Together they hurried towards the younger man.
‘A stag is calling,’ said Honey. The old man said the same thing in Romanian: ‘Striga taur’. And they both pointed to the right where the summit of the Munchel Mare would have been visible but for the mist which covered it.
Balint jumped up. Motionless, the three men listened. For a few minutes there was nothing to be heard. Then again the deep organ-like call boomed out, as powerful as a lion’s roar.
‘Raincoat! Telescope! A hat!’ said Abady, as he picked up his Mannlicher sporting rifle, not that he had any particular desire to shoot anything, but in those days no one walked the mountains without a gun on his shoulder. When all was ready they walked swiftly and noiselessly; the ground was so sodden that neither leaves nor fallen branches snapped beneath their feet. They followed the track that led to the high watershed of the range and there they stopped briefly until the stag called again. This time he called twice, bravely and boldly, and the sound seemed to come from the right of where they stood.
‘He’s going towards the Burnt Rock,’ whispered the old poacher who may have had poor sight and red-rimmed eyes from too high a consumption of brandy but whose hearing was as sharp as a lynx’s. ‘That’s where he’s going, for sure,’ and the stag, as if to confirm what he said, called again exactly from the direction the old man had indicated.
The little band moved off in that direction as quickly as they could. As in all forests that were well-maintained and well-guarded, the grass grew high on the tracks and the men were soon soaked to the waist. They pressed on, hoping to hear the call again, and, as the forest was now in almost total darkness they could run freely with no risk of startling the quarry and making him bolt. In half an hour they had arrived by the Burnt Rock and even in the dark they knew well where they were from the skeletal stunted trees and the gravel underfoot.
They stopped, and from the pine trees came a few lazy drops of rain. Far below they could hear the noise of a mountain stream now swollen from the persistent rain of the last few days. For some time they heard nothing else. At last, quite close, there came a loud call, abruptly rapped out like a word of command. It was imperious, but at the same time it held something of yearning in its timbre. It was the voice of the King of the Forest.
For some time the men stood there without moving … but they heard no more. Slowly, and walking carefully, they started to pick their way back to the campsite.
When they arrived Balint said, ‘We must be back before daybreak. Maybe he’ll stay until morning.’ Then he gave his orders: ‘Wake me at three!’
Everywhere there was thick fog and the little band could never have found their way if they hadn’t taken a powerful lamp. With it they advanced confidently, though with more care than they had needed the previous evening. When they were half-way there Honey stayed behind in the little meadow near the rushing stream that led into the Retyicel valley, because from there he would have a wide view of the surrounding country. Balint and the old gamekeeper picked their way carefully to the spot they had reached the day before. Thence they could command all three valleys that ran down from the mountain‚ the Retyicel, the Vale Arszna and the little one below that turned into the Vurvuras.
By now it was half-past four, but it was still night and they had to wait patiently, without moving, for dawn, for the stag might be anywhere amongst the trailing pine branches. It was possible that he had moved on in the night, but it was equally possible that he was standing there only a few paces away.
Zsukuczo squatted down on his heels and started murmuring something that might have been prayers but which was more likely to have been a jumble of by now meaningless words which, a thousand years before, had been some invocation to the forest gods.
They had to wait a long time before the dawn made it possible to see their surroundings. And it was not one of those sharp sparkling dawns when a triumphant nature set the world ablaze with a myriad soft tints of colour. Rather was it hesitant, almost apologetic, with the mountain forests swathed in an ambiguous foggy light such as lamps will throw when the shades are made of some milky sanded glass.
For most of this long wait Balint completely forgot where he was and why he had come, for his thoughts had turned once more to the bitter disillusion of the last few days. Then, out of the lightening forest came that deep booming call, deeper far than any human bass voice could achieve. It was the voice of the stag.
It seemed to come from further up, close perhaps to the summit, and a few moments later it came again.
‘He’s up there!’ whispered the old gornyik excitedly. ‘There! Up there! Follow me, Mariassa — my Lord!’ and, as nimbly as any youth, the old man jumped up and made for the dense undergrowth, not in the direction of the sound but diagonally across it, for he knew instinctively how a true hunter could cut off his quarry. His old hob-nailed boots made no sound either on stones or heather; and he went swiftly forward, crouching under low branches, sliding on wet pine needles, stepping over fallen logs, always avoiding any open spaces and never ever making a sound as he went.
Balint was hard put to keep up with him.
They arrived at a small clearing beside a rock that resembled a saddle carved out of stone. Here Zsukuczo did not go out into the open but crouched down at the edge of the undergrowth. The fog was denser here in the open and they could barely see twenty paces ahead of them. The pine trees on the other side of the clearing were only vague shadows, barely darker than the fog, and the rocks above seemed as insubstantial as painted canvas.
But somewhere, not far away, there was a faint rustling and then the sound of wood being struck as if the trees were being hit by a stick. Then the undergrowth to their left parted and the stag appeared, walking with long confident strides out into the open. He was enormous and powerful, the size of a horse. He carried his head high, as proudly as any monarch, and his antlers were formed of so many branches that, although he was so close to the men that they could have hit him with a lightly lobbed stone, they could not count them.
Then the stag stopped and threw up his head so that the two thick fore-antlers — each as formidable as a Turkish sword — pointed straight up to heaven, and his huge voice boomed again with so much power, and so deep a sound, that no instrument yet invented could have reproduced it. It was the strength of the primeval call and his hot breath, as if to match the strength of his need, billowed forth like a cloud in the cold morning air.
Then he called again, and with head still raised high went slowly and majestically back into the forest. There was no thorn, thicket, pine-branch or treacherous ground that could for an instance hinder his path, no obstacle that would not be brushed carelessly aside as he went on his proud way. Fallen branches, broken by the cutting spread of his antlers, cracked beneath his feet for here he was the master, the antlered sovereign who would never deign to pick his way through that wilderness that was his realm. For a long time the three men could hear the great animal as he went on his way through the forest towards the Munchel, where, the night before, he must have left the hinds.
Balint felt a sense of great joy to have been able to see the stag so close in all his indifferent nobility and for the first time in days had forgotten his own sorrows. The old poacher turned game-warden, who was now accustomed to this strange lord’s perverse delight in merely looking at game when any normal man would have shot it at once, was compensated for his disappointment with a handsome tip, though he never understood why the master’s gloom had lifted as if by magic.