‘Blast you!’ he roared, brandishing his whip at the count. ‘You let him go! . . . Call yourself a huntsman?’ And evidently not willing to waste any more words on the embarrassed and frightened count, he turned away from him and took his fury out on the brown gelding, lashing its sweating and heaving flanks as he flew off after the dogs. The count stood there like a schoolboy after punishment, looking round on all sides and hoping his smile might summon up Semyon to sympathize with him in his dire situation. But Semyon wasn’t there – he had galloped round outside the bushes to cut the wolf off from the wood. The men in the field had also galloped in on their prey, from two different sides. But the wolf had nipped off through the bushes, and not one of the party got anywhere near him.
CHAPTER 5
Meanwhile Nikolay Rostov was standing at his post, watching for the wolf. From the noise of the chase as it came up close and went away again, from the cries of the dogs that were familiar to him, from the voices of the huntsmen near by, far away and then suddenly getting louder, he could follow what was going on within the copse. He knew there were young and old wolves in the covert. He knew the hounds had split into two packs, and somewhere they had had sight of a wolf, but something had gone wrong. Every second he expected a wolf to come his way. He had worked things out in a thousand different ways – how the wolf would emerge, where it would happen and how he would deal with it. Hope gave way to despair. Several times he prayed to God for a wolf to run out on him. He prayed with the kind of passion and sincerity which often overwhelms people in moments of deep distress over trivialities. ‘Oh, what would it cost Thee,’ he asked God, ‘to do this for me? I know Thou art great and it’s a sin to pray for this, but for God’s sake please let an old wolf come out on me, and let Karay catch him and get his teeth into his throat and finish him off right in front of ‘Uncle’, because he’s watching me.’ Rostov strained his eyes a thousand times during that half-hour, anxiously scanning the thickets at the edge of the copse, where a couple of scraggy oaks towered above the aspen undergrowth, an undercut bank led steeply down the ravine and ‘Uncle’s’ cap peeped out from behind a bush on the right-hand side.
‘No, I won’t get that kind of luck,’ thought Rostov. ‘And it would cost Him so little! No chance! I’m always unlucky – at cards, fighting in the war, everything.’ Clear visions of Austerlitz and Dolokhov flashed through his mind in rapid succession. ‘Just once in my life to kill an old wolf. It’s all I want!’ he thought, straining eyes and ears, looking left, right and centre, and listening for the slightest variation in sound coming from the hunt. He looked to the right again, and this time he saw something running towards him over the open ground. ‘No, it can’t be!’ thought Rostov, taking a deep breath, as men do when something long expected is finally achieved. This was a sheer fluke, and it had come about so simply, with no sound, no splendid flourish, nothing to mark its arrival. Rostov couldn’t believe his eyes, and his doubts lasted more than a second. But the wolf was running on. She made a clumsy job of jumping across a little hollow that lay across her path.
It was an old she-wolf, grey-backed, with a well-filled, reddish belly. She wasn’t in a hurry, apparently confident that no one could see her. Rostov held his breath and looked round at the dogs. Some were lying there, some were standing around, and they were oblivious to everything, not having seen the wolf. Old Karay had his head turned round and his yellow teeth bared as he rummaged angrily for a flea, snapping at his own haunches. ‘Loo! loo! loo!’ Rostov whispered, pursing his lips. The dogs leapt up, jingling the iron fittings on the leashes, and pricked up their ears. Karay stopped scratching his hind-leg and got up, cocking his ears and wagging his tail, with all its straggly tufts of hair.
‘Shall I let them go?’ Nikolay asked himself as the wolf moved away from the copse and came towards him. Suddenly the wolf was physically transformed. She shuddered – this was probably the first time she had felt human eyes upon her – turned her head slightly towards the huntsman and stopped, wondering whether to go on or go back. ‘No difference. I’m going on!’ the wolf seemed to say to herself, and she pressed on without looking round, treading softly and cautiously but with a firm and easy step. ‘Loo! loo! . . .’ Nikolay yelled in an unrecognizable voice, and his trusty horse hurtled off downhill of its own accord and leapt the watercourse to intercept the wolf, while the hounds ran even faster and overtook it.
