At
The Tail, A Tale To Tell
By Hector Hugh
Munro, a.k.a. Saki ( 1870 - 1916 )
Hector
H. Munro was the son of a British officer stationed in Burma.
Sent in England to be educated by his aunts after his mother’s
death, he attended school until 1885, when his father retired
from the army and took over his education. They traveled together
all over Europe, and later on Hugh became journalist, and even
foreign correspondent. He wrote mainly short stories. Member of
the 22nd Royal Fusiliers since 1914, he was killed
in battle in 1916. |
In
a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Carpathians,
a man stood one winter night watching and listening, as though he waited
for some beast of the woods to come within the range of his vision,
and, later, of his rifle. But the game for whose presence he kept so
keen an outlook was none that figured in the sportsman's calendar as
lawful and proper for the chase; Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled the dark
forest in quest of a human enemy.
The
forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well stocked with game;
the narrow strip of precipitous woodland that lay on its outskirts was
not remarkable for the game it harbored or the shooting it afforded,
but it was the most jealously guarded of all its owner's territorial
possessions. A famous lawsuit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested
it from the illegal possession of a neighboring family of petty landowners;
the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment of the courts,
and a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered
the relationships between the families for three generations. The neighbors'
feud had grown into a personal one since Ulrich had come to be head
of his family; if there was a man in the world whom he detested and
wished ill to, it was Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the quarrel and
the tireless game snatcher and raider of the disputed border forest.
The
feud might, perhaps, have died down or been compromised if the personal
ill will of the two men had not stood in the way; as boys they had thirsted
for one another's blood; as men each prayed that misfortune might fall
on the other; and this windscourged winter night Ulrich had banded together
his foresters to watch the dark forest, not in quest of four-footed
quarry, but to keep a lookout for the prowling thieves whom he suspected
of being afoot from across the land boundary. The roebuck, which usually
kept in the sheltered hollows during a stormwind, were running like
driven things tonight; and there was movement and unrest among the creatures
that were wont to sleep through the dark hours. Assuredly there was
a disturbing element in the forest, and Ulrich could guess the quarter
from whence it came.
He
strayed away by himself from the watchers whom he had placed in ambush
on the crest of the hill, and wandered far down the steep slopes amid
the wild tangle of undergrowth, peering through the tree trunks and
listening through the whistling and skirling of the wind and the restless
beating of the branches for sight or sound of the marauders. If only
on this wild night, in this dark, lone spot, he might come across Georg
Znaeym, man to man, with none to witness - that was the wish that was
uppermost in his thoughts. And as he stepped round the trunk of a huge
beech, he came face to face with the man he sought.
The
two enemies stood glaring at one another for a long, silent moment.
Each had a rifle in his hand; each had hate in his heart and murder
uppermost in his mind. The chance had come to give full play to the
passions of a lifetime. But a man who has been brought up under the
code of a restraining civilization cannot easily nerve himself to shoot
down his neighbor in cold blood and without a word spoken, except for
an offense against his hearth and honor. And before the moment of hesitation
had given way to action, a deed of nature's own violence overwhelmed
them both. A fierce shriek of the storm had been answered by a splitting
crash over their heads; and ere they could leap aside, a mass of falling
beech tree had thundered down on them. Ulrich von Gradwitz found himself
stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the other held
almost as helpless in a tight tangle of forked branches, while both
legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass. His heavy shooting boots had
saved his feet from being crushed to pieces; but if his fractures were
not so serious as they might have been, at least it was evident that
he could not move from his present position till someone came to release
him. The descending twigs had slashed the skin of his face, and he had
to wink away some drops of blood from his eyelashes before he could
take in a general view of the disaster. At his side, so near that under
ordinary circumstances he could almost have touched him, lay Georg Znaeym,
alive and struggling, but obviously as helplessly pinioned down as himself.
All round them lay a thickstrewn wreckage of splintered branches and
broken twigs.
Relief at being alive and
exasperation at his captive plight brought a strange medley of pious
thank offerings and sharp curses to Ulrich's lips. Georg, who was nearly
blinded with the blood, which trickled across his eyes, stopped his
struggling for a moment to listen and then gave a short, snarling laugh.
"So
you're not killed, as you ought to be; but you're caught, anyway,"
he cried; "caught fast. Ho, what a jest, Ulrich von Gradwitz
snared in his stolen forest. There's real justice for you!"
And
he laughed again, mockingly and savagely.
"I'm
caught in my own forest land," retorted Ulrich. "When
my men come to release us, you will wish, perhaps, that you were in
a better plight than caught poaching on a neighbor's land. Shame on
you!"
Georg
was silent for a moment; then he answered quietly:
"Are
you sure that your men will find much to release? I have men, too, in
the forest tonight, close behind me; and they will be here first and
do the releasing. When they drag me out from under these branches, it
won't need much clumsiness on their part to roll this mass of trunk
right over on the top of you. Your men will find you dead under a fallen
beech tree. For form's sake I shall send my condolences to your family."
"It
is a useful hint," said Ulrich fiercely. "My men had
orders to follow in ten minutes' time, seven of which must have gone
by already; and when they get me out - I will remember the hint. Only
as you will have met your death poaching on my lands, I don't think
I can decently send any message of condolence to your family."
"Good,"
snarled Georg, "good. We'll fight this quarrel out to the death-you
and I and our foresters, with no cursed interlopers to come between
us. Death and damnation to you, Ulrich von Gradwitz!"
"The
same to you, Georg Znaeym, forest thief, game snatcher!"
Both
men spoke with the bitterness of possible defeat before them, for each
knew that it might be long before his men would seek him out or find
him; it was a bare matter of chance which party would arrive first on
the scene.
Both
had now given up the useless struggle to free themselves from the mass
of wood that held them down; Ulrich limited his endeavors to an effort
to bring his one partially free arm near enough to his outer coat pocket
to draw out his wine flask. Even when he had accomplished that operation,
it was long before he could manage the unscrewing of the stopper or
get any of the liquid down his throat. But what a Heavensent draft it
seemed! It was an open winter, and little snow had fallen as yet, hence
the captives suffered less from the cold than might have been the case
at that season of the year; nevertheless, the wine was warming and reviving
to the wounded man, and he looked across with something like a throb
of pity to where his enemy lay, barely keeping the groans of pain and
weariness from crossing his lips.
"Could you
reach this flask if I threw it over to you?" asked Ulrich suddenly.
"There is good wine in it, and one may as well be as comfortable
as one can. Let us drink, even if tonight one of us dies."
"No, I can
scarcely see anything, there is so much blood caked round my eyes,"
said Georg; "and in any case I don't drink wine with an enemy."
Ulrich
was silent for a few minutes and lay listening to the weary screeching
of the wind. An idea was slowly forming and growing in his brain, an
idea that gained strength every time that he looked across at the man
who was fighting so grimly against pain and exhaustion. In the pain
and languor that Ulrich himself was feeling, the old fierce hatred seemed
to be dying down.
"Neighbor,"
he said presently, "do as you please if your men come first.
It was a fair compact. But as for me, I've changed my mind. If my men
are the first to come, you shall be the first to be helped, as though
you were my guest. We have quarreled like devils all our lives over
this stupid strip of forest where the trees can't even stand upright
in a breath of wind. Lying here tonight, thinking, I've come to think
that we've been, rather fools; there are better things in life than
getting the better of a boundary dispute. Neighbor, if you will help
me to bury the old quarrel, I will ask you to be my friend."
Georg
Znaeym was silent for so long that Ulrich thought, perhaps, he had fainted
with the pain of his injuries. Then he spoke slowly and in jerks:
"How
the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode into the market square
together. No one living can remember seeing a Znaeym and a Von Gradwitz
talking to one another in friendship. And what peace there would be
among the forester folk if we ended our feud tonight. And if we choose
to make peace among our people, there is none other to interfere, no
interlopers from outside... You would come and keep the Sylvester night1
beneath my roof, and I would come and feast on some high day at your
castle… I would never fire a shot on your land, save when you invited
me as a guest; and you should come and shoot with me down in the marshes
where the wild fowl are. In all the countryside there are none that
could hinder if we willed to make peace. I never thought to have wanted
to do other than hate you all my life; but I think I have changed my
mind about things, too, this last half-hour. And you offered me your
wine flask… Ulrich von Gradwitz, I will be your friend."
For
a space both men were silent, turning over in their minds the wonderful
changes that this dramatic reconciliation would bring about. In the
cold, gloomy forest, with the wind tearing in fitful gusts through the
naked branches and whistling - around the tree trunks, they lay and
waited for the help that would now bring release and succor to both
parties. And each prayed a private prayer that his men might be the
first to arrive, so that he might be the first to show honorable attention
to the enemy that had become a friend.
Presently,
as the wind dropped for a moment, Ulrich broke silence.
"Let's
shout for help," he said; "in this lull our voices
may carry a little way."
"They
won't carry far through the trees and undergrowth," said Georg;
"but we can try. Together, then."
The two raised their voices in a prolonged hunting call.
"Together
again," said Ulrich a few minutes later, after listening in
vain for an answering halloo.
"I
heard something that time, I think," said Ulrich.
"I
heard nothing but the pestilential wind," said Georg hoarsely.
There
was silence again for some minutes, and then Ulrich gave a joyful cry.
"I
can see figures coming through the wood. They are following in the way
I came down the hillside."
Both
men raised their voices in as loud a shout as they could muster.
"They
hear us! They've stopped. Now they see us. They're running down the
hill toward us," cried Ulrich.
"How
many of them are there?" asked Georg.
"I
can't see distinctly," said Ulrich, "nine or ten."
"Then
they are yours," said Georg; "I had only seven out
with me."
"They
are making all the speed they can, brave lads," said Ulrich
gladly.
"Are
they your men?" asked Georg. "Are they your men?"
he repeated impatiently as Ulrich did not answer.
"No,"
said Ulrich with a laugh, the idiotic chattering laugh of a man unstrung
with hideous fear.
"Who
are they?" asked Georg quickly, straining his eyes to see what
the other would gladly not have seen.
"Wolves!"
