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Before making our way into the brush-wood we put down our insect-cases and game-bags, for the enterprise required our unimpeded agility. As long as we could cling on to the plants and shrubs, the descent was mere child's play; but we soon found ourselves treading on a reddish ferruginous soil, which some great land-slip had exposed.
Great, tall, raw-boned Kentuckians, attired in hunting-shirts, and trailing their loose joints over a vast extent of territory, with the easy lounge peculiar to the race, rifles stacked away in the corner, shot-pouches, game-bags, hunting-dogs, and little negroes, all rolled together in the corners, were the characteristic features in the picture.
When his young companions extracted enjoyment from fish-hook and gun, and hilariously filled game-bags and fishing-baskets, he sat quietly drinking in a higher, more humane delight before his easel. These tastes, as they strengthened, caused his father, though a liberal and cultivated man, severe disappointment.
The sportsmen took up their positions at some distance from each other, Hautot Senior posting himself at the right, Hautot Junior at the left, and the two guests in the middle. The keeper and those who carried the game-bags followed. It was the solemn moment when the first shot it awaited, when the heart beats a little, while the nervous finger keeps feeling at the gun-lock every second.
The furniture in the parlour was unpainted and evidently roughly made by a carpenter; guns, game-bags, and whips were hanging on the walls, and all this old rubbish was covered with the rust of years and looked grey with dust. There was not one picture; in the corner was a dingy board which had at one time been an ikon.
The skin of the wolf is strong and durable; the woodmen, braconniers, and mountaineers, make cloaks and caps of it, the tail being left on the latter to fall over the ear by way of ornament; they likewise cover with it the outside of their game-bags.
By eleven o'clock there were barely a score of birds in the game-bags when there should have been a hundred. At the second cross road, the right and left party convened. It was what Le Bour had been waiting for. A sour old man in a blue blouse now rose up out of a hedge in which he had hidden himself, and came glowering toward us.
The place, moreover, invited to repose. People in elaborate shooting costumes sallied from the château with guns and game-bags; and this was a pleasure in itself, to remain behind while these elegant pleasure-seekers took the first of the morning.
Fowling-pieces of all sizes, from the long ducking-gun mounted on a swivel for boat use to the light single-barrel or carbine, stood in racks against the walls; game-bags, revolvers in their holsters, hunting and fishing knives in their sheaths, depended from hooks above them. In one corner stood a harpoon; in another, two or three Indian spears for salmon.
"The way the gun bangs when it goes off worries me. I believe there's a bangless gun, but even so, you're expected to kill things, and I think the things are much happier alive. I don't even like the taste of them cooked. But Allan hunts. He brings game-bags full of poor little dead things back whenever he's where he can do it. He hasn't yet, here. We just came, you know."
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