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The Hunter
THE hunter and his servant, the white master and the brown servant, who have grown to be comrades whilst hunting together, are watching for game, on the border of the grass-grown clearing in the heart of the forest. They do not care what it is that comes to them; it is sure to be a strong animal or a quick animal, one that has strength to attack or one that has strength to escape; sure to be something to kill.
As they are watching now, on the border of the wood-meadow, so they watch always in all places. At the edge of the forest where the hard immovable bodies of the trees do not crowd together so closely but soft hurrying bodies of animals may slip through; and on the shore of the mountain lake, in the night, where many thirsty ones bend down to drink and, having slaked their thirst, stand for a while motionless and dark against the sky, whilst drops like liquid sparks of moonlight drip from the wide nostrils about which the breath stands out like a silvery mist; and in the tall grass of the wilderness that lifts its grey blossom-plumes high above a man's head, in the dangerous alang-alang that hides from one another the pursuer and the pursued, so that the one never knows about the other or about himself, whether he hunt or be hunted; and they watch in their own home, too, in their own smooth, white house.
As other men the hunter lives in a house, and does the things that are done within the walls and under the roof of a house - easy things, done without passion, to sate and foster the body, and difficult things, done without passion too, for the sake of such fostering in future. He eats food which others prepare for him and set forth on a table spread with white linen, he puts on thin, cool clothes, he has a smooth floor under his feet, sits down in an easy chair, and sleeps on a bed that is carefully made. It is all the same to him whether the storm shriek and the rains stream down, or whether the scorching sun flame in the skies; he is dry under his roof, cool within his walls. And he reads, ponders, and writes, that he may be certain this same well-fed, well-sheltered, well-cared-for life may still continue. No other purpose has he in this, no other
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wish. But as he sits in his smooth, white house doing these things dispassionately, because of custom and necessity, the desire for his true life waits, restless and fell. He thinks of the great spaces without, beyond his walls, over his roof, the infinite spaces that teem with animals - the grass, the water, the wood, the hills, the air, teeming with animals. He is all a-tremble with desire and impatience. The while his eyes read, his hand writes, his mouth eats, the while his body lies stretched out, his innermost thought sits watching, spying for animals to kill. Because his own eyes are blinded and his own ears are deafened, so many times and for so many hours together within the entombing house, he has eyes and ears in other men who go about spying and listening all day. In the evening they come to him to tell him of what they have found.
When the translucent green that after sunset spreads its tranquil lakes around purple and golden cloud-islets, begins to dull and to ebb away in the western sky, when the trees of the garden grow immense, broadening, heightening into stupendous dimensions as they exhale innermost darkness, when the smooth white things within the house sink and disappear before the rising tide of night, the hunter sits behind the tall pillars of the verandah as behind tall, smooth tree-trunks at the border of the wood, watching. His cigar gleams out toward the dark highway like the tiny lantern which cricket-hunters hide amongst leaves to lure the light-loving chirpers. And, as easily lured as they, natives approach who know there are silver coins waiting behind that spark. Voices come out of the darkness:
‘I crave permission.’
Well content the hunter answers, ‘Come and stand before me.’ Vaguely discernible figures crouch on the nethermost step of the verandah.
‘Tooan, every night deer come to drink at the brook that flows past the bamboo copse.’
‘A herd of wild pigs has broken through all my fences, into the sweet-potato plantation! Alas, alas! they have rooted up and devoured all the crop.’
‘A tiger, Tooan, prowls around the hill village. We found his trail near the buffalo pen.’
The hunter's heart is set throbbing. He questions the villagers to
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[p. t.o. 50] | |
The Hunter
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know the hour and the spot, the animals' wonted haunts. Gladly the native feels the small coin in his palm. Gladly the hunter calls to his comrade, ‘Djongolan! Djongolan!’ Djongolan is standing behind him already. He has been sitting in the dark near the house. He too has been on the watch. He too has been hunting - all the time - and his finer ear has caught the sound of those naked footsteps before they left the road. ‘Djongolan! look after the guns. See that rice is boiled in a plaited bag of fresh banana-leaf strips. See that water is filled into bamboo cases. We will go hunting to-morrow morning before dawn.’
Now they may light the lamp over the writing table! It is no matter if the piles of books and papers be never so high. The hunter sits down whistling, and all through the monotonous work he hears the music of the guns clicking in Djongolan's hands, the music of his movements and voice in the go-down and in the kitchen. As he stretches himself on the cool sheet of his bed he thinks, ‘To-morrow night I shall lie on dry leaves, and I shall see the light of the watch-fire playing through the trees overhead.’
The comrades are in the midst of the wood when the morning star still hangs, brimful of light, in the dark sky. Silently and surely they go through the sulky blackness of the wood. Night is about their feet, night against their faces, and the dewy fulness of leaves. Immeasurably high overhead, a glowing purple vault rises, seen through dark tree-tops as through dark, low-drifting clouds. The air smells of life. Where the smell is dull and lies still, there is the motionless life of earth and stones. Even as through a dark rippleless pool living water will sometimes come welling up in smallest bubbles, even as somewhere through the ooze of its banks a tiny rill flows out, thus, through the dull, still smell of earth and stones, a smell of beginning life in moss and fungi floats up, a smell of ending life in rotting leaves and decayed wood floats out and is lost in the air. Where smells are sweet and hang tranquilly, there is the balmy-breathed life of new-budded leafage, and flowers deeply hidden that have bloomed overnight. Where smells are sharp and fugitive, like sudden rays, there the rapid lives of animals have passed by. Was it a bird, warm from the darkling nest? A red-eyed squirrel that with a swinging leap bounded into the leafage where it is densest? Or perhaps a wild cow wandered past, with her calf
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nuzzling her full udder as it went. Perhaps that pungent smell rose from the dripping sides of a stag that swam across the lake to the hind browsing among the tall reeds of the shore.
The two men breathe deep. They sniff the air. They drink in the multitudinous life. Their own grows stronger and wilder with it. Their eyes grow fierce. They tread noiselessly. They warn one another without speech, with hands and eyes. Underfoot, around, overhead, the forest is like a mountain of leaves, and they move along the all but invisible paths of charcoal burners and of the wood-rangers that tap the areng palm for its sweet juice, as along passages burrowed by moles into the solid greenness. Often, too, they have to hew out their way themselves. With their short, broad knives they hack into brushwood and saplings and through the masses of the thorny rattan that cuts at them with hooked whips. The leeches, raining down upon them out of the shaking leaves, hang on and sting so fiercely that their clothes are red with their own blood. They do not heed; they are hunting. Purplish blue and golden green, a woodcock flaps his wings. A catamount spits at them, her yellow eyes ablaze. Howling with fear, a troop of monkeys leap through a tree past which the black-spotted panther creeps. And as often as the hunter, motionless and well-hidden for a while, takes aim, an animal, broken and bleeding, drops with a shrill scream.
In the tall grass of the wilderness that makes the hillside to glisten palely in the sun, the tiger has his lair. Snake-like he winds through the tall stalks; swift as a flash of lightning he strikes the deer herd browsing among the young shoots, or the wild pigs that burrow up the sweetest roots of the alang-alang. Sated and heavy with blood, he lies asleep in the bamboo copse that rises sheer above the grey seas of grass. The peacocks come out and perch in the branches; his followers they, who live on his leavings. Greenish blue and golden, their tails gleam like some dark rainbow among drifting clouds of leafage. Their sharp heads with the diaphanous blue crests glisten as they stretch bending necks to peer down. Among the black and the yellow of shadows and sunbeams, has not other black and yellow stirred? Has it not slowly risen in a stretching of supple limbs, whilst blood-red jaws yawn under a gleam of cruel eyes? Resplendent in the noonday glare they take flight, screaming for joy.
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In the alang-alang wilderness the deer hear, and flee in flying leaps; the wild pigs hear and break into a gallop, shaking the ground with the thud of their hammering hooves. In the meagre rice-fields of the hillside, the peasants hear, and throw down spade and mattock as they run toward the gate of the village, narrowly opening into the enclosure of sharply pointed posts. Within the plaited huts of the hamlet, the women hear, and rush out for their children at play out-of-doors. At the border of the wood the hunter hears. The hunter rejoices. The comrade leads the timorous men into the alang-alang in a wide semicircle, that with shouting and the beating of hollow wood blocks they may drive the tiger toward the edge of the forest. There the hunter stands watching, leaning against a tree, his back toward the tiger. He hears a scouring, shuffling sound drawing nearer and nearer. He stands motionless, tense, from his head that listens and thinks rapidly to his finger that waits on the trigger. Branches break under a soft, heavy tread; a poisonous breath, a stench of blood and decay, goes past; he sees the shambling black and yellow shanks. On the spot he has chosen, thirty paces away, his bullet strikes the tiger in the neck. When the terrible beast leaps up, when it turns roaring and that flaming head comes at him, his second shot goes home.
The comrade bends over the open, bleeding jaws to pull out the whiskers, which he hides in the folds of his head-cloth for a talisman. The villagers come running; they know the hunter will turn over the quarry to them, that they may claim the prize-money. Eight of them carry the stupendous carcass slung upon a bamboo trunk that bends, creaking. The white of belly and throat, grown so delicately for the shade and the cool green and brown gleams of the forest soil, is turned toward the fierce sunlight; the great head hangs dangling; the nose and the golden glassy eyes, the broad forehead, strike against stones and knotted roots. The hunter averts his eyes.
When the comrades follow up a trail, through the wood, along the ravine, up the steep hillside, they never think of giving up the quest until they overtake the stag or the dangerous wild bull, the lone one whom the herd has driven out. Then they forget ways and hours. The heat of the day is lessening. Farther and farther away from them like to a couple of small black animals, the two shadows of their heads run
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along the hillside among boulders and bushes and, suddenly, high up against trees. They are somewhere in the unknown, where no men live.
The comrade begins searching. By the trunk of an areng palm into which notches have been cut for a ladder, by a charred piece of wood on the ground or a barely perceptible smell of burning on the wind, he guesses the path to the wood-ranger's hut, or to the smouldering pile of the charcoal burners in some as yet far-off clearing. But the hunter eschews as if it were a prison all human habitation, even one which, like a bird's nest, is made of plaited twigs and leaves, and through which the wind plays, and the changeful lights of the heavens by day and night. He needs the great spaces of the limitless world about him that freely flow and freely rise out into all distances, up into all heights - such as environ all beings except man only. On an airy hill-top he lights his watch-fire; the light of the flames shall be the thin dancing wall around his defenceless sleep in the night.
The comrade sits warming himself at the fire, drying his drenched clothes and chilled skin. He feels for the thorns and chards that have pierced deep into his feet and tears off the leeches, all swollen and black, that are sticking to his legs. Meanwhile, he watches the roasting of the deer's haunch, stuck on a green branch from which the juice drops into the fire hissing. After the meal he is drunk with repletion, fatigue, sleep. And the hunter, seeing how he no longer has any power over his head and eyelids, how he cannot hinder them from bending and hanging down like flowers wilting, says with a smile that the comrade may go and sleep; he himself will watch the fire, their protection in the night.
Now he is alone; thus he would choose to be. And around him the night is like a black sea, rolling in waves under the wind like the sea, teeming with life like the sea. He sits still. Overhead are the lofty stars, a cloud slowly sailing, the hanging leafage through which the firelight plays. No limits anywhere, no narrowness. He feels the great motions that go on through all eternity, resistless, all-pervading. In the chill of the black earth, in the radiance of the stars, in the wind that blows through the surging trees and is still again, in the light noises here and there, in his own breathing, he feels the never-ending course of life, the never-ending course of birth and death. Like waves, like the great waves of the sea, that still are coming and still are going, that
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fling themselves on one another, and strike down and swallow one another so that one swells and grows immense with the gulping-in of the overthrown, but from its triumphant height crashes down and subsides and is dispersed: even thus the innumerable lives are still coming and still going, the quick, strong, devouring lives that wrathfully fling themselves upon one another, every greater one on every lesser one; and on the many feeble ones devoured a stronger one grows surpassingly, until from its topmost height it is hurled down, and is no more - the flaming eyes, the claws that struck down and gripped, the devouring jaws that tore open and drank so much of life, are no more. Never to be anything again. Ever to be everything again. A new life springs where a past life sank. There is no decrease from any disappearing, ever; there is no increase from any appearing, ever. What was from the beginning is to-day. What then does it mean when a man says I? What then is that which takes on the semblance of birth? And what in truth underlies the appearance of death?
The flames sink and pale. The hunter, musing, throws twigs and dry leaves on the fire. Around a branch that is half alive yet, blackish-green, the flame hisses writhing among twists of vapour and smoke. The comrade stirs and mutters in his sleep. What was that noise, hard by? And now, that cry? The hunter lifts his head, listening sharply. His thought sees in the dark. He knows how the snake in writhing curves ran up the tree and seized the small monkey in a loop that broke its ribs; he follows the luwak as with dripping mouth it slips out of the nest where the ringdove sat, spreading her wings over her callow young ones; he guesses the spot where the crouching panther leapt on the deer. He throws more wood on the fire, and draws deeper into the circle of radiance what remains of his booty - a couple of green-winged wild ducks, maybe, brought down as out of the blackish reeds along the river they flew up into the purple sunset sky, or a long-legged heron that sailed on wide-stretched wings over his whitish reflection in the swamp. He listens, his nostrils quiver, his mouth stands half open in the grey rough beard. Is there still more of life there, still more of fell death? And he holds his breath to hear the better, suddenly, far away, the shrill hoarse lowing of the rhinoceros.
In a steep pass between mountains rising high above the sea - the rivers falling down from their sides hang in cascades that cease in mid- | |
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air, a floating whiteness over the up-leaping whiteness of the surf - in a deep vale between the rocks over which he has hollowed out his way, scouring out the stone with his heavily hanging belly, the terrible bull stands, blacker than the black night around, a clenched darkness. He stands immovable, ponderous, a hill of strength. He roars with rage, with angry desire to crash into another such as he, another black thunderous hill of heat and strength. He makes the valley to shake with the stamping of his feet. He sniffs the wind in which he scents his rival. The white of his terrific horn breaks through the night when he throws up his bent head with a jerk.
The hunter sees it as if he saw it with his eyes; he frowns in despite because he cannot win his way through the blind night. And the comrade, who has waked up, half raises himself leaning on his elbow - his face with the protruding cheek-bones and the receding chin is strangely contorted in the light of the flames - and tells how Malays kill the rhinoceros, secure from the danger that threatens from this strongest and fiercest of all beasts of the forest: in the rhinoceros's hollowed-out path over the rocks they plant a knife, the handle dug well into the ground, the point upward, so that the heavily trailing belly cuts itself open against it. But the hunter never answers. Maybe he never heard those sayings about safety and easily got booty, he who from the innermost heart's depths up to the outer rim of the senses is filled full with the one lust for life and for death which hurls every strong one upon every other strong one.
In him, the man of lonely life who already is beginning to grow old, this desire has been for so long a time that, for all he knows, it was there always. So great and strong it has grown during these many years of hunting, so absolutely the greatest, absolutely the strongest, that, for all he knows, it is the only desire in him. That is why the confusion was so great when, suddenly, in an hour that in no way differed from all other hours, whilst he sat watching for some creature to kill, and he cared not what it was that came; when in that instant a feeling rose within him before which that great and strong one crouched and slunk away. And to this day he does not well understand what it was that happened to him in that moment.
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He sat watching at the border of a clear meadow in the heart of the forest, well hidden, with those keen eyes of his; and, well hidden too, his comrade sat not far away from him. They held in their hands the death of many animals; well content, they were waiting to let it loose on some strong wild life. The meadow lay light green in the earliest sunshine. The red blossoms of the many mimosa plants stood shining above the dew-whitened fans of still-folded leaflets.
Suddenly there was a violent crashing of brushwood. Almost at the same instant two animals, a brownish one, a yellowish one striped with black, leapt out of the dense leafage into the open and sunlit meadow. They stood still for a second, affrighted by the strong sun. But then, loosely as the wind runs out through the leaves, the one ran away, the other ran after, and the two began a game of playful chasing and fleeing all through the blossoming meadow and round and round about in rapid circles. The one that playfully chased was a fawn, the one that playfully fled was a tiger cub.
The fawn ran on high, woody legs; it held its delicate head capriciously on one side, and when it pretended to butt at its playfellow with that round little forehead about which the hair crinkled softly, it suddenly, all four feet off the ground, made a bound which surprised itself and stood quite startled. The tiger cub had a thick soft head, thick soft paws, a little belly that stood out all round and full of suck. The white about its mouth looked like milk. And it ran as if it ran for its life. It drew back its ears, laying them flat to its head; it darted through the grass, crouched, peered at its playfellow, and flung itself down on its flanks to await him. There it lay like a patch of sunshine, and its black stripes looked like so many shadows thrown by leaves of grass and mimosa stalks.
The little fawn came stepping gingerly, with stiff legs, its head on one side. It stood still, looking like a brown lump of forest soil, dappled over with round patches of sunlight that falls through leaves hanging quite still. Flattening itself against the ground, the little tiger came crawling toward him; its shoulder-blades stood up and on its back, thin and angular, its short blunt tail quivered. It crouched as if about to spring; but just then the fawn leapt with an impetus that carried it clean over the tiger cub and quite a distance out into the meadow before it could stop. The little tiger was off before the other came to a
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stand. It ran, and the fawn ran after through grass and flowers, scattering the dew. Like the wind through waving grasses the little tiger ran; like the wind through bushes and nodding ferns the fawn leapt; like sunbeams the striped playfellow gleamed, like patches of sunlight the dappled one.
And suddenly, as wind and gleams of sunlight are gone, so they were gone, both at the same instant. It was only when the comrade muttered that they would not come back any more now, that the hunter became aware he had sat waiting. Had he been sitting there, so quietly, among the green leaves, forgetting his gun, smiling? And he saw that the comrade too was smiling. He went home, slowly, without speaking.
That evening, when the natives came with tidings such as a hunter loves to hear, he gave them the coin he always gave, but he asked them no questions nor did he call for his comrade. He sat in the dark with himself, as with a stranger, for a long time after they were gone, whilst the crickets began to chirp among the leaves, and the stars came out in the sky, so clear, so still. There was a tone he had never heard as yet in the chirping of the crickets, a merry sweetness, most gentle. Was it the starlight? He could not but think of the eyes of his young mother, who had died when he was as yet a child.
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Auteursrecht onbekend