Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

had arranged to go strawberry-picking, and Taráska had promised to call his sisters and little brother as soon as he came back with the horses. He had kept his promise. In the night, sitting under a bush, he had felt extremely sleepy, but now he was wide awake, and decided not to lie down at all, but to go strawberry-picking with the girls. His mother gave him a mug of milk and cut him a chunk of bread, and he sat down on the high bench by the table to eat his breakfast. Then, dressed only in a pair of trousers and a shirt, he hurried along the road, leaving the prints of his bare feet in the dust⁠—which already bore a number of smaller and larger footprints, distinctly showing the imprint of the little toes. Far ahead he could see the girls, like red and white specks against the dark green of the forest. In the evening they had prepared a little jug and a mug to put the berries in; and this morning, after crossing themselves once or twice before the icon, they had run out without breakfast, and without even taking a bit of bread with them. Taráska caught them up near the big forest, just as they turned off the road.

The bushes, and even the lower branches of the trees, were covered with dew. The girls’ little bare feet at first grew cold, and then began to glow, as they stepped now on the soft grass and now on the rough earth. The strawberries grew chiefly where the trees had been felled. The girls first went to the part where the trees had been cut the year before and the young shoots had only just begun to grow: where between the sappy little bushes were patches of long grass, amid which the rosy-white strawberries⁠—with here and there a red one⁠—hid and ripened. The little girls, bent nearly double, picked the berries one by one with their small brown fingers, putting the worst in their mouths and the best ones into the mugs.

“Ólga dear, come here! Here’s an awful lot!”

“Nonsense!⁠ ⁠… Hullo!” they called to each other when they got behind the bushes.

Taráska went farther, beyond the hollow, where the trees had been felled two years before, and where the new growth, especially the hazels and maples, was already taller than a man. The grass there was thicker and more juicy, and the berries, protected by the grass, grew juicier and larger.

“Groúsha!”

“Eh?”

“Supposing a wolf came?”

“Well, what about a wolf? What do you frighten one for?⁠ ⁠… I’m not afraid, I’m not!” declared Groúsha; and absentmindedly, her thoughts wandering to the wolf, she put berry after berry⁠—and some of the very finest⁠—into her mouth instead of into the mug.

“See! our Taráska has gone beyond the ravine!⁠ ⁠… Taráska, hullo!⁠ ⁠…”

“Here!” answered Taráska across the ravine. “You come too!”

“Yes, let us; there are more berries there!” And the girls clambered down into the hollow, holding on to the bushes and along the little crevices, and up again on the other side. And here they chanced at once on a spot lying in the full glare of the sunlight, covered with fine grass and sprinkled thick with strawberries; and straightway they set to work with hands and mouths, silently and without pausing. Suddenly something rustled through the stillness, and with a terrible noise (as it seemed to them) rattled and clattered among the grass and bushes.

Groúsha fell down with a fright, upsetting the already half-filled jug. “Mammy!” she whimpered, and began to cry.

“A hare, a hare!⁠ ⁠… Taráska, a hare!⁠ ⁠… There he is!” shouted little Ólga, pointing to the grey-brown back that gleamed through the bushes. “What’s the matter with you?” she said to Groúsha, when the hare had disappeared.

“I thought it was a wolf,” answered Groúsha, and her terror and tears of despair changed instantly to loud laughter.

“There’s a stupid!”

“I was dreadfully frightened,” said Groúsha, with peals of ringing laughter. They picked up the berries and went on. The sun was now up, and threw bright flecks and shadows on the green, and glittered in the dew that lay everywhere, and that had now saturated the girls’ clothes up to their waists.

The girls had nearly reached the end of the wood, having gone on and on in the hope that the farther they went the more strawberries there would be, and now the shrill voices of girls and women who had come out later to pick berries, resounded from every side. The girls’ mug and jug were nearly full when they came across Aunty Akoulína, who had also come strawberrying. Behind her a little fat-bellied, bareheaded boy, with nothing on but a shirt, waddled along on thick bandy legs.

“Here, he hangs on to me,” said Aunty Akoulína to the girls, taking the boy up in her arms, “and I have no one to leave him with.”

“And we have just scared a hare; such a clatter he made⁠ ⁠… dreadful!”

“Dear me!” said Akoulína, and put the boy down again. Having exchanged these words, the girls parted from Akoulína and went on with their work.

“Suppose we rest a bit now,” said little Ólga, sitting down in the shade of a hazel-bush. “I’m tired!⁠ ⁠… Oh dear, we’ve not brought any bread! It would be nice to eat a bit now!”

“I’d like some, too.”

“What’s Aunty Akoulína shouting about? Hear?⁠ ⁠… Hullo, Aunty Akoulína!”

“Ólga dear⁠ ⁠… eh!”

“What?”

“Have you got my boy there?”

“No!”

The bushes rustled, and Akoulína appeared on the opposite side of a hollow, with her skirt tucked up to her knees and a basket on her arm.

“Haven’t you seen my boy?”

“No.”

“Here’s a nice business!⁠ ⁠… Míshka!”

“Míshka!⁠ ⁠…”

No one answered.

“What a bother! He’ll get lost!⁠ ⁠… He’ll wander off into the big forest.”

Ólga jumped up and went with Groúsha to look for him one way, and Akoulína another, unceasingly calling with their ringing voices; but no one answered.

“I’m tired!” Groúsha kept saying, as she lagged behind Ólga, who did not stop shouting, going now to the left, now to the right, and looking from side