USI, THE SVÂN
"I am Usi, of Ushkul, in the country of the Svâns; Usi the Bear-slayer
was my name, as long as I lived among them. The custom of the country is
that as often as a female child is born, any youth of the village who
looks forward to his need of marriage may come to the cradle and hang
his own bullet around the neck of the infant, and from that time she is
pledged to him, and he must marry her when she is old enough. When I was
a stripling, the wife of our Priest produced him their fourteenth child,
a daughter; and I was the first to go in at his door, and bespeak the
young creature for myself. But as fortune ordained, the damsel proved
deaf and dumb, though in other ways quite useful; and I very justly
refused in the presence of all the village to marry her. And this I did,
when she was ten years old, allowing her plenty of time for others, who
might esteem it to their pleasure and advantage to possess a wife
without a tongue. But the very next day, when I was watching the maize,
a bullet came through my hat, and lodged in a tree behind me; and when I
dug it out, behold it was my own with the fancy pattern on it, with
which I had betrothed myself ten years before. To that I need not have
paid much attention, but that the Priest had nine well-grown sons, and
it would be the duty of all these nine in succession to lie in wait for
me, and endeavour to shoot me through the head. The eldest had been too
near the mark for me to believe without rashness that the other eight
would fire in vain; so I took my good mother's advice, which she gave me
with many tears, and left my native place for lifetime. Neither was it
safe for me to dwell in any of the villages for miles and miles around,
because we people of the Svâns had suffered from want of food for the
last two years, and had been obliged to take all the loaves, and corn,
and cattle of our neighbours within three days' journey; and so we were
out of favour with them.
"On this account I was compelled, having borne a strong hand in those
forages, to keep myself away from spots where I would have settled
gladly. At a distance I saw beautiful maidens, over the tops of the
raspberries; but whenever I desired to draw near them, there was sure to
be a father or a brother, whose cow or whose sheep had been beef or
mutton to me. And those people bear such things in mind, not being
generous as we are. And thus I went along the valleys, feeding on the
fruit, wherever the bears had left a tail of it. Then going further
towards the rising sun, which is the strength of all of us, I came upon
a man who carried a kinjal on a gun-mouth.
"In those days, I could jump as high as I could put my hands up; and
being surprised by his pointing at me, I did it to give him time to
think. This made him think more of me than I deserved, and instead of
shooting me, he asked in what land men could jump so. I could not
understand at first, though he did it with all his fingers; because we
had kept ourselves apart from other people, whenever we could live
without our neighbours' goods. But I was always considered the foremost
of the young men for understanding, and I contrived to make out what he
meant, and to do a thing which is much harder--to make him know what I
meant. He was a soldier of the great Imaum, desiring to shoot Russians;
and as soon as we made out one another, he showed me the notches on his
gun, and I counted forty-two, and he said every one was the good corpse
of a Russian. This made me long to do the like, though the Russians had
never shot at me, but my own friends had; and my soul arose to look
along a gun at any stranger, even as it had been done to me.
"Others came up, and when they found how straight my barrel was, and
what it was famous for doing among the bears, the Captain said, 'Thou
shalt do it, my lad, with the bears that eat our people.' And so I was
put into Shamyl's army, and for many years enjoyed myself. I have shot
three Russian colonels, and small officers by the dozen; and I could
have shot the Commander once; but his daughter was by his side, and I
stopped my finger when it was on the crook, with my mind upon my mother.
"Twelve years I fought under Shamyl, and did so much good that as often
as a great man came on the Russian side, it was my place to put a stop
to him. If you come across any of our old men now, and say to them,
'What about Usi the Bear' you will see their eyes sparkle, and hear them
say, 'Not one among us could compare with him for sending a Cossack to
the devil three-quarters of a verst away.' Alas that I shall no more do
it! The times are not as they used to be.
"Then there came a man who was the noblest of all the sons of men to
look at that ever the red sun shone upon. Imar, the son of Dadian,
Master of the Western Lesghians, stronger than an Auroch bull, and
gentler than a suckling woman. His father Dadian had been mighty, and a
lord of men; but Imar was as the Saint Christ that stands in gold among
the images of clay. Though I was not of his tribe, I craved to be put
into his troop, and whatever he did Usi was never far away. Until the
war came to an end, and all who were not shot or starved went home to
their own mountains. But I dared not go to Ushkul yet, and had forgotten
how to live without a rifle in my hands. Then Imar, the son of Dadian,
took me, and beholding in me an honest man, and the surest with a long
gun of all whom he had proved in battle, he appointed me a little place
on the northern slope of Kazbek, to keep the wild beasts from the crops,
and the wolves who had thriven by means of the war from eating the
helpless children. As long as he reigned I had a hut in the forest, and
twenty-five kopeks a week, and all the timber I could cut, and a wife
who behaved very softly to me, and bore me several children.
"Then the Russians spread their hands along the mountains and the
valleys, when there was no longer any power of men in arms to stop them,
and they put a tribute on every house, and they sent away all the
leaders of the men who had fought against them, and among them the Lord
Imar, to a little island in the West which had never been friendly with
them. My money was cut down to ten kopeks; but I had my cattle and sheep
and goats, and all the things that I could grow or shoot, until that
Princess Marva came, the widow of Rakhan Houseburner, and claimed the
command of everything. I would not rebel against the sister of the man I
had loved so much, and she said that she sent him all the money to keep
him in his exile, and for a long time people believed her. Until a great
man of authority was sent to us from Russia, to see to the forests and
the revenue, and he told us that the lady had never sent a kopek to her
brother, but that the Russians very justly allowed him most of his
revenue, because he had friends of clever voices and power in high
places. Then the Princess said that I defied her, although I had never
said a word of lies, and she sent fierce men to turn me out; but I had a
little powder left, and my eye was straight though my hands are old, and
I made two of them fall as dead as bears, and the rest flew away, like
the shadow of a cloud, when the wind is blowing.
"But a week after that my house was burned, while my wife and I were
fast asleep; and I lost the gun that shoots so straight, though I think
it must be in the ashes still. My little daughter, nine years old, died
in the stream we put her in to relieve her of her death-pain, and the
other damsel and both my boys were hurt by jumping into the fir-tree.
The hair of my wife's head was scorched so that I had to put a
sheep-skin on; and the doctor said that if I had been a smooth man, I
never could have worn a shirt again. But people were good, and I had
shot a bear, which was hanging on a tree unmelted; and when you have
such fat to rub you, you can cure anything outside.
"Ossets, and Lesghians, and such races might think none the worse of
Marva for treating them in that kind of way; but Svâns, such as I am,
have never abandoned their bodies and their goods to the authority of
any one since the time of the great Queen Tamara, none of us can tell
how long ago; and although I might not be a true Svân now, yet the
nature of the race abode in me. Then, while I was thinking, I heard a
thing which stirred me like the trumpet of the great Imaum,--Sûr Imar
himself was coming home to take his proper place again, and do good to
his people. Great joy was spread among the Lesghians; but the Ossets
went against the thought, because he had too much strength of law, and
had grievously wronged them of the many goods flowing in to their
dwellings from robbery, for the short time he governed at Karthlos. It
was said, moreover, that Queen Marva, as she loved to hear herself
called, would now have no chance of holding fast her manifold
encroachments, fruitful valleys which she had stolen, and flocks and
herds, and timber-trees, and crag-sides where some strangers pay her for
hunting stones which they can change for gold.
"Now I will tell you a little thing; and it is the wisdom of the wiser
days. There are two sorts of bears which prowl and devour in the
corn-land and the forest; the big brown bear called _Michael_, who
destroys the crops and the fruit-trees, but is glad to run from an
unarmed child, unless his body is wounded; and then there is another
bear, not so large indeed, but black with a white frill to its bosom.
This animal we call _Michaina_; and a wise man flies from it, unless he
can slay it at one shot; because it will rush upon him in the dark, and
tear out his intestines. And our fathers have left word for us through
many generations, that the brown bear is the form in which bad men on
earth have been condemned to come back to it and see the harm they did;
when some of it has been stopped by death. But the black bears are the
wicked women, still going on in wickedness, not so often met with as the
evil men, but a hundredfold to be dreaded, being black to the depth of
their hearts and souls. And this black bear Queen Marva is.
"I had no house in the forest now, and no place left me in the world
better than any other; and it mattered little to my flesh what became of
all great people. I had my wounded children, or as many as remained of
them, to carry on my back sometimes, or sometimes to run and pull me on,
according to the power of our courage. And my wife, when I grieved about
her hair, which had brought men in office to admire her, said that
without it her head felt lighter, and begged me not to accept another
woman, with no hut of my own to bring her to, and no meat to put into
her. Why she asked me such a thing--when I had never thought of it, and
was going along in a steadfast way, with a child on either
shoulder-blade--only the Lord, who made most of the women for our good,
can tell us.
"Sir, and honourable gentlemen (who have saved my life upon a hair),
when I was a boy my teaching was to believe in the Devil only, and to
pray to certain images that knew the way to appease him. But now I have
been among wiser people, who look up to the sky, and think that it was
made for good as well as evil. And whether that be true or false, I have
found the people who think thus a great deal better than the dark
believers."
At this point the poor Svân broke down, and shed a flood of tears after
a long sad gaze at the mountains as if he had no home now, and at the
sky as if he had no hope there. We gave him a little more nourishment,
for we saw that his tale was coming towards us now; and then he wiped
his eyes, and set them sternly, and cast self-pity into the fire of his
wrongs.