Sandeep felt restless. He got up to stretch himself and looked down towards the unluxuriant summer vegetation below him in the ravine and the even sparser scrub outside. They could now hear the faint cries and shouts of the beaters in the distance. Maan too appeared lost in his own thoughts.
Suddenly, and far earlier than expected, a wolf, an adult grey wolf, larger than an alsatian and faster, broke through the main outlet of the gorge where many of the professional marksmen were stationed and bounded over the wasteland and dry fields. It rushed straight for the wood to its left, pursued by a few belated shots.
Maan and Sandeep were not in a position where they could see the wolf clearly, but the shouts and shots that followed it told them that something was going on. Maan caught a brief glimpse of it running across an unploughed, hard-baked field when it swung over to his side at a fair distance and disappeared among the trees, swift and desperate in the face of death.
It’s got away! he thought angrily. But the next one won’t.
There were shouts of dismay and recrimination for a minute or two, and then everything in the immediate area settled down to silence again. But a brainfever bird had taken up its obsessive triple-cry from somewhere in the wood, and the sound interlaced itself with the cries and drumbeats from the other direction: the beaters were coming swiftly up the ravine now, flushing out whatever was in it in the direction of the hunters. By now Maan could also hear the sounds they made as they whacked the bushes with their lathis and spears.
Suddenly another, smaller grey form bounded out in panic from the ravine, this time towards the steep outlet which Maan was guarding. With an instinctive reflex he swung his rifle towards it and was about to fire – earlier than he had planned to for a good sideways shot – when he muttered to himself, with a shock: ‘But it’s a fox!’
The fox, not knowing that it had just been spared, and out of its wits with fear, cut across the fields and streaked like lightning into the woods, its black-tipped grey tail stiff and horizontal to the ground. Maan laughed for a second.
But the laugh froze on his face. The beaters could not have been more than a hundred yards away when a huge wolf, grey and rugged, its ears drawn back, and with the hint of an irregularity in its swift bounds, broke cover and rushed up the slope towards the place where Maan and Sandeep were sitting. Maan swung the rifle around, but the wolf presented no large target. Rather, as it bounded towards them, its great grey face with its dark arched eyebrows seeming to stare at them with vengeful savagery, it was an object of gross terror.
All at once it sensed their presence. It swung away from them and leapt down to the path in the ravine where Maan had imagined a wolf might emerge in the first place. Giving himself no chance to think of his own relief, and paying not the least attention to the dazed Sandeep, he swung his rifle to follow the wolf to the point where he had earlier judged it would present the best target. It was now in his sights.
But just as he was about to fire, he suddenly saw two marksmen who had not been there before and who had no business to be there, sitting on the low ridge at the far side of the path, directly opposite him, their rifles trained on the wolf, and clearly about to fire as well.
This is mad! thought Maan.
‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ he shouted.
One of the marksmen shot anyway but missed. The bullet pinged against a rock on the slope two feet away from Maan and ricocheted away.
‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! You crazy fools!’ yelled Maan.
The great wolf, having changed its route once, did not do so again. With the same irregular heavy swiftness it charged out of the ravine and made for the woods, its paws raising a trail of dust until it disappeared for a second behind the low boundary of a rough-surfaced field. The moment they saw it in open countryside some of the marksmen positioned at other exits fired at its diminishing shape. But they had no real chance. The wolf, like the fox and his own earlier fellow, was in the woods in a matter of seconds, safe from this concerted human terror.
The beaters had reached the exit of the ravine, and the beat was over. Not disappointment but a fit of violent anger seized Maan. He unloaded his rifle with trembling hands, then went over to where the errant marksmen were standing and grabbed one of them by his shirt.
The man was taller and possibly stronger than Maan, but he looked apologetic and frightened. Maan released him, then stood before him, saying nothing, merely breathing swiftly and heavily with tension and aggression. Then he spoke. Instead of asking them whether they were hunting humans or wolves, as he had been about to do, he controlled himself somehow and simply said in a semi-feral growl: ‘You were placed to guard that route. You were not intended to come over the ridge and hunt in some other place that you decided was more promising. One of us might have been killed. It might have been you.’