There! the deed is done, for good or for evil. The goose who stood to receive my shot lived on, and I trust still lives; his feathers are thick and tough, and I hope in mercy that if he is hit at all his plumage has turned aside or suffocated the shot, and that he is not much hurt. He is gone, anyhow, flying strongly. The goose which rose to receive fire will rise no more. He is dead; he will utter never more his sad pilgrim-notes; he will feed no more in these pleasant pastures. Go and pick him up, Ivan, and he shall be cooked and tentatively eaten, and perhaps pronounced very nice, and perhaps condemned as very nasty.
Now turn and see what we have done. The last crane has taken wing—running a few yards and jumping clumsily into the air, rather like a cyclist mounting his machine. He will fly a hundred yards before those long legs of his are comfortably stowed away! What a slow flight it seems, yet it carries him wonderfully far away from us in a short time!
And the ducks? Gone also; circling high in air, taking stock of us. When they have made up their minds that we are bad characters and not to be trusted, they will head for a distant point and disappear. The curlew is far away, so is the osprey; the sandpipers are still in the neighbourhood, they are too inquisitive to go far from us; they must needs watch us and find out all about us first. And away there in the bright distance floats, receding, the triangle of geese—one less than it came, and one, perhaps, in pain and suffering, though Heaven forbid that this should be so.
All this we have done, friend Ivan, with our banging and bloodshed! See what a transformation scene the act of man works, in an instant, upon a lovely landscape? Of life he makes death; of busy, happy places, full of colours and of sounds, and of song and of joy, he makes a barren waste, with himself the sole living creature remaining to look upon the face of it! Let us go home, Ivan, we shall see no more of bird-life this morning; take up your poor grey victim and come along—the place will be the better and the happier for our departure, and perhaps, after a while, all its evicted tenants, save one, may return again to their own.
But Ivan only remarks that I ought to have shot that first goose in the head, and then we should have had two instead of one. Then he scratches his own head, gazes long and intently over the sparkling waters of the lake in the direction where the departed geese are now but a dark smudge in the distant sky, spits on the ground in contempt of muff-shots and lost opportunities, and strides away towards the ponies. As we disappear in the forest I look back and see some ducks returning, and hear the sandpipers whistle us a taunting farewell! Amen! No one wants us here: they are all happier without us.
CHAPTER III
A DAY AFTER CRAWFISH
There are certain days of one's boyhood which have made so deep an impression that they seem to stand out like mountain peaks in the misty plains of the memory, clear and distinct against the sky-line, when all else is dim and hazy and distorted by distance. One of these landmarks in the early life of the writer is a certain day, long years ago—though the recollection of every detail of it is as green as though it all happened but yesterday—when, in company with two or three kindred spirits, he made his first grand expedition after crawfish. It was summer—the summer holidays: holidays long looked forward to as to be among the most delightful that ever boy spent; for they were to be passed in Mourino, the paradise of our youthful imaginations, where the long Russian days were not half long enough for the multitude of delights to be crammed into each, there being "more to do" at Mourino, as we always thought, than anywhere in England, seaside or otherwise. As a matter of fact, the northern haven of our schoolboy desires was the very place for boys home from an English public school, and fond of healthy outdoor pursuits and recreations. There was a river at the bottom of the garden in which fish of many kinds might be lured to their doom; there was shooting, in a mild way; there was riding ad lib., if galloping about the country on the spiky backs of the little Finn ponies of the place can be dignified by that name; there was boating, of course, and canoeing, at our very doors, as well as the usual English games which the true Briton takes with him however far afield he may roam. No wonder then that Mourino was the place in which we preferred, par excellence, to pass our summer holidays; for, as I say, the days were not long enough to contain all the joys to be crammed into them.
There were crawfish to be had at the bottom of the garden, but these were neither sufficiently large nor sufficiently numerous to tempt us to engage very frequently in their capture. When we wanted crawfish of a size to do their captors credit, we knew well enough where to go for them, just as well as the giant crawfish themselves knew which part of the river suited them best as their headquarters. It was, however, some little distance to the favourite haunt of the monsters, a matter of ten miles or so; a journey not to be undertaken lightly over the unspeakable roads of the neighbourhood, so that we did not very often disturb the scaly warriors in the cool depths of their chosen pleasure-grounds; when we did organise an excursion, therefore, in their honour we fully intended to "do the thing in style," and to create some considerable gaps among the ranks of their best and mightiest. When a day was to be devoted to the capture of big crawfish at Sairki, preparations were made over-night in order that no time should be wasted on the morrow; the usual miscalculation was made as to the number of sandwiches required—food sufficient for an entire regiment was invariably provided for us, yet I cannot recall that we ever brought any back. The stock-in-trade of the complete crawfisher, a strong hand-net and a pound or two of slightly high meat, was in readiness for each of us; our pike rods and tackle were seen to; the most particular instructions were issued as to our awakening as soon as daylight should appear; the vehicles, or rather their peasant owners, were hunted up for the hundredth and last time and warned, with all solemnity, as to the awful consequences that unpunctuality would bring down upon their heads, and then we all four went to bed and wished for day.
When morning came—the particular morning I am now recalling—things were propitious. Two telyegi stood awaiting our pleasure at the door, each with its pair of small Finn ponies ready harnessed and impatiently whisking away the horseflies with their long tails. The telyegi, I may explain, are springless carts upon four wheels. They are provided with so-called "cushions," which consist of a square bag of sacking with a certain amount of hay inside it. The sensations of the traveller who has once been bumped about in a telyega over Russian roads are memorable—indeed, I have spent the rest of my days since my boyhood in wondering how in the world I managed to remain "all in one piece" throughout the awful joltings to which my body was submitted during those telyega days. Has the reader ever seen a Russian country road? It is not a road at all, as we are accustomed to understand the term, but a mere succession of deep and wide holes worn in the natural sandy soil. The Finn ponies think nothing of such trifling drawbacks, however, and pursue their headlong course without regard to the feelings of the evil-entreated passengers behind them. Perhaps the good-natured creatures experience a mischievous delight in thus "taking it out" of those who weary their flesh by causing them to drag a heavy load at breakneck speed through all the heat and dust and breathlessness of a Russian summer day. The pair are harnessed in an original manner; one, the better trotter of the two, is between shafts, while his companion canters alongside, attached, in a happy-go-lucky way, to the vehicle by means of a couple of loose ropes, but otherwise free to do pretty much as he pleases, consequently he is sometimes close enough to his comrade to make that animal, if irritably inclined, put back his ears and snap at him as a gentle reminder that he is taking liberties, and sometimes a yard or two away, frisking over puddles or shying all over the road on his own account. When a pit of more than the average depth is encountered, both horses will jump it in preference to running down to the bottom and up again, and at such a moment the fate of the passenger in the cart behind is melancholy. He is tossed up into the air for all the world like a spun coin, sharing also the uncertain destiny of that coin as to the manner of his descent—whether "heads or tails." It must not be for one moment supposed that we, in the exuberance of our happiness, and in the all-accepting, unquestioning, all-enjoying spirit of the British schoolboy, cared a farthing for the depth or width of the very vilest hole that time and horseshoes ever wore in a Russian road; on the contrary, we loved the sensation of being sent flying up into the air every other minute, and if we came down upon the top of one another or of the luckless driver on his hard box-seat, or even into the six-inch dust of the road in the rear of the telyega, why, I believe we liked it all the better. As every one knows, a special Providence watches over drunken men and school-boys, and I have often reflected that we must have caused our particular bodyguard a terrible amount of anxiety, and kept it very hard at work during these wild telyega drives of ours at Mourino, for we were racing, most of the time, with the wheels of the two carts interlaced, the horses—all four of them—galloping ventre à terre, and the demented Russian drivers—quite as far gone in lunacy as our British selves—shouting at the top of their voices and bumping about half in air and half in cart, like a couple of demon Jehus let loose for the occasion, and for our especial and particularly complete destruction; and yet I cannot remember that any one was ever hurt! Truly that special Providence of ours was well up to its arduous duties, and performed them admirably.
Sairki was reached at last, and the horses put up at the village. As for us, we unpacked the carts before a group of admiring Finnish children; for Sairki, like many a score of other villages within twenty miles of the Tsar's capital, is inhabited exclusively by Finns, who cannot speak a word of Russian. Hand-nets and rods were got out; the crawfish meat was produced (extremely unsavoury by this time, owing to the intense heat of the day, but all the better for that from the point of view of the crawfish, who likes his dinner to be attractive to his olfactory senses); huge fishing-baskets were strapped upon our shoulders, containing our food at present, but to be used for another purpose soon, and away we headed for the riverside. The Ochta is a tributary of the Neva, into which it flows close to St. Petersburg—a pretty little river as one would wish to see, if he cares for the sort of scenery that Ruysdael loved to depict. Down by the river there grew countless clusters of leafy young birches and aspens, and to these our attention was first directed, for from them we must draw one of the essential items of our stock-in-trade. Provided with large knives as we were, we soon possessed ourselves of the necessary number of long sticks, about a dozen each, and stripped the leaves off to the end. In order to explain the exact object of these sticks, I will now, with the reader's permission, make him acquainted with the modus operandi of the scientific crawfisher. I have said already that a lump of meat is required. This is cut into small sections of about an inch and a half square, one of which is firmly tied to the end of each stick with a piece of string or "machalka," the birch-bark ribbon known to gardeners. This is the nastiest part of the proceedings, and it is better to get a friend to do it for you if you can. The preliminaries being thus completed, the next thing is to take the twelve baited sticks one by one and place them in the water, the meat downwards and resting on the bottom, while the top end of the stick is allowed to project a foot or so above the surface and to rest against the bank. The sticks must not be placed too close to one another. The proper distance is about ten yards between each. It will be remarked by the intelligent reader that the crawfisher thus requires a considerable portion of the stream to himself, for no two sportsmen can find scope for their energies within a hundred and fifty yards or so; while a party of four or five will occupy the best part of half-a-mile of bank. When the sticks are all placed scientifically, according to the fisher's knowledge of the spots likely to be favoured of crawfish, the sportsman must possess his soul in patience for a quarter of an hour at least, in order to give time to the gentlemen of the claws to realise the good fortune that has come their way in the shape of a lump of meat dropped apparently from the skies. After the interval indicated, the hand-net is taken and the sticks are visited one by one. Now comes the moment when the skill and science of the performer is put to the test. The water is not very clear. It is not muddy, but the colour is dark—a brownish tint—caused, as we always believed, by the quantities of iron in it, so that we cannot see to the bottom or near it. Hence, the first part of the proceedings must be done in faith and hope, and with an extremity of caution and lightness of hand not attainable without considerable practice in the art of crawfishing. The stick is taken firmly in the left hand, while the right grasps the handle of the net. Then the stick is raised from the bottom, but so gradually and imperceptibly that the movement is, presumably, unnoticeable down below. The baited stick is thus slowly and carefully lifted inch by inch, until the lump of meat at the end of it is visible. If a crawfish is clinging on to the meat the stick is raised no higher, for the hand-net now comes into play. This latter instrument is brought cautiously up against the current, placed deftly underneath the clinging feaster, the stick and the net are raised together, and as the crawfish reaches the surface of the water, and at length realises that he had better quit this perambulating breakfast, he lets go, only to discover that he is too late and has been outwitted, and that his place henceforth is in the fishing-basket, or a watering-pot half full of water, until such time as he is taken out and boiled for the use of man. It is very simple, and were the crawfish not the most criminally greedy and careless creature in the world, he would never allow himself to be captured in so ridiculously elementary a way. But it is his nature to, and no amount of experience will teach him the foolishness of his conduct, for you may, if you please, catch and return to his element the self-same crawfish a dozen times in an afternoon. In a good place, the fisher may find two or three, or even more, of these hungry fellows clinging to the same piece of meat, and, if clever enough, may easily capture the lot at one swoop.
Such, in brief, is the modus operandi of the crawfisher. We all knew the way to do it, we of the Sairki party; and the tying on of the bait and the placing of the sticks were finished as quickly as these operations could be performed with a due regard to efficiency, lots having decided the portion of bank to be worked by each of us. Then came the quarter of an hour during which it is the etiquette of the crawfisher to allow his prey to discover and to enjoy undisturbed the refreshments provided for him. I do not know whether schoolboys possess souls—presumably they are provided with a special schoolboy quality—but in any case we, at least, were entirely unable to possess those souls in patience, and that little quarter of an hour was spent by each of us upon his own portion of bank under a carking sense of grievance. We felt that we were conceding too much to the crawfish. Personally I passed my fifteen minutes at full length in the long grass, within a yard or two of the water, and any one but a schoolboy would have been glad enough of the opportunity to lie thus beneath the brilliant northern August sky upon a bed of wild flowers, which, if one chose to sit still and pick one specimen of each, would have filled his hands with a hundred delicate stems without the necessity to stretch beyond an easy arm-reach. I have never seen any place that equalled the country about Mourino for the wealth and variety of its wild flowers, or the luxuriance of the ground-berries in the woods—Arctic strawberry, bilberry, cranberry, raspberry, and a berry which I remember as making the most delicious bitter-sweet jam, called brousnika. As for the flowers, the anemone is the only representative of our familiar spring visitors, but the summer months are gorgeous with every blossom that our own English fields can boast, with few exceptions, besides lilies of the valley, linnæa borealis, a lovely creeping plant with a tiny starry flower; "star of Bethlehem," and other varieties not often seen in this country.
But the longest and most vexatious wait must come to an end in its season, and at last the crawling minutes had sped by and we were at liberty to commence the business of the day. Oh, the delightful excitement of the first visit to each stick! How my heart beat, I remember, as I grasped the first of them, and with somewhat trembling fingers raised it cautiously a few inches towards the surface, peering the while into the dark brown depths to catch the earliest possible glimpse of the desired visitor. The water seemed extra dark in colour to-day, to spite one, and the stick had to be slowly lifted to within a foot or so of the keen eyes watching above it before the meat could be distinguished at the end of it. There it is at last—now then! Is that the claw of a crawfish sticking on to it, or not? It may be, but if so it is a tiny one. Carefully the hand-net is drawn towards the bait, up the stream, for otherwise the current bulges the network inside out, and deftly the string-prison is placed underneath the end of the stick—there! If it is a crawfish I have got him safe. Up comes stick, and up comes net with it to the surface—alas, no! It was but the split end of a piece of "machalka," and not the claw of a crawfish. Down goes the stick again to its place at the bottom of the stream, and away go I to the next one. Here a strong waggling at the end of it when it is raised from the bottom tells me that undoubtedly a guest is availing himself of my hospitality; caution must be observed—yea, caution must be doubly cautious. It is a big fellow by the feel, and he is still tugging away as I raise the stick with breathless care towards the surface. Now I can see the bait, or rather I can see the place where the meat may be supposed to be; for there is nothing visible but a dark mass which hides the bait from view. Now comes the tug of war. The current is rather strong, and the exertion of bringing the broom-handled net against it is considerable; but this is not a moment to think of difficulties. Down comes fate upon the thoughtless reveller; a turn of the wrist with the right, and a swift upward motion of the left arm, and anything there may chance to be busying itself at the baited end of the stick is my own. What do I see? A big crawfish? It is indeed a big crawfish, and with it a second and yet a third, true Sairki monsters, all three of them, seething and glistening in their dark brown armour at the bottom of the net, and laying hold angrily of each other wherever they can fasten a claw, as though each were chastising his companions for having brought him into this mess. They must be taken up carefully, one by one, and held by the back, else those cruel-looking claws will lay hold of one's fingers and inflict a pinch which will be a memorable circumstance for some little while. These three fellows, exactly like lobsters made in a smaller mould, so far as the unscientific eye can judge, are about six to seven inches in length from head to end of tail; one of them has one large claw and the other quite a miniature member, as though it had never emerged from its baby stage; the truth being that the warrior has lost one of his natural weapons, probably in a fight with a rival, and that a beneficent nature is providing him with a substitute as quickly as can be managed. If I place one of these creatures upon the ground, instead of in the watering-pot prepared for his reception, he will instantly set off backwards in the direction of the river. I have tried this at all distances from the water, placing a crawfish as far as several hundred yards from his native element, and pointing him in the wrong direction; yet in defiance of all obstacles, the poor fellow invariably and without hesitation made straight for that point of the compass in which instinct told him lay the stream which was his home. And so was made the round of the sticks; one producing nothing, another a single tiny victim, a third four at once, and so on to the twelfth and last; the net results of the first round being seventeen crawfish of a fair average size. Then the proceedings began again, da capo. The sport generally improved up to about the fifth round, while the inhabitants of the stream were gradually becoming aware of the feast spread for them at easy distances all down the river. After the sixth round the numbers fell off again, until, eventually, a second portion of the bank had to be worked, the original lie having been exhausted. The largest haul that I ever made from one stick at one swoop was six crawfish, all good ones, and one of them a giant. We had agreed to put back the babies, the very tiniest, that is; though we invariably took a great number home with us which we did not intend to eat, in order to let them go at the bottom of the garden as stock for our own portion of the river, and to afford us sport when they should have grown to more respectable dimensions. They always accommodated themselves to circumstances, and remained contentedly where they had been put in.
When we grew tired of capturing our crawfish in the orthodox manner we adopted another plan; this involved, first, the finding of a shallow place in which, when found, we waded about with a short stick in one hand and a net in the other. When we caught sight of a crawfish wandering along or trying to hide the too expansive volume of his tail beneath a stone designed to conceal a junior member of the family only, all we had to do was to suddenly place the stick in front of his nose, at the same instant holding the net immediately behind him, when the simple creature would promptly commit suicide by running backwards into prison.
Then there was trolling for pike in the quiet pools when we were weary of the crawfish. There were good pike to be had at Sairki, and their favourite food was spoons—so, at least, one would suppose from the voracity with which they endeavoured to devour those we offered for their destruction. Many an exciting half-hour was afforded us by the good-natured Sairki pike; they generally got away in the end, but always thoroughly entered into the fun of the thing and obliged us, while the game lasted, by pretending to be doing their best to escape our unscientific attempts to bring them to book. Probably they could have rid themselves of the bait and us at any moment if they had been so disposed, but they were too good-natured. Now and then we caught one, but very rarely.
And so the summer day would pass with its sport and its bathing and its incalculable sandwiches, until the brilliant sunshine began to wane and the time came to shoulder our nets and hoist our heavily loaded watering-pots and mount the hill to the village. As for our sticks, we hospitably left these in the water in order that the crawfish remaining in the neighbourhood might enjoy themselves to the full and learn to laugh at those of their fellows who were disposed to look with suspicion at bits of meat attached to the ends of sticks. They might now finish the food with absolute impunity, and would come to the feast at our next visit without a thought of danger.
A memorable ceremony was the counting of the victims up at the village. This was performed in the midst of a gaping and ejaculating crowd of Finnish children, a score or so of scantily dressed, fair-haired little maidens and their brothers, who expressed their delight with the outcome of our prowess in a ceaseless chatter of their own language, monosyllabic, but full of extremely expressive inflections. We put ourselves upon the best of terms with these little foreigners by letting loose a number of our scaly captives among their naked toes, a move which caused them to jump about and scream in the wildest delight. The distribution of a few copecks among them completed our popularity thus easily acquired. The Finns are a good-natured, inoffensive race, when properly treated; but proud and stolid and somewhat lazy, and withal dignified and extremely jealous of their personal independence. The commonest Finn peasant considers himself the equal of any other man. Destiny may have put the Tsar in a warmer corner than himself, perhaps, but that does not make the Tsar the better man of the two. "The Tsar has a pair of legs exactly like my own," a Finn peasant once remarked to the writer, and the saying sums up very concisely the attitude of this quiet but dignified member of the human family towards his fellow-men.
Six hundred and thirty-seven was the sum total of our day's netting, besides many others caught and put back: not a bad tally! It was sufficient to supply the whole of the British colony in Mourino, which is a good large one, with crawfish enough to last them for some time. These are most delicious eating, as highly flavoured as the lobster, but much more tender and less stringy. A certain soup made of crawfish is declared by gourmets to be simply unequalled by any other decoction known under the name of potage.
And so, sped upon our way by the shouts of our admiring friends the little Finnish maids and urchins, we set forth once more to brave the perils and discomforts of the return journey. I know not what the unfortunate creatures in the watering-pots and the fishing-baskets may have thought of the bumpings and jars that marked our progress along that terrible road, but I do know that the day's wading and netting had not damped our own spirits in any appreciable degree. The ponies, knowing that they were directed homewards, flew along like mad things; breakneck races were once again the order of the day, and once again did our special Providence preserve us from the destruction we courted. Swiftly, too swiftly for us, the miles were left behind, and the last rays of the setting sun had scarcely lighted up the green cupola of Mourino church when, with whips cracking, drivers shouting, dust flying in clouds, and six human beings (counting schoolboys as coming under that category) and 637 crawfish bumping about like peas on a drum-head, we raced up to the lodge gates—and the day was over.