Finally, there was moonlight. A field lay before him, traversed by veils of fog. And through the middle of the field ran a murmuring stream, in an inconceivable, almost enchanted zigzag. It ran so freely, in such a mysterious course, that its silver gleamed like a gown, sure of its own worth, speaking and sighing, laughing and weeping.
That was the edge of the horse pasture. He stopped, perplexed that it had taken him so long to get there. Wasn’t she coming? Anything was possible for such a poor soul. He stood still again. For it seemed to him that something had just been waiting for him to emerge from the forest. He saw: a stag had stepped with him out of the forest’s darkness. At first there was only one. Later there may have been four. But this one was following him. He didn’t know why. It would have been much too late anyhow. So he kept to a straight path, his thoughts contradicting themselves as they do in times of danger, “they can’t be following me.” Suddenly he was thinking of nothing at all, not even of the girl. But somehow, in a plea for help, he turned in her direction. But from just that point a stag was coming toward him. So he made for the stream. He crossed the stream. By now he had reached the middle of the clearing. But that was all.
The stag leapt over him, as if engaging the man in a wicked joust. “This is the end of me,” the young man thought. It had knocked him down. But people being as they are, just after this he was happy again, and stood up. He should have stayed down. Perhaps then the enraged animal would have left him alone. It must have known that he was a man, and not a beast. Didn’t it know who he was, that this was him? He was the hunter. He might have a gun, or a scythe. Why wasn’t it afraid of those things? (In fact, he didn’t have so much as a stick.) But on this night, the animal might have feared nothing at all. It wanted a fight.
It started to fly over him again. But closer and closer, lower and lower. The young man pulled his hat down over his head as he lay in the grass, so that he wouldn’t have to watch anymore. For those long leaps were dreadful. The stags (indeed, there was no longer only one) raced over him as if he weren’t even there. Or worse, as if he were nothing. He felt their hooves, light but hard on his jacket. He could almost count them. They seemed to be releasing all their rutting fury upon him. Often it seemed that they were gone, but they were only leaping through the lines of fog that floated over the stream, as at first they had only leapt over him. They merely disappeared and appeared again. But then he was only the second hurdle in their race, so to speak, and the third was the heart of the green forest. But they returned, even from there. He was the one — the man lying as if dead on the grass — who gave their leaps a new ferocity.
How many times they struck his head, how many times they brushed his arms and feet, can only be a matter of conjecture. Once the stags had felt him in their hearts, they did not forget him again. That is where the animal guards its primeval essence. It persists. It charged at him with its bellowing cries. It waged a fearful fight with a defenseless man. Its antlers bore him. Over the stream, over the fog. The stag seemed not to notice the weight. And the shock seemed to have rendered the man not only speechless, but insensate as well. And the animal’s joyous wrath bore off his motionless form with its growing strength. One stag would poach him from another. One stag would leap away from another, the quarry held in its broad antlers.
The moon and the stars did not stir. God did not stir. The forest and the fields lay still, as if they weren’t there. Only the stags kept surging, with this quarry in their antlers, this man who had vainly deceived them with his jackboots, as if he were a doe, pure and innocent. Their bellowing had ceased. Now the stags were pure joy, empty triumph.
But many a night passes that way over one who is dying and dead.
The sky broke open again with a quiet red line. Dogs brought the first trace of the dead man. They tugged and wagged the old shepherd and his boys to the spot. The horses sniffed at the battlefield. A butterfly landed on the corpse’s chest.
As they were tying together a stretcher to bear him, the girl passed by. Without a shudder, without fear, without the slightest sense that she ought to help. She, who had never filled or carried even the smallest jug, walked unsuspectingly beside the old man. Fir twigs and foliage covered the victim. Those who saw him doffed their hats before him, before the majesty of death. No one had to show the old horsekeeper the way. He knew where he was headed with his burden. Down below, halfway home, where he had always set down the basket with his little foster child, where the hunter was painted on the tavern sign, the stag leaping away from his shot.
The Mouse
Death was prepared in the form of a trap. But before its time finally came, the mouse would have to gnaw through the wall that led into my bedchamber. It would have to gnaw through a long and narrow passage, and gnaw through my sleep.
Sometimes I pounded on the bed with my fist, frightening myself with the way that its thunder rolled over everything imaginable in the night. And I thought I could sense that the mouse felt this fear, too. But before this wave of fright could roll gently into peace, that same quiet gnawing could be heard again from afar. It was so quiet that it was audible only to someone alone and left to himself in a house by a moonlit field on the edge of a forest. He guards himself like his own hunting dog, and even when he is asleep he will hear any approaching danger. He is like fog, when it is dark, the fog that seems to live in its own light. He is like the rain, far and wide, high and distant, in the heavens and on earth. How could he fail to notice the gnawing of a mouse, when that activity returns again to itself. He feels it in his blood. So once again I lit my candle, the bane of all four-footed intruders. But the candle didn’t spread its angel wings as it had in other nights, arching them over the dark abyss of fear, becoming a spirit of the shadows, the better to offer its light. . Instead it suddenly betrayed me to my enemy, becoming a sort of gnawing creature itself, there in its candlestick. It ate away at my sleep, and the mouse did not fear it.