Jemmie tells me that before the peat-people built this line it had been necessary to bump along to Erinofka as best one could, over the most awful roads that human bones ever creaked upon, a distance of forty or fifty miles; but that now, if only you can secure the sober, the comparatively sober driver, the journey is a sweet boon. It appears that there are three drivers on this line—Matvey, who is always very drunk indeed; Ivan, who is always rather drunk and sometimes highly intoxicated; and Yegor, who has been known to be sober. I have not seen the man who saw Yegor sober; but it is confidently asserted that he has been observed in this unusual condition, and that he is rarely more than half drunk.
Well, I seldom have much luck, and when I went with Jemmie to Erinofka upon that little narrow railway, in a wide long carriage that might have served as a portion of the G.W.R. rolling stock in its unregenerate broad-gauge days, we had Matvey to drive our engine. Matvey had, to put it mildly, been drinking, and he desired to drink again. Now, Matvey knew very well that he could get no more vodka until he reached Erinofka, and this is why we travelled at a pace which was bound to end, and did shortly end, in disaster. In a word, we ran off the line three miles or so from the start, and that we did not also run down a steep embankment into a river was certainly not Matvey's fault; we could not have gone much nearer the edge than we did.
However, Erinofka was reached in safety at last, and—since our accident had delayed us at least two hours—right ravenously did we fall upon the good cheer set out for us by the head-keeper, Hermann, and his wife. One item of this repast, at least, I remember vividly: an enormous dish piled to the height of nearly a foot with luscious wild strawberries. It would be unfair to give my friend away in the matter of those strawberries; but I will say that Jemmie partook with freedom of the fruit, and that I myself tasted, well, a few berries. The armchairs in the Erinofka sitting-room were remarkably comfortable, I remember, after that repast, and the conversation languished. But we were to be up and away at half-past three a.m.; for we must drive a matter of seven miles to the moor we intended to work on the morrow, and the courteous Hermann—who had cleared away the large empty dish which had contained so many strawberries with but one convulsive movement of the facial muscles and a quick glance of polite consternation in the direction of the reposing James—this courteous Hermann very gently reminded us that it was now eleven, and that between that hour and three was embraced the entire period devotable by us to sleeping off the effects of railway accidents and arctic strawberries, all of which was so very true that we sighed, and rose from those blest armchairs and went to bed.
The baying and barking of four excited dogs (who knew as well as we did that the first shoot of the season was to come off on this day) rendered unnecessary Hermann's polite knockings at the bedroom doors, and his gentlemanly intimation that the day was all that could be expected of it, and the hour—three. When Shammie, and Carlow, and Kaplya, and Bruce are performing a quartette at 3 a.m., even Jemmie cannot sleep, and we were both wide-awake and discussing matters when Hermann came to hound us to breakfast. Breakfast was somewhat of a failure, I remember. Did I mention that we had taken a few strawberries at 10.30 p.m.? Well, we had; and it was found that the circumstance militated against a hearty British appetite at 3 a.m. However, this being so, the less time was wasted before starting for the moor. There is something, to me, peculiarly fascinating and exhilarating about this starting out on the first day of shooting; but oh! that seven mile drive to the moor. The roads were so absolutely and utterly vile, and the cart so unspeakably uncomfortable, that no reader would believe me were I to attempt to describe the misery of driving under such conditions. But Jemmie, bless him! smiled on and smiled ever; and I—not to be outdone in exuberance of spirits this superb morning—pretended that I enjoyed being bumped about like a hailstone on a hard lawn. All four dogs were with us. They lay, at the start, quiescent enough at the bottom of the vehicle; but alas! not for long. In the first fifty yards Shammie was on my lap, and Bruce with his arms round Jemmie's neck; in the second I found, to my surprise, that a cartridge-box had usurped Shammie's place on my knee, and that Shammie's head and my shin were exchanging civilities at the bottom of the cart. Occasionally the driver was sprawling on the back of the shaft horse, and now and again he was shot violently upon the top of Jemmie or me, or suddenly appeared, wrong way up, between us. Occasionally also we found that the dogs and we had changed places, and that we lay struggling on the floor of the cart while they stood on their heads, or sat with surprised and pained expressions upon the seat. Nothing mattered. Jemmie smiled, and I tried to. What though our shins were black and blue with the misplaced attentions of cartridge cases and gun stocks? What though the dogs whined and grew absurdly angry with one another, showing signs of an imminent general engagement? What though Jemmie bounded into air—bird-like—and nested upon the top of my head, or I on his? Nothing matters on the first day of shooting; disasters are a joke, and battered heads and limbs are contributions to the hilarity of the proceedings. Ah, well! the dogs limped ostentatiously when we arrived, and Jemmie and I were very, very stiff, but oh! so happy, and I, at all events, grateful and amazed to find myself all in one piece, and we paced slowly through the first belt of thick, gameless pine-wood, thinking unutterable things, and with a decided tendency to quote poetry when the tongue would wag.
Half a mile of barren trudging and then the forest begins to lighten; the young day sends golden smiles to greet us through the trees; wherever there is room for a ray or two of his glory to pass, he stretches a hand to us. "Come," he seems to say, "come out upon the moor and bathe yourselves in my full favour; my good, gigantic smile is over all this morning!" And here is the moor itself, a sight to set the heart a-beating on this first day of the season; stretching wide and rich before us; miles across; limitless, apparently, from end to end; and, as we believe and hope, teeming with game if only we can hit upon the coveys.
What a lot of trouble it would save, I suggest foolishly, if one had a divining-rod that showed the whereabouts of the birds! "Proh pudor!" says James, and rightly, "the dogs are our divining-rods." As to these dogs, Shammie and Carlow are setters—Shammie a red Irish, Carlow a blue Belton, and wild at that. The other two are Russian-bred pointers of English parentage—good animals both, and well trained, according to his lights, by Hermann. The setters both hail from a Scottish moor, and are to-day on their trial in this unfamiliar country. Their journey has lost them none of their keenness—look at them now! Shammie, cool and collected, businesslike, making no false move, but ardent and determined; Carlow, half a mile off, but back again in no time and hundreds of yards away on the opposite tack, the quickest and wildest dog, surely, that ever ranged. Kaplya and Bruce hunt close to their trainer—we are giving all four of them a breather just to settle their nerves; but presently two will be taken in while two do the work.
Suddenly Shammie stops dead; so do, for an instant, my heart and pulses. Kaplya and Bruce back instantly, stiff as marble. Carlow is coming in at racing speed, but sees the others when fifty yards away, and lies down automatically. Shammie's tail wags slightly, and we feel that there may be a disappointment before us; but he turns and looks at us;