In Partial Disgrace (43 page)
“Mongoloid.”
Then he nodded and stepped back, waving to the Skopje to be off.
“One last thing, Herr Doktor.” He grinned mischievously, “The chow carries its tail over its back. As long as it’s up the weather’s fine. But if it ever drops, even a centimeter, run like a lunatic.”
Then he offered his hand again. But the Skopje cracked his whip, bellowing out in a high falsetto:
“Stand clear, ye warmints!”
The wheels spun gravel and the kennels issued a baleful, incandescent roar. As the carriage door slammed on Felix’s hand, from within the cab there came only a hiss:
“I walk out of your heart!”
My father ran alongside the carriage for perhaps a mile, only his apologetic white thumb visible in the black doorframe. He felt lonely as that little finger when, at a sharp turning of the road, he was flung into a ditch.
The village clock did not sound but showed such a time as perhaps never comes.
Sport (Aufidius)
No country offers as much variety in hunting as the great pied-à-terre of Cannonia. An hour’s drive in any direction will give the Sportsman an unlimited extent of moor and forest where he can range at will, whilst taking all manner of bodily relaxation in jorrocks, jaunts, and jollities. The visitor who is able to ride cross country, drop birds, take the tiller of a yacht, play rackets with skill, lure a great salmon to an artificial fly, keeping it in play for hours on the trace of a single gut, will have little difficulty in securing an invitation to a shooting party.
It is nevertheless advisable to put yourself under the expert guidance of one of the peasant nimrods of your district. They are capital walkers, generally amusing companions, and by no means despicable shots. Seek a good cragsman, untiring and dependable, clammy of brow with good lungs and heart, and a hand which when called into play, shows no tremor.
The shooting season commences on the fifteenth of July at the intersection of our sixteen migratory routes, which comprise the complete trajectory, song line, and career of every bird alive. First come the willow grouse, hazel grouse, woodcock, grate, single, and jack snipe, golden plover, curlew, corn crake,
et alia
. The double snipe arrive about the twelfth of August, but a night’s frost will drive them southwards. Then come the incantations of Asia: duck, teal, thrush, titmouse, swallow, sparrow, swan, fieldfair, wildgoose, nightingale, plover, raven, lark, lubber, goldfinch, seagull, and merganser. (Also cranes and white pelican, though these are not considered at the head of the game list.)
The foreign minister of the country, Count Moritz Achilles Zich, founder of the famous antlers collections in Munich, often leaves his estate at eleven at night, shoots his birds high in the mountains, and is back for his daily duties at seven. At Scipsi, in 1895, he shot eleven hundred and twenty pheasants in one day, dispensing twenty-five thousand Purdey cartridges, and near Chorgo he had the good fortune to bag thirty-two duck with a single discharge of his gun. His estate at Malaka includes eagles, vultures, and flamingoes on the jealously preserved game list, though in middle age his most esteemed sport is the killing of skylarks with golf balls.
The ibex was reintroduced to Cannonia by Victor Emmanuel and was carefully preserved there by his son, King Humbert, until his assassination. The golden pheasant was provided to several forests by a former Marquis of Breadalbane, and the mouflon is from an unknown donor in Hungary. The American rainbow trout and turkey were imported in the 1890s, as were the great gray wolf from Iskalisia; oryx and coubain hail from the Grand Duke Serge’s estate in the Caucasus. One can replicate here the equivalent of Turkish sea fishing, a goose shoot at Seville, the ibex stalking of Novgorod, an otter drive in the Pontine Marshes, or the dolphin shooting off Cattegat.
In July, when raspberries come, the bear turns vegetarian; then mulberries and wild apples in the month of September; then acorns in October and November. By the end of September,
Black Game
have retired to the thickest woods. The willow grouse are so packed in the turnip fields as to defy the wariest dog; the rest have left for warmer climes. It is now that the bateau and boat shooting commences. Punts contain boatmen only. In coot-drives the etiquette is to complete the line and keep it closed, driving from one end of the lake to the other, pressing the game ashore. If the birds should fly overhead and settle on the other side of the line, the punts are put about and the drive repeated from the other side.
In bustard-stalking, the sportsman goes to the other extreme, making no attempt to hide, but on the contrary, showing himself carelessly, as if unaware of the birds’ presence. In a native cart with a thatched roof he drives slowly beside the plowed fields like some farmer inspecting his land, then brings them down with a knout.
Rabbits are met with in most places, even in the dunes, and are not protected. Ferrets are used to thin them out. There are red and white hares in the woods that may be enticed by imitating a doe’s bleat, which may also produce the bonus of an amorous, twenty-six point red buck.
The winter season comprises the following: vulpecibism is not here considered a crime, and many a gallant fox has fallen from a deadly barrel behind a bateau. As the country is mostly unrideable, foxes are nevertheless contingent and are trapped adrag, or hunted with clubs near Phamaphy.
The forest pig should be approached from behind, leaping upon it and gripping it with your knees. While grasping with one hand the thick mane of the creature’s shine, plunge the knife into the body behind the right shoulder blade, between the first and second ribs.
With bear, the Sportsman is generally provided with two guns and a spear as a
dernier ressort
. When ringing a bear, as it is termed, should the peasant guide again cross the track of a bear he knows is out of the circle when making his ring, rather than returning to his starting point, he will accordingly follow the fresh track. Many Sportsmen will pursue only when the animal has settled himself for the winter. When the peasant has discovered the spot where he has made his den, the Sportsman thus informed goes to the place alone, generally taking with him three or four rough dogs, to rouse the bear from his lair; and thus he has only himself to blame if he returns empty-handed (or does not return).
Wolves are very wary, difficult to drive from their lurking place. (Tether a young pig as bait and pinch its ear to make him squeak.)
On the inaccessible little island of Reil, once featured on coins (unapproachable and fog-bound most of the year), one may stalk a group of ibex which have been carried there by volcanic disruption. Patriarchal rams have dark yellow fleece. The parti-colored hybrids are bigger and more powerful with superb ebony black horns which curve backward, saberlike, almost to the spine, like the bow of Pandarus. No dog can keep up with them.
The coveted lynx, our European tiger, are here considered vermin. In the Marches, miniature antelope sleep like dogs near the railway tracks. As for Belgian wolves and white blackbirds, more people talk of them than see them.
The Mze, as Thucydides tells us, is the “fishiest” river in Europe, “comprised of two-thirds fish and one-third water.” To this unaddicted observer, the fish seem quite unsophisticated, picking at almost any fly in the book at random, though the gaudier ones are preferred. The tributaries are run with trout of microscopic size, as well as salmon (the only piscivorous animals which profit by abundance.) A new American method to catch pike involves a short line, a strong hook, and a big worm. The great sturgeon must be shot in the head, for if wounded, they go off at great speed or sink immediately, only to reappear inflated by decomposition. They are best retrieved by two large men in a rowboat, though recently a Russian prince retrieved thirteen in five days by swimming. Ponds should be avoided as the natives often net the narrow places and dynamite the deeper pools.
Among our most intrepid guests are, of course, those English counts and American physicians who court landrails, the king of quails, returning home with barrels of them preserved by cooks, and generally setting off a great migration of dead birds by steam launch to the poulterer’s. Often they use lighted torches to attract exhausted quails, net larks at night, surprise wild bustards with their wings frozen (driving them in this helpless state straight to market) and gather wild ducks after the frost, starved to death on the golf links. Their weapon of choice is a .303 sporting Lee-Metford or Mannlicher.
But true sport in Cannonia is for neither show nor pot. You will find no downy tailfeathers of the golden eagle in our hats. Only the Capercailzie Chase, our national sport, retains its original characteristics, which the invasion of the Western hunters have banished from so much of our cultural life.
The male of the species capercailzie is in splendid condition in April, when the valley corn is still short, his beak ornamented with a pair of bristling mustachios which he will soon lose to his rivals. When the cock and hen are seeking each other at first light (or twilight) they make low deep notes of love somewhat resembling a woodcutter’s saw, notes that cannot be imitated in words or music, and it is only in April or possibly early May, when his lovesong betrays him, that the Sportsman can locate this wild and timid bird, and then only his silhouette on the driest limb of the tallest tree.
Leave the three or four hours before dawn, astonishing the poultry. Flop the old horse behind the ears with a pig-driving whip. Load your dog in the fantail of the gig. Set out chuckling silently and at the very best pace, on the lane leading to the steepest mountains, for the capercailzie lives only where the water rushes dangerously down from the hills. The standard uniform for such a hunt is a loose gray Tyrolese coat with buckthorn buttons, trousers garnished with green braid, mouse-gray felt boots fit loosely at the ankle, and a Phrygian cap. The dog should be cleansed the night before with a douche of rhubarb, aloe, syrup of buckthorn, and Castile soap.
If nothing can be done in Cannonia without a count, in Klavierland nothing can be accomplished without a dog, and of its many species, only the Chetvorah is capable of dealing with the capercailzie.
Full-blooded, sanguine, up and apt, the Chetvorah are bred to leave their point and return to the Sportsman, showing by their movements that they have found game, an invaluable quality in thick cover. They must point and retrieve alike; in summer act as bloodhound on the trail of a wounded roe; in winter retrieve ducks from water; and in spring act as a spaniel for snipe. In September they must take no notice whatsoever of hares, but two months later they must hunt them down without noticing partridges, as well as retrieve teal from ice-floes. (Occasionally, with large game, they will adopt the expedient of Ulysses and squat upon the ground.)
The capercailzie is the oldest, largest, wariest, and proudest member of the
Black Game
genus, as well as the finest table bird in history. He has been with us since before the Ice Age and will, no doubt, survive us as a species. While his crowing and rearing grounds occupy the wildest areas of the world, where his chicks survive chiefly on bilberries, the adult bird prefers the edge of man’s destructiveness, diligently following the axe, the plough, and his fist of fire. In ancient times, they were salted and exported to China, and while small families of distant relatives survive in the Italian Undine (
Valsavaranici pharatrope
), the Black Forest (
Kaltebrooner bastobarbus
), the Scanian Forest (
Fjall ripa
), and in Siberia (
Glukar naryank
), they were extinct in Britain by 1760, the only one left is stuffed in the Earl of Surrey’s manse (the Earl being the first man to teach a dog to stand before the gun), and they thrive today only in the Unnamed Mountains of Cannonia.
As a semi-historical bird of Jove in a semi-natural habitat, the capercailzie live a strange and most fascinating life. Never a corsair of reckless daring, he is a woodland sage of unusually perceptive faculties, a wisdom which profits by past experience, and he becomes wild only as an essential to his existence. (Since the children of Israel slew nine thousand at Kobroth-Hataaven in 1350
BC
, the modern record is held by Count Zich, who killed eighteen sitting on a rail fence atop a stone dyke while they were looking in different directions.)
With his bristling beautiful plumage—brownish-black speckled with light gray and tan, emerald-breasted with red and yellow spots and feathered to the toes—he would do credit to an ancient eastern potentate. (The Astingi will use no other feathers on their arrows.) His voice—
tack, tack, tackatack a tack
—will tell you when a female of any race is in close proximity.
As you squat beneath a dripping tree, listening for the first clucks of the invisible fowl perched in the countless branches around you, all social distinctions dissolve as you await the lovelorn bird. The call is not only meant to bewilder and fluster his foes, but also to entertain them with the odd, ridiculous mockery of a professional clown. But the peculiarity of the bird is that at the end of his call, he will close his eyes, spin around, and become oblivious to everything. In this trance is the only time you can advance.
As you scramble up the mountains in the dark, it may be necessary to hang a tiny lantern from the tail of your Chetvorah so that he might repeat his lessons
en miniature
. Once on the weird plateaus of Exiliadesertas, where in April violets and buttercups burst from the earth the instant the snow melts, the stalk commences as soon as it’s light enough to see the end of the gun barrel.
Now we enter the ancient space, between the prey’s apprehension and the predator’s alertness, for during his call the bird cannot hear and the dog cannot see
.
The dog creeps a few feet, from tree to tree, then stops and waits for the hunter to draw alongside. Then the man takes the lead, creeping a few feet on all fours, and the dog, between stanzas, gauging his steps carefully, reciprocates his crabwise movement, which is not random though it may appear so. We are not between ideas (as those parasitic priests and peripateticizing professors who pass themselves off as the friends and disciples of those whose sufferings they live off, would have it) but between two sets of
instincts
—which is a finer way of looking at the world, as reason is not a force but only one weapon of the warring instincts.
Nor is this the place for bourgeois hunter lads, for woe to those who are limited to being happy only in the style of their times. Mad with the untold misery of those who hunt regularly but do not like it, they seek honor where none is to be found and pleasure in places where no pleasure lies for them. As the stalk draws nigh, such poor fellows’ delights become vague and still more vague, emptying their flasks before noon, and yet they talk of nothing but their runs, worse than the barrister who talks of nothing but his briefs; most tedious and heavy in hand, such toy histories. For sport requires something more than a Sportsman, as one must see whole the stages by which the hunter becomes the hunted.