"What! no guns and no rod?" I said, growing grave very suddenly. To be at Erinofka and never to hear the popping of another cartridge seemed a dreadful prospect.
"Oh, you can carry a gun if you please," said the presiding Mahatma, who was growing strangely like a London police magistrate, "but you must use smokeless and noiseless powder, and no shot."
"And a rod without a reel," said another Mahatma.
"And a line without a hook," added a third.
"And see that you have a license," put in a fourth.
"But, sirs," I began, "what am I to do with myself, if I may not——"
"Take life?" interrupted the Chairman. "Silence, prisoner at the bar, and learn to be happy without killing! To Erinofka with him, gaoler!"
"How long, your worship?" said that functionary.
Four thousand five hundred years was, I think, the figure, but it may have been four hundred thousand. I was still puzzling over the matter when I awoke. Afterwards, when I thought upon this dream of mine, it struck me that my sentence was, after all, a most enviable one. Thousands of years at Erinofka, with no terrestrial cares to weigh me down; face to face and heart to heart with Nature, learning her secrets day long; a life-atom among myriads of others; a little part of an infinite whole; harmless, free, careless, contented, in fellowship with bird and beast and insect, and with every form of life that has a vested interest in wood and moor and wet morass. For such an existence I had chosen, I thought, the right place. At any rate my spiritual essence, if weary of wandering about armed with a gun that would not work, could amuse itself by recalling those dear, unregenerate days when guns, unprohibited by stern Mahatmas, popped freely, and reels craked, and when the glad voice of the sportsman was heard upon these moors, and among them my own, together with the popping of many terrestrial cartridges. One day, especially, and that the day of my first acquaintance with the place, lingers more fondly than others in the memory, and would afford material for much spiritual contemplation, perhaps even unto forty-five thousand years, if there were nothing better to do! And it is of that particular day that I propose to tell, now that this somewhat extended preface has been got through.
It was Jemmie, of course, who introduced me to Erinofka. Any one in St. Petersburg will tell you who Jemmie is, for he is a popular character there, and is known and loved by all. Well, it was Jemmie who proposed a day at Erinofka, a day among the juveniles; the younglings of the blackcock and of the willow-grouse, and perhaps a peep at the princelings of his majesty king capercailzie. It was early in the summer, perhaps too early; but shooting in the Tsar's domains begins considerably earlier in the year than we, in this country, are accustomed to take gun in hand, and the sportsman may there sally forth on July 27, if it please him, and shoot young game without breaking any laws. It was not quite so early as this when Jemmie carried me—a willing captive—to Erinofka, but August was still very young, and so were some of the coveys; though, thanks to a fine warm season, many or most of these were marvellously well-grown; but of this anon. Erinofka is blessed, or cursed, with a most marvellous little railway of its very own, a kind of toy track from town, laid down for the convenience of a peat-cutting establishment not very far from the shooting-box which was our objective point. The railway is very narrow, and the omnibus-like carriages, which the public are allowed to occupy for a consideration and at their own risk, are very top-heavy; and the driver of the little engine is generally very drunk, all of which circumstances combine to make this Erinofka heaven quite as difficult of attainment as the very highest of Mahomet's, and the journey a matter not to be undertaken without deep thought, much repentance, and a visit from the family lawyer. The line looks something like the toy track at Chatham—that upon which youthful officers of the Royal Engineers are or were wont to disport themselves; a pastime devised, I believe, by the War Office, for the twin purposes of teaching the British officer how to drive a locomotive, and how best to fall off it with dignity when the engine runs off the rails.
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