Nikolay couldn’t hear himself yelling and had no sense of galloping; he saw neither the dogs nor the ground he was covering. All he could see was the wolf, as she quickened her pace, bounding on in a dead straight line along the gully. The leading hound was Milka, the stocky black and white bitch, and she was closing on her. Nearer, nearer, almost there . . . But the wolf turned slightly sideways, and Milka, instead of putting on her usual final spurt, suddenly stiffened her fore-legs and pulled up with her tail in the air.
‘Loo! loo! loo!’ yelled Nikolay.
A red hound called Lyubim darted past Milka, dashed at the wolf and seized her by the hind leg, only to leap away immediately in terror. The wolf had squatted down, snarling, but now she got up again and raced away, followed a few feet behind by all the dogs, though they took care not to get too close.
‘She’ll get away! No, she can’t!’ thought Nikolay, still yelling in a husky voice.
‘Karay! Loo! loo!’ he yelled, looking for the old hound, his one last hope.
Karay summoned up all the strength left in his old frame and stretched out to his full length as he watched where the wolf was going and bounded slightly away from her to cut across her path. But it was clear from the wolf’s speed and the dog’s slowness that Karay had miscalculated. Nikolay could now see the copse not far ahead, and once the wolf got there she would be sure to escape. But suddenly in front of him some dogs appeared and a man with them, galloping almost straight at the wolf. There was still hope. A lanky, yellowish young borzoi, not one of the Rostovs’ – Nikolay didn’t know him – flew towards him straight at the wolf and almost knocked her down. The wolf recovered faster than might have been expected, snarled and savaged the young hound, which fell headlong on the ground with a piercing yelp, covered with blood from a gash in its side.
‘Karay! Come on, old fellow!’ Nikolay wailed.
Because of the wolf’s setback the old dog, with tufts of matted hair dangling from his haunches, had managed to cut across the wolf’s path and was now only five paces behind her. Sensing the danger, the wolf took one sideways glance at Karay, tucked her tail further down between her legs and ran on even faster. But then something happened to Karay – Nikolay couldn’t see exactly what it was – and there he was on top of the wolf with the pair of them rolling down in a struggling heap into a gully just ahead.
That moment, the moment when Nikolay saw the dogs struggling with the wolf down in the gully, her grey coat visible at the bottom of the heap, one hind-leg sticking out, her ears flattened and her head gasping in terror (Karay had her by the throat) – the moment Nikolay saw all this was the happiest moment of his whole life. He had grasped the pommel of his saddle to get down and stab the creature when suddenly the wolf stuck her head up through the heaving mass of dogs and managed to get her fore-legs out on to the edge of the gully. With a snap of her teeth (Karay having let go of her throat), she heaved her hind-legs out of the hollow, tucked her tail back down, struggled free of the dogs and ran off again. Karay stumbled out of the gully with his hackles raised, hurt and perhaps badly wounded.
‘Oh my God . . . No!’ Nikolay shouted in despair. But then one of ‘Uncle’s’ huntsmen cut across from the other side and his hounds ran the wolf to earth again. Again she was hemmed in on all sides.
Nikolay, his groom, ‘Uncle’ and his huntsman pranced round above the beast, whooping and howling, a second away from dismounting when the wolf cowered away, but starting forward again every time she shook herself free and edged towards the copse which might yet be her salvation.
At the beginning of this cruel scene Danilo, hearing the hunters’ cries, had darted into the edge of the copse. He saw that Karay had the wolf at his mercy and checked his horse, assuming it was all over. But when he saw that the hunters were not dismounting and the wolf was shaking herself free and was off again, Danilo galloped his own horse, not towards the wolf, but straight towards the copse, like Karay, to cut her off. It was because of this manoeuvre that he was bearing down on the wolf when ‘Uncle’s’ dogs brought her down for the second time.
Danilo galloped up in silence, holding a drawn dagger in his left hand and lashing the heaving flanks of his chestnut, using his riding whip as a kind of flail.
