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The khan has here a mew of about two hundred ger-falcons, which he goes to see once a-week, and he causes them to be fed with the flesh of fawns.
Nat asked no questions; but after a time, I voluntarily related to him the mishaps of the afternoon. He laughed heartily, and promised to go with me in the morning and give me a practical lesson in deer-stalking. The next day we visited the scene of my discomfiture, which Nat pronounced a splendid place for stalking, showing me where several fawns had lain the previous night.
His forbearance to do so would but mark, precisely, the complication of his fears. "What she does like," he finally said, "is the way it has succeeded." "Your marriage?" "Yes my whole idea. The way I've been justified. That's the joy I give her. If for HER, either, it had failed !" That, however, was not worth talking about; he had broken off. "You think then you could now risk Fawns?"
They made, none the less, at Fawns, for number, for movement, for sound they played their parts during a crisis that must have hovered for them, in the long passages of the old house, after the fashion of the established ghost, felt, through the dark hours as a constant possibility, rather than have menaced them in the form of a daylight bore, one of the perceived outsiders who are liable to be met in the drawing-room or to be sat next to at dinner.
"Even such I saw their sisters, one swan white, The little Helen, and less fair than she, Fair Clytemnestra, grave as pasturing fawns, Who feed and fear the arrow; but at whiles, As one smitten with love or wrung with joy, She laughs and lightens with her eyes, and then Weeps; whereat Helen, having laughed, weeps too, And the other chides her, and she being chid speaks naught, But cheeks and lips and eyelids kisses her, Laughing; so fare they, as in their blameless bud, And full of unblown life, the blood of gods."
"Fawns is all there for you, of course to the end of my tenure. But Fawns so dismantled," he added with mild ruefulness, "Fawns with half its contents, and half its best things, removed, won't seem to you, I'm afraid, particularly lively." "No," Maggie answered, "we should miss its best things. Its best things, my dear, have certainly been removed.
A young marsh hawk which we reared used to play at striking leaves or bits of bark with its talons; kittens play with a ball, or a cob, or a stick, as if it were a mouse, dogs race and wrestle with one another as in the chase; ducks dive and sport in the water; doves circle and dive in the air as if escaping from a hawk; birds pursue and dodge one another in the same way; bears wrestle and box; chickens have mimic battles; colts run and leap; fawns probably do the same thing; squirrels play something like a game of tag in the trees; lambs butt one another and skip about the rocks; and so on.
He was thinking of a Spring as well as of a Stevie of sixty years ago, and he babbled on of how many fawns were in the Queen's Bower this summer, and who had best shot at the butts at Lyndhurst, as if he were excited by the breath of his native Forest, but there was no making him understand that he was speaking with his nephews.
Like a flash he leaped in on the fawns. One quick snap of the long jaws with the terrible fangs; then, as if the whole thing were a bit of play, he loped away easily with the cubs, circling to join the mother wolf, which strangely enough did not return to the attack as the caribou charged back, driving the cubs and the old he-wolf away like a flock of sheep.
At a distance of some five miles farther down the valley we secured what we wanted, having come quite unexpectedly, while our horses were walking, upon a herd of black antelope, among them a number of half-grown fawns, one of which I managed to bowl over before they had sufficiently recovered from their surprise to get away; and having secured our prize upon the back of Piet's horse, behind his saddle, we proceeded to retrace our steps leisurely.
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