Chapter 20 - Page 2

he came out
into a glade or onto the road. The seven heavy pheasants dragged
painfully at his waist. Having found the traces of yesterday's
stag he crept under a bush into the thicket just where the stag
had lain, and lay down in its lair. He examined the dark foliage
around him, the place marked by the stag's perspiration and
yesterday's dung, the imprint of the stag's knees, the bit of
black earth it had kicked up, and his own footprints of the day
before. He felt cool and comfortable and did not think of or wish
for anything. And suddenly he was overcome by such a strange
feeling of causeless joy and of love for everything, that from an
old habit of his childhood he began crossing himself and thanking
someone. Suddenly, with extraordinary clearness, he thought: 'Here
am I, Dmitri Olenin, a being quite distinct from every other
being, now lying all alone Heaven only knows where--where a stag
used to live--an old stag, a beautiful stag who perhaps had never
seen a man, and in a place where no human being has ever sat or
thought these thoughts. Here I sit, and around me stand old and
young trees, one of them festooned with wild grape vines, and
pheasants are fluttering, driving one another about and perhaps
scenting their murdered brothers.' He felt his pheasants, examined
them, and wiped the warm blood off his hand onto his coat.
'Perhaps the jackals scent them and with dissatisfied faces go off
in another direction: above me, flying in among the leaves which
to them seem enormous islands, mosquitoes hang in the air and
buzz: one, two, three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million
mosquitoes, and all of them buzz something or other and each one
of them is separate from all else and is just such a separate
Dmitri Olenin as I am myself.' He vividly imagined what the
mosquitoes buzzed: 'This way, this way, lads! Here's some one we
can eat!' They buzzed and stuck to him. And it was clear to him
that he was not a Russian nobleman, a member of Moscow society,
the friend and relation of so-and-so and so-and-so, but just such
a mosquito, or pheasant, or deer, as those that were now living
all around him. 'Just as they, just as Daddy Eroshka, I shall live
awhile and die, and as he says truly:

"grass will grow and nothing more".

'But what though the grass does grow?' he continued thinking.
'Still I must live and be happy, because happiness is all I
desire. Never mind what I am--an animal like all the rest, above
whom the grass will grow and nothing more; or a frame in which a
bit of the one God has been set,--still I must live in the very
best way. How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not
happy before?' And he began to recall his former life and he felt
disgusted