King Stakh's Wild Hunt

My thoughts were sad ones: I had learned that they were hunting Janoŭskaja and me, that no mercy need be expected, that I had let two bandits make their escape, and also that I had been so cruelly mistaken as to Bierman. I was convinced that his was a suspicious character: he had opened a letter addressed to me, and for some reason or other went to this dreadful place where he met his death. In itself the fact of this death pushed into the background the rest of his sins from me. But I had learned a great deal from the conversation that I had overheard and, first and foremost, now I knew one of the Wild Hunt. The story about the burnt haysacks gave him away. The haystacks that had been burnt had belonged to Mark Stachievič. I had seen him at the drunken revel at Dubatoŭk's place. And it was this man who had been Varona's second. Well, let's say I had been mistaken as to Bierman, but there's no mistake, it seems to me, about Va-rona. And he shall be mine. Only now greater determination is necessary.

And late in the evening King Stach's Wild Hunt appeared again. Again it howled, wailed, cried, its voice an inmuhan voice:

“Raman of the last generation, come out! We have come. We shall put an end to all! Then we shall rest. Raman! Raman!”

And again, lying hidden in the bushes at the entrance, I shot at the flying shadows of horsemen that flashed by at the end of the lane lit up by a misty moon. When I shot the first time, the horses threw themselves into the thicket and disappeared, as if they had never even been. It resembled a horrible dream…

It was necessary to put an end to things. I recalled Mark Stachievič's words spoken beneath the tree, concerning Raman's promise that after his death he would give away the murderer, and I thought that Raman might have left some clue in the house or at the place of his death. A clue that even Ryhor's vigilant eye had overlooked.

And when Ryhor came we hurried together to the place where Raman had been murdered. I am not a bad walker, but I could hardly keep up with this leggy figure. It might have seemed, looking at him, that Ryhor was walking slowly, but his movements were measured, and his feet he placed not as ordinary people do, but with his toes turned inward: all born hunters walk that way. By the way, it has been observed that this makes every step approximately one inch longer. Along the way I told him about the conversation between Mark Stachievič and some Pacuk.

“Varona's men,” Ryhor angrily growled. And then added: “But we had thought that ‘Likol’ is the beginning of a surname. You, sir, hadn't asked the right way. ‘Likol’ is evidently a nickname. You must ask Miss Janoŭskaja who is called that. If Śvieciłovič knew this nickname and perhaps, even, Bierman, it means that she must also know it.”

“I asked her.”

“You asked her about a surname, said that it was its beginning, but not that it's a nickname.”

In this way we came to the well-known place which I have twice described, the place where Nadzieja Ramanaŭna's father had perished. We sought all over in the dry grass, although it was stupid to look for anything in it after two years. And finally we came up to a place where there was a precipice, not a large one, over the quagmire.

Over the abyss a rather small stump met our sight sticking out from the earth, the remnant of the trunk of a tree that had grown there long ago, roots spreading throughout the abyss like mighty snakes, roots reaching downwards into the quagmire, as if there to quench their thirst, roots simply hanging in the air.

I asked Ryhor to recall whether Raman's hands had been visible over the quagmire.

Ryhor's eyes lowering, he was remembering:

“Yes, they were. The right one was even stretched out, he must have wanted to catch hold of the roots, but couldn't reach them.”

“But perhaps he simply threw something there where a hole is visible under the roots?”

“Let's look.”

And holding onto the roots, and breaking our finger-nails, we let ourselves down almost into the very mire, hardly able to hold onto the small slippery ledges of the steep slope. A hole did indeed turn out to be under the roots, but there was nothing in it.

I was about to climb up to the top, but Ryhor stopped me:

“Stupid we are. If there really was something here, then it is already under a layer of silt. He could have thrown something, but you know, two years have passed, the earth there in the hole will have crumbled and buried it.”

We began scratching the caked silt with our fingers, emptying it out of the hole, and — believe it or not, — soon my fingers hit on something hard. In the palm of my hand lay a cigarette-case made of maple wood. There was nothing else in the hole.

We climbed out and carefully wiped off from the cigarette-case the reddish silt mixed with clay. In the cigarette-case lay a piece of white cloth which Raman had evidently torn out from his shirt with his teeth. And on this little rag hardly decipherable reddish letters: “Varona mur…”