experience when he was with the detachment, did not seem to him
attractive, and he also avoided the society and life of the officers in
the village. The life of officers stationed in a Cossack village has
long had its own definite form. Just as every cadet or officer when in
a fort regularly drinks porter, plays cards, and discusses the rewards
given for taking part in the expeditions, so in the Cossack villages he
regularly drinks chikhir with his hosts, treats the girls to
sweet-meats and honey, dangles after the Cossack women, and falls in
love, and occasionally marries there. Olenin always took his own path
and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks. And here, too,
he did not follow the ruts of a Caucasian officer's life.

It came quite naturally to him to wake up at daybreak. After drinking
tea and admiring from his porch the mountains, the morning, and
Maryanka, he would put on a tattered ox-hide coat, sandals of soaked
raw hide, buckle on a dagger, take a gun, put cigarettes and some lunch
in a little bag, call his dog, and soon after five o'clock would start
for the forest beyond the village. Towards seven in the evening he
would return tired and hungry with five or six pheasants hanging from
his belt (sometimes with some other animal) and with his bag of food
and cigarettes untouched. If the thoughts in his head had lain like the
lunch and cigarettes in the bag, one might have seen that during all
those fourteen hours not a single thought had moved in it. He returned
morally fresh, strong, and perfectly happy, and he could not tell what
he had been thinking about all the time. Were they ideas, memories, or
dreams that had been flitting through his mind? They were frequently
all three. He would rouse himself and ask what he had been thinking
about; and would see himself as a Cossack working in a vineyard with
his Cossack wife, or an abrek in the mountains, or a boar running away
from himself. And all the time he kept peering and watching for a
pheasant, a boar, or a deer.

In the evening Daddy Eroshka would be sure to be sitting with him.
Vanyusha would bring a jug of chikhir, and they would converse quietly,
drink, and separate to go quite contentedly to bed. The next day he
would again go shooting, again be healthily weary, again they would sit
conversing and drink their fill, and again be happy. Sometimes on a
holiday or day of rest Olenin spent the whole day at home. Then his
chief occupation was