“What orders, your excellency?” said the huntsman in his deep bass, deep as a proto-deacon’s and hoarse with hallooing—and two flashing black eyes gazed from under his brows at his master, who was silent. “Can you resist it?” those eyes seemed to be asking.
“It’s a good day, eh? For a hunt and a gallop, eh?” asked Nikoláy, scratching Mílka behind the ears.
Danílo did not answer, but winked instead.
“I sent Uvárka at dawn to listen,” his bass boomed out after a minute’s pause. “He says she’s moved them into the Otrádnoe enclosure. They were howling there.” (This meant that the she-wolf, about whom they both knew, had moved with her cubs to the Otrádnoe copse, a small place a mile and a half from the house.)
“We ought to go, don’t you think so?” said Nikoláy. “Come to me with Uvárka.”
“As you please.”
“Then put off feeding them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Five minutes later Danílo and Uvárka were standing in Nikoláy’s big study. Though Danílo was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human life. Danílo himself felt this, and as usual stood just inside the door, trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of breaking something in the master’s apartment, and he hastened to say all that was necessary so as to get from under that ceiling, out into the open under the sky once more.
Having finished his inquiries and extorted from Danílo an opinion that the hounds were fit (Danílo himself wished to go hunting), Nikoláy