an almost human look full of contempt, wheeled round and bounded away at top speed, not deigning to heed the imperative shouts with which they called him back...

It is impossible to overstate how this proof of canine intelligence was celebrated at supper time. Great sport was made of Julián, and, as a penance for his clumsiness, he was sentenced to attend immediately, tired as he was, the night watch for hares.

The moon on that December night resembled a disk of burnished silver suspended from a dome of dark blue crystal; the heavens seemed wider and loftier by virtue of the almost boreal serenity and transparency of the atmosphere.

A sharp frost was falling, and thousands of tiny needles seemed to cross the air, tightening the flesh and driving the vital warmth back into the heart. But for the hare, clad in her warm coat of soft, dense fur, it was a night of feasting, a night for browsing on the tender pine shoots, the fresh grass drenched with dew, the aromatic herbs of the forest; and a night of love as well, a night for pursuing the timid maiden of long ears and short tail, surprising her, thrilling her, and bearing her away into the shadowy depths of the pine woods...

Behind pines and bushes the hunters lay in ambush on such nights. Stretched prone upon the ground, the muzzle of their carbine covered with paper so that the scent of powder might not reach the delicate olfactory organs of the hare, they pressed their ear to the earth, and thus would spend whole hours at a stretch. Upon the soil hardened by frost the irregular patter of the game resounded clearly; then the hunter started, raised himself, planted his knee firmly on the ground, rested the gun against his right shoulder, lowered his cheek, and nervously felt the trigger before pressing it. By the moonlight he perceived at last a monster of fantastic appearance, making prodigious leaps, appearing and disappearing like an apparition: the alternation of the darkness of the trees and the spectral, oblique rays of the moon made the harmless hare appear enormous, magnified its ears, lent to its bounds something funambulistic and fearful, and to its swift movements a dazzling speed. But the hunter, with his finger already upon the trigger, checked himself and did not fire. He knew that the phantom which had just flitted past within range of his shot was the female, the Dulcinea pursued and wooed by innumerable gallants in the mating season, whom modesty compels to hide by day in her burrow, who comes forth by night hungry and weary to nibble the pine tips, and behind whom, breathless and languishing with love, run at least three or four males eager for romantic adventures. And if the lady is allowed to pass ahead, none of the nocturnal rovers will halt in his mad career, though he hear the shot that cuts short the life of his rival, though he stumble upon his bleeding corpse in the path, though the reek of powder tell him: “At the end of your idyll stands death!”

No, they will not halt. Perhaps the instinct of cowardice peculiar to their race will move them to crouch for a few moments behind a bush or a boulder; but at the first imperceptible love-breath borne to them by the biting breeze, at the first scent of the female rising above the resinous odour exhaled by the pine woods, the fiery pursuers will dash forward again with fresh vigour, blind with love, convulsed with desire; and the hunter lying in wait will lay them low one by one at his feet, upon the grass where they dreamed of finding a bridal couch.