The ‘little war’ that Slawata had hinted at the previous autumn never materialized and relations with Italy remained as amicable as ever. All the same, King Edward of England went ahead with his plans to visit the Tsar at Reval and did so in such a flamboyant manner that no one could have mistaken the visit for anything but a public flaunting of the Anglo-Russian alliance. The only real cloud on the political horizon had been the revolutionary movements in Turkey, which had begun with army revolts in Monastir and Salonika and ended with the Sultan Abdul Hamid granting a constitution, lifting the censorship and declaring a general amnesty. It was obvious to everyone that he had not done this of his own free will and so people began to speak of a new historical movement in Istanbul that could well come to preoccupy both Russian and England, whose interests in the Bosphorus were diametrically opposed. All sorts of modifications might be made here and there to the map of Europe without much disturbing the balance of power, but he who could wield the most influence over the dying Ottoman Empire held a trump card in the councils of the great powers of the West. Maybe, thought Balint, it will all be to our advantage. Perhaps, as it was in England’s prime interest to keep the Russian fleet bottled up in the Black Sea, King Edward might look with a more kindly eye upon Austria-Hungary?
It was thoughts of this kind which preoccupied Balint as he sat in his hide half-way up the great tree and scanned the scene in front of him for any signs of life. Now the late afternoon shade softened all the outlines so that changes of scale or vegetation were marked only by their colours, the bright shining green of the young beech shoots, the blue of the pines, the angry green of the grass on the edge of the little streams and its fading yellow by the clay banks. Two fallen tree-trunks gleamed white against the soft grass, cutting a hard line as if etched with a sharp knife, and everywhere there was slight movement as a soft almost imperceptible breeze kept the grass in shimmering motion which concealed the solid earth beneath.
From somewhere near the river could be heard the cry of a kingfisher. No other sound was to be heard until suddenly there was a very soft crackling, so soft that it would never have been noticed if everywhere around there had not been such total silence. It came from the edge of the forest to the right, and Balint swiftly looked in that direction.
A doe raced out of the undergrowth, ran in a wide curve to the bottom of the valley and then turned and ran back to a little hillock where she stood waiting. In an instant she was followed by a buck. The chase must already have lasted some time since the buck showed flecks of foam round his mouth. The buck stopped almost as soon as he saw the doe some fifty feet away on her little hillock. As if totally unconcerned she made as if to graze for a moment. Then she raised her head, looked straight at the buck and gave the mating call, a low whistle. At once he ran towards her. She, ever coquettish, waited motionless until he was less than two paces away and then made a great jump and ran off.
The two deer ran almost together towards the foot of the cliff below Balint’s hide. Here the buck nearly caught up with his quarry but she found a new way to tease him, racing round and round a little grove of hazel bushes with him in hot pursuit until the buck abruptly stopped, so out of breath that Balint could hear him panting. For a few instants they remained still and if Balint had dropped something it would have fallen between them. Suddenly the doe whistled again and was off, the buck close behind her, zigzagging across the valley, leaping over the fallen trees and bushes, stopping and starting as the doe seemed to order, and then finally disappearing over the ridge and out of sight. Balint wondered how many more clearings they would find for the chase before the female finally decided to end the game. He had been enthralled by this glimpse of love-making in the wild.
Now dusk began to fall and the golden light faded from the peaks of the Munchel. Lilac shadows spread over the valley and the scent of wildflowers and fallen leaves became overpoweringly strong.
Abady was just getting ready to go back to his camp when another movement at the base of the clearing caught his eye. Something brown was moving at the edge of the fir tree plantation.
A giant mother bear, followed by two cubs, ambled slowly out into the clearing with that strange swaying walk, the head apparently wobbling from side to side almost as if the animal were shaking its head in puzzled consideration of a new idea. After a moment the mother bear paused to allow her two cubs, tiny beside the huge bulk of their mother, to join her. Then all three moved slowly and deliberately towards that part of the meadow which was the most boggy and where the wild clover grew and all the fresh buds were at their most succulent. Seen through the binoculars it seemed to Balint as if the trio were as close as if they were at his feet. He could even see the sparkle in the cubs’ eyes as they nibbled at the feast to which they had been brought. The mother, on the other hand, grabbed at whole clumps of grass, gnawing them to the root and leaving round bare patches where she had eaten. When one of the cubs strayed too far the mother would bark out a gruff command and the cub, for all the world like any well-brought-up youngster, would return at once to his place to be greeted with a light cuff over the ear, for family discipline was not the prerogative of humans.
After feeding for some considerable time the family moved slowly away in the direction of the waterfall. Balint started to climb down, taking care that his gun did not clatter against the rungs of the ladder. As quietly as possible he started to walk back to the camp along the grass-covered path. It was not yet completely dark and as he came to a turn in the path he heard a very faint little tap-tap-tap on the ground coming from the young trees that bordered the pathway. Standing quite still, Balint looked in the direction of the noise which continued, though hesitantly, as if whatever creature was making it did not know his way.
Then Balint heard the plaintive call of a young roe-deer — a much higher and softer note than the mating call of the adult female — and all at once a very young roe-deer jumped onto the path and nearly bumped into Abady himself. Hardly noticing the presence of a human the little animal looked this way and that, uttering repeated little pipings and flapping its large ears in one direction after another. It was clearly in distress, its ears turning in every direction in the most comical manner until Balint imagined that the little animal was saying to itself that suddenly it understood nothing, that its mother, always until then so protective and so omnipresent, had run away and left her all alone in the dark frightening forest, and that nothing like that had ever happened in the world before! There was no way, reflected Balint, that the young fawn could have understood what happened in the forest when the mating season began, and that later, when her mother had played out the game of flight and refusal and eventual surrender, she would come back and look after her offspring. In the meantime the fawn stood there, its tiny patent-leather-like snout sniffing in all directions trying to pick up its mother’s scent. Balint held his breath and for several minutes the man and the little deer stood there within a few yards of each other. Finally it was the animal that moved. It lifted its head, piped twice, turned its ears in the direction of the clearing below and trotted off.