An Encounter
ALL the day long I had expected. something, known that every dreary furlong of my hundred-and- twenty mile drive across that Central Indian upland of thin grass and bare rock and stark, burnt earth brought me nearer to some adventure of a, flavour hitherto un- tasted, and here it was ! For as the car swung slowly over the crest of an undulation differing in no particular from the uncounted undulations left in my wake, They rose to their feet and faced me, four on my right, three on the road itself—Wolves !
Never before in my life had I seen these beasts in the open, and my childhood memory of wolves behind bars was lifeless and dim. Perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty years had passed since I had even thought of a wolf. The heavy jungles and sodden rice country where my work had lain till then do not hold them. But neither the startled mutter of the man at my side—" Varr " nor his hurried, backward glance into the body of the car, where the guncase and its contents lay buried under a pile of miscellaneous bundles and trunks, were necessary for my enlightenment. I knew them at once, as a man would recognize a Unicorn, or a Mermaid, or Apollyon himself out of the illustrated Pilgrim's Progress of his nursery days. They were not jackals, nor big, whitish- grey village dogs, nor did they even suggest a likeness to those animals. They were the real thing, high as three- month calves, gaunt in their hot-weather coats, big- headed and ruffed at the neck. Their jagged lower jaws hung open in the heat and their tongues were very long and red. They were wolves.
Involuntarily I slowed the engine to avoid a collision with the three on the road, and these, without a glance at the car, walked leisurely aside and joined their com- panions. All seven of them paced uneasily up and down, leering at, me sidelong, about fifteen paces away, panting and_smelling the ground. Out of bravado—one feels so much braver in a car than galloping by moonlight through a Russian forest in a three-horse sleigh—I shouted at them. Then they left off their aimless pacing and lowered their heavy jowls almost to the ground, and clamped their hanging jaws together, and looked at me. I belong to that eccentric class of persons who have no natural desire to kill every large wild beast that crosses their path. I would not walk a hundred yards to shoot a tiger which meant no harm to me, or, within reason, to the cattle of the villagers under my charge. And it has so fallen out that in the past quarter of a century I have very frequently—more frequently, perhaps, than most men with similar chances—met such animals, face to face and unexpectedly, on the march at dawn, or in the cool of an evening stroll. We have invariably parted without ill- feeling or excitement, after a momentary and mutual acknowledgment of each other's presence. So, the mere fact of a large carnivorous animal going peaceably about his business is not alarming to me, even if his eyes happen to meet mine. But under the malignant stare of those seven pairs of eyes set close together above the long, raking jaws (I had seen what was inside those jaws) I felt fear, the numbing fear of the child who wakes in the dark and knows there is a bear under his bed. It is not pleasant, it is positively indecent, to experience this emotion when one is on the wrong side of forty. I am sickeningly afraid of my dentist, and shall be until after the extraction of my last tooth, but that is quite a lawful kind of fear, with nothing in it humiliating or obscene.
Therefore, jamming the pedal into bottom gear, the car being a Ford, I whimpered to myself : " They are following us, following us at their great padding pace which will quicken to a spring, and then, suddenly, my man and I will be smothered beneath their rank, hot bodies, and their long jaws will snap and worry at our necks and arms--a horrid death, but I will not release the clutch until the car has run twenty yards, according to the Book of the Ford."
A quarter of a mile further on three villagers met us, grey-beards all, trampling mournfully to heaven knows where, two of them with iron-shod staves, and one had an ancient six-foot matchlock on his shoulder. Very brave and indifferent, I hailed them : " Varri," said I, " seven of them, just round the next corner ; if you hurry you may get a shot at them." But I could have wished that my voice had been steadier.
And straightway those three old men, for babble and excitement, became like men transfigured. One pulled a smouldering crust of dried cow-dung from his turban, blowing on it till it roared softly, and lit the other's match till it roared too. Right manfully the third swung his " lathi," and in a moment all of them were hurrying forward to the encounter like boys to • catch a sight of hounds. " This State pays a reward of two rupees on every wolf's head," explained my man. " One will aim the matchlock, and when he gives the word another must put the match to the vent. There is no trigger or hammer to that gun. Let us stop here and listen for their shot."
But I opened the throttle all the wider, for the car now held a third passenger whose name was Shame, and he was in haste, " And yet," thought I bitterly, " what do those old men know of Little Red Riding Hood, or the fate of the Lamb at the brook, or how the howling wolf- pack closes in on the doomed sleigh when the ammunition is all spent and the trace-horse cut loose and left to his fate, and the devoted footman (Ivan is his name) has given his life for the lovely fur-clad Countess and he sleeping child ? What is a werewolf to them ? Or that grim, prowling monster of the privy paw, the terror of the sheepfolds ? Nor have they so much as heard of that other ghoulish brute on whom my fellow-country- woman laid the Ban in her noble Lament for the Forests of Ulster The great grey wolf with scraping claw, lest he Lay bare my dead for gloating foes to see,
Lay bare my dead who died, and died for me.' "
As a good European, I inherit a whole huddle of dark neolithic fears which the poets and magicians and schoolmasters of my tribe have sedulously kept alive through the safe, comfortable centuries. I am not to Maine. From my cradle have I been bidden, enjoined, commanded to fear the wolf. He tears you to pieces alive and digs you up when you are dead, and before the maid has time to run to your frantic ringing he pulls you down on your own threshold ; between the pillar- box and the front-door he pulls you down, in the dark, after tea. No, I am not to blame.
But all that night, as I tossed, sleepless, under a glaring moon on the roof of the Dak bungaloW, that un- invited companion of my drive sat by the bed. " The stature of my soul " had been shortened for ever by three old men, and Asiatics at that, with two sticks and a crazy matchlock between them. .
C. G. C. T.
Previous page
