(A chapter from _The Forest Schoolmaster_)
A load is off our hearts. The storm has fallen. A soft wind came and
gently relieved the trees of their burdens. There were a few mild days;
then the snow settled and we can now go where we will with snow-shoes.
Nevertheless, something has happened lately over in the Karwässer.
Berthold, whose family increases from year to year, and from year to
year has less to eat--Berthold has turned poacher. A wood-cutter is a
better hand at this than any of us, who remain faint-hearted humbugs
all our lives long.--Poor people need not marry, says the wood-cutter.
Well, according to custom and practice, they have not married, but they
have kneeled before me in the forest ... and ... and now they are all
starving together.
So Berthold has turned poacher. Wood-cutting brings in far too little
for a roomful of children. I send them all the food I can, but it is
not enough. He must have good, strong soup for the ailing wife and a
piece of meat for the children; so he shoots the roe that comes his
way. To this, then, has passion brought him, until Berthold, who once,
as a herd, was such a good and jolly fellow, has, through poverty,
pride, and the love of his own, grown into a pretty criminal.
I have once already pleaded with the gamekeeper for God's sake to be a
little, just a little lenient with the poor husband and father: he was
sure to mend his ways, I said, and I would go bail for him. Up to the
present he has not mended his ways; but the events of these wild winter
days have made him weep aloud, for he loves his Lily-of-the-Forest
above everything.
It happened on a murky winter evening. The little windows are walled up
with moss; outside new flakes are falling on the old snow. Berthold is
sitting up with the children and with his sick Aga, only waiting until
the eldest girl, Lily, comes back with the milk which she has gone to
beg of a neighbouring hermit on the Hinterkar. For the goats at home
have been killed and eaten; and, if only Lily would return, Berthold
means to go into the forest with his gun. For the roe cannot be far to
seek in this weather.
But it grows dark and Lily does not return. The snow falls thicker and
heavier, night draws in and Lily does not come. The children by now are
crying for their milk; the father is eager to be after his game; the
mother sits up in bed:
"Lily!" she calls. "Wherever are you, child, trotting about in that
pitch-dark forest? Come home!"
How can the sick woman's weak voice reach the wanderer through the
fierce snowstorm?
As the night grows darker and stormier, Berthold's craving to go
poaching grows deeper, while his fears for his Lily-of-the-Forest rise
higher and higher. She is a frail little twelve-year-old girl. True,
she knows the precipices and the wooded mountain-paths; but the paths
are hidden by the snow and the precipices by the darkness.
At last, the man leaves his house to go in search of his child. For
hours he roams and shouts through the storm-swept wilderness; the wind
fills his eyes and mouth with snow; he has to put forth all his
strength to get back to his hut.
And now two days pass. The snow keeps on falling; Berthold's hut is
almost snowed in. They do their noisy best to console themselves: Lily
is sure to be at the hermit's. This hope is destroyed on the third day,
when Berthold, after struggling for hours over the snow-clad landscape,
succeeds in reaching the hermitage. True, Lily was at the hermit's
three days ago, but left early on her way home with the milk-pot.
"Then my Lily-of-the-Forest lies buried in the snow," says Berthold.
Whereupon he goes to other wood-cutters and begs, as no one has ever
seen this man beg before, that they will come and help him look for his
dead child.
They find Lily-of-the-Forest on the evening of the same day.
Down a lonely forest-glen, in a dark and tangled thicket of young pines
and larches, through which no snowflake can make its way and upon which
the loads of snow lie heaped and arched till the young branches groan
again, in this thicket Forest-Lily is found sitting on the ground, on
the dry pine-needles, amid a family of six roe-deer.
It is a very wonderful story. The child, returning home, lost her way
in the forest-glen; and, as she was no longer able to cope with the
masses of snow, she crept into the dry thicket to rest. She did not
long remain alone. Hardly had her eyes begun to close, when a herd of
deer, old and young together, came up to her and sniffed at the little
girl and looked at her with gentle eyes of pity and understanding, and
were not the least afraid of this human thing, but stayed and lay down
and gnawed the little trees and licked one another and were quite tame:
the thicket was their winter home.
The next day everything was muffled up in snow. Forest-Lily sat in the
dark, which was only tempered by a faint twilight, and refreshed
herself with the milk which she was taking to her people, and nestled
up against the kind animals so as not to become quite numb with cold.
Thus passed the grim hours while she was lost. And, when
Lily-of-the-Forest had already laid her down to die and, with her
simple fancy, asked the animals to stay with her faithfully in her last
dying hour, suddenly the roe-deer began to snuffle very strangely, and
lifted their heads, and pricked up their ears, and broke through the
thicket with wild bounds, and darted away with shrill cries.
And now the men work their way through the snow and underwood and see
the little maiden and hurrah for joy; and old Rüpel, who is among them,
shouts:
"Didn't I tell you to come and look in here with me,--that perhaps she
was with the deer?"
And so it was; and when Berthold heard that the beasts of the forest
had saved his child from being frozen to death, he yelled like a
madman:
"Never again! As long as I live, never again!"
And he took the rifle with which for many years he had killed the
beasts of the forest and smashed it on a stone.
I saw it myself; for I and the parish priest were in the Karwässer to
help look for Lily-of-the-Forest.
This Lily-of-the-Forest is almost as soft and white as snow and has the
eyes of a roe-deer in her little head.