path, arched his back and, rushing
headlong toward the porch with lifted tail, began rubbing himself
against his legs.

"O-hoy!" came at that moment, that inimitable huntsman's call which
unites the deepest bass with the shrillest tenor, and round the corner
came Daniel the head huntsman and head kennelman, a gray, wrinkled old
man with hair cut straight over his forehead, Ukrainian fashion, a
long bent whip in his hand, and that look of independence and scorn of
everything that is only seen in huntsmen. He doffed his Circassian cap
to his master and looked at him scornfully. This scorn was not offensive
to his master. Nicholas knew that this Daniel, disdainful of everybody
and who considered himself above them, was all the same his serf and
huntsman.

"Daniel!" Nicholas said timidly, conscious at the sight of the weather,
the hounds, and the huntsman that he was being carried away by that
irresistible passion for sport which makes a man forget all his previous
resolutions, as a lover forgets in the presence of his mistress.

"What orders, your excellency?" said the huntsman in his deep bass, deep
as a proto-deacon's and hoarse with hallooing--and two flashing black
eyes gazed from under his brows at his master, who was silent. "Can you
resist it?" those eyes seemed to be asking.

"It's a good day, eh? For a hunt and a gallop, eh?" asked Nicholas,
scratching Milka behind the ears.

Daniel did not answer, but winked instead.

"I sent Uvarka at dawn to listen," his bass boomed out after a minute's
pause. "He says she's moved them into the Otradnoe enclosure. They were
howling there." (This meant that the she-wolf, about whom they both
knew, had moved with her cubs to the Otradnoe copse, a small place a
mile and a half from the house.)

"We ought to go, don't you think so?" said Nicholas. "Come to me with
Uvarka."

"As you please."

"Then put off feeding them."

"Yes, sir."

Five minutes later Daniel and Uvarka were standing in Nicholas' big
study. Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was
like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and
surroundings of human life. Daniel himself felt this, and as usual stood
just inside the door, trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of
breaking something in the master's apartment, and he hastened to say all
that was necessary so as to get from under that ceiling, out into the
open under the sky once more.

Having finished his inq