“Have you ever,” Alan asked, “met a bear all alone?”
“Of course,” the woodcutter replied. “He looked at me for a long time with his green eyes, then we winked at each other and parted. We are inhabitants of the forest; we have no need to fight.”
PAUSTOVSKY
The Snow-Covered Plain
In the evening the bear came out of the gorge and barged into the middle of the summer camp. He threw dogs, cows, milk, milkers, horses and piglets into confusion, then headed back to the gorge, taking along schoolteacher Gevorg Abovyan’s grandmother’s you-know-what—too embarrassing to say, that thing grandmothers wear underneath. The teacher was standing there by the tent, gun in hand. They saw each other, stopped, looked each other in the face; then the bear winked, took the drawers and went into the gorge. The teacher, still holding his gun, had fallen down and was writhing with laughter.
“Shoot! What are you gaping at? Go down after him! Why are you laughing with your mouth open?”
“Sh… ha-ha-ha-ha… it’s shot, sh… ha-ha-ha-ha…”
They put a carbine in his hands and brought a horse beneath him. “Go! Ride down!”
“Granny, that thing you washed—where is it?.. You washed it, it was spread out here…” he said, choking with laughter, but the milkmaids understood nothing.
“Ride down! You’ll catch him! Go!”
He urged the horse forward—but the horse was young, the girths loose, and he fell.
“Oh, you clown, you clown…”
The part about the drawers was a lie: the bear had taken no drawers. The rest is true. At night he entered the pigsties; next day he frightened the girls in the blackberry thicket, then remodelled the shepherd’s cloak and dog. He had pinched the pigs’ ears, kept one girl’s bucket for himself, and torn off the dog’s ear and tail. The village had a good laugh. Then he went too far: he had killed some ten pigs. The village decided he would have to be killed.
So Gevorg, the teacher, went to Girish, the old hunter, so they could go and kill him.
“You say he’s done damage, eh?” Uncle Girish asked, a smirk under his moustache.
“They say he has.”
“Right! We’ll kill him. Done damage, done a lot—we’ll kill him. You say we should kill him, eh?”
“They say, kill him with Uncle Girish.”
“Right! They’ve said kill him, so we’ll kill him.” He kept him talking while fastening his gun barrel to the stock with copper wire. “You say you were in camp when he came. Why didn’t you shoot?”
“I had shot, no bullet for a bear.”
“You had shot, no bullet for a bear, understood. But when you got on the horse and had the carbine in your hands, why didn’t you go?”
“I fell off the horse.”
“Fell off the horse…” He talked and secretly laughed. “I believe you: you had shot, they brought the carbine late, the horse was unbroken, you fell off—you didn’t kill him. I believe you, I do.” He talked and slowly wound the copper wire.
He wound it and wound it until the wire ran out.
“Let’s go.”
“But a gun for you?.. With that gun?”
Uncle Girish, then, is a hunter; he hunts. He spends all day in the fields, must surely be killing plenty of things, and surely hunting forbidden game too. Nikol, the village council chairman, comes to his house in the evenings, eats partridge, sits and stays. “Bring the gun, give it to him,” Uncle Girish tells his wife. For hunting forbidden game, Nikol takes the gun away, then comes again the next evening. Again he eats partridge, again takes a gun away. In this way some ten guns accumulate in the office. They are all one real gun. One real gun is scattered among those ten, and will be scattered among another ten: one has a real barrel, the second a stock, the tenth a bolt, and the twentieth will have a real foresight. The rest Uncle Girish carves and makes with an adze or whatever comes to hand. Yes, with his passion for hunting, even if that one part were missing, he would still make it, piece by piece, and bind it with wire, just so there was always partridge at home. Or bear meat. Or roe deer.
But if you want the truth, Nikol has never once eaten pigeon meat in his house. It was chicken. Or pork. Or calf. If you want to know, he does not hunt at all. The fields simply draw a man, and he gives that meaning for himself and others by hanging something like a gun over his shoulder: “I’m a hunter, I hunt in the fields. Here’s my gun.”
“Can you kill a bear with that?” Gevorg, the teacher, said. “With that club?”
“Yours is a carbine; it kills. A good gun.”
They knew where the den was, went and stood above it.
“The lunatic’s inside,” Gevorg said, as though speaking of a friend who had got drunk and acted crazy yesterday.
“If he’s inside, we’ll kill him. Had he done no damage, we wouldn’t kill him…” And the old man peered in familiarly, as though entering his brother’s house. “Ahem… May I?” And he went inside.
The bear woke. They looked each other in the face, and the bear came out without a sound. The old man made way and, as he passed, said into his ear: “You’re guilty, aren’t you?”
Gevorg fired rather late.
Sitting at the door of the bear’s house, they laughed after the fleeing householder, puffed their tobacco and invented their report. “We fired and missed. You heard the shot, didn’t you?”
Later the bear kept doing damage, and Uncle Girish and Gevorg kept going and shooting, until the volunteer correspondent for Unswervingly towards Socialism learned that bear hunting was forbidden and wrote to the paper: bear hunting was forbidden, yet Uncle Girish and Gevorg Abovyan were shooting. The district centre notified them of the ban and, in passing, the size of the fine.
The laughter ended.
“Since when is a bear a harmless animal? We’ll kill him, you fine us. Let’s see how you’ll fine us.”
The district centre notified them that after a warning the fine was doubled. “We are warning you!”
They grew afraid.
Meanwhile the bear kept doing damage. He killed a cow on the farm. Very calmly they telephoned the district centre to report that he had killed a cow, and suggested they stay by the telephone: “We won’t keep you waiting for the next report.” And the next day they reported: “Nothing much, a heifer with one broken horn, not even pedigree…” The district centre suggested killing him: “You are permitted to kill that bear, do you hear, that one, and send the meat and skin to the district centre as state property.”
“The bear is an ornament of nature,” they said at this end of the line. “We aren’t people who spoil nature’s ornaments.”
A brigade of hunters arrived. Olympic Games winner Vasiko Ghoghoberidze approached the den from behind; four-time Transcaucasian champion Hakob Meghruni from the left; writer and hunter Vakhtang Ananyan from the right; taxi driver Karapet Harutyunyan and district Party committee instructor Vilen Khachatryan from the front. With a single shot they shattered his uncomprehending skull. They left the entrails here and took the meat and skin to the capital.
Old Girish now has only one gun, a real one. The fields draw the old man away, and, giving it meaning for himself and others, he slings that gun over his shoulder, as if to say: I’m hunting forbidden game. Of course he meets bears. Often they pretend not to see each other; sometimes they stop and look. The old man does not shoot because there is a fine; the bear does not attack because the gun is real. That is all. But winking—they no longer happen to wink at one another.