‘Yerzynka, come on, darling!’ wailed Ilagin, his voice unrecognizable. Yerza did not respond. Poised and about to seize the hare, she could only watch as he swerved and darted away to the ridge between the stubble and the green field. Again Yerza and Milka, running side by side like horses in double harness, flew after the hare; he was better off up on the ridge, and the dogs were taking longer to close him down.
‘Rugay! Rugayushka! Fair for the chase!’ This time it was another voice. And it was Rugay, ‘Uncle’s’ hunched-up red dog, reaching out to his full length and curving his back, who caught up with the two leading dogs, flashed past and flung himself with complete abandon on the hare, toppling him from the ridge down into the green field, and leapt at him again even more savagely, sinking knee-deep in the boggy ground until all you could see was a rolling mass of dog and hare and the dog’s back covered with mud. The other dogs gathered round, their behinds sticking out again like the points of a star. Within a few moments the whole party had pulled up alongside the horde of dogs. A delighted ‘Uncle’ was the only one to dismount, cut off a hare’s foot and shake the blood away. He stared about edgily, eyes dancing, hands and legs almost out of control. He carried on talking, blurting out the first thing that came into his head and to no one in particular. ‘Nice chase that one . . . some dog! . . . outstripped the lot of them . . . one-rouble-dogs, thousand-rouble dogs . . . Fair for the chase!’ he gabbled, gasping and glaring aggressively, fulminating against the world in general, and all those enemies who had insulted him, and now at last he had a chance to get his own back. ‘Do what you want with your thousand-rouble dogs . . . Fair for the chase! Rugay, here’s a nice little foot for you,’ he said, dropping the hare’s severed muddy foot for the dog. ‘You’ve earned it . . . Fair for the chase!’
‘She was finished. She had three goes on her own,’ Nikolay was saying. He too wasn’t listening to anyone else and didn’t mind whether he was being heard or not.
‘Oh yes, cutting across like that!’ said one of Ilagin’s grooms.
‘Course, once he’d been run down and missed like that, any old mongrel could have caught him,’ Ilagin was saying at the same moment, red in the face and struggling to get his breath back after all the galloping and excitement. And also at the same time Natasha, who wasn’t even trying to get her breath back, shrieked with such rapturous excitement that her scream rang in everyone’s ears. It was a scream that said what the others were saying just by chattering all at once. It was the kind of weird scream that she would have been ashamed of, and the others would have been amazed to hear, at any other time. ‘Uncle’, meanwhile, had flung the hare neatly and tidily across his horse’s hind-quarters and strapped him to the saddle, taunting them all by the very gesture, and with a strong hint that he had no wish to speak to anyone he got on his bay and set off home. Everyone else rode away too, he being the only one not suffering from a sense of injury and unhappiness, and it took some time for the rest of them to regain their previous outward show of indifference. For some time after, they kept looking askance at red Rugay, who trotted along behind ‘Uncle’s’ horse with mud all over his hunched-up back, jingling the fittings on his leash, with the serene air of a conqueror.
‘Look, I’m just like any other dog till it comes to a chase, but then – watch out!’ was what the dog’s demeanour conveyed, or so it seemed to Nikolay.
When, a good deal later on, ‘Uncle’ rode up to Nikolay and spoke to him, Nikolay felt quite flattered they were still on speaking terms after all that had happened.
CHAPTER 7
When Ilagin took leave of them in the early evening Nikolay, realizing he was a long way from home, accepted ‘Uncle’s’ invitation for the hunting party to stay the night with him in the village of Mikhaylovka.
‘You should come to my place . . . Fair for the chase!’ said ‘Uncle’. ‘Best thing all round. Look, it’s wet, you could have a nice rest, and we could send the little countess home in a trap.’ The invitation was accepted, a huntsman was dispatched to Otradnoye for a trap, and Nikolay, Natasha and Petya rode over to ‘Uncle’s’ house.
Men servants large and small, half-a-dozen of them, came running out on to the front steps to meet their master, while the women, old, large and small, slipped out in dozens round the back to watch the arrival of the huntsmen. The presence of Natasha – a woman, nay, a lady, on horseback – roused the curiosity of ‘Uncle’s’ house serfs to such a pitch that many of them lost all inhibitions and went straight up to her, staring her in the face and voicing their opinions about her, as though she were some kind of exhibit rather than a human being, some wondrous object incapable of hearing and understanding what was being said about her.
