MOURZOUK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 119, 3 October 1941, Page 47

MOURZOUK

ASSILICH was a gamekeeper-he was old and solitary. His household consisted of a cow, a horse, a dozen hens, and a half decrepit old dog. One day when. Vassilich was hunting he killed a mother lynx. He didn’t know that somewhere there was a lynx baby waiting for its mother and two little brothers to come home. HE little brown lynx baby lay alone in the lair under the roots of a fallen tree. Its mother had long ago taken away its two russet-coloured brothers. Where to and what for the baby lynx did not know. The night before a tree near by had been violently shaken by the wind during a storm, The huge stem threatened every minute to come down and bury the lynxes, And the old

lynx decided to take her babies to a safe place. The baby lynx waited a long time for its mother, but she never came back. In an hour or two it became ravenously hungry and started mewing. Its mewing got louder and louder every minute. But still its mother did not come. At last its hunger.became intolerable, and the baby lynx set off to look for its mother. It crawled out of thre .hollow and, bumping its half-blind head painfully against the roots and the ground, crept slowly forward, Vassilich, the hunter, was standing in the glade looking over the skins of the dead animals. The lynx was already buried. "TI ought to get twenty roubles for this," said the old man stroking the thick fur of the lynx skin. "If it weren’t for the knife slits, I’d have got thirty. A rare pelt." The skin was unusually large and fine. The dark grey fur, scarcely tinged with brown, was thickly marked with tawny spots, Vassilich rolled it up carefully, fur: side in and thew it over his shoulder. "TI must be home before dark,’ he thought and was just setting off when a faint mewing sound came from somewhere. He stopped to listen. The mewing came again. . The tawny lynx cub was quite hoarse with crying, and could only crawl blindly forward. Then a vague fear made the cub crouch against the earth. But, the next "minute overcome with hunger, it crept right up to Vassilich who had his back to it, "Where do you come from?" he exclaimed. The cub slumped down on its hind legs and mewed faintly, displaying the rosy inside of its mouth. "Just like a kitten!" thought Vassilich, ._The cub crawled on, pushing clumsily» among the roots, and went suddenly head over heels into a hole. "Going into the grave without invitation! Little Booby," said Vassilich, laughing, and he picked the cub out of the hole, " Just look at its whiskers and what dainty little eyes! A regular little Tartar. Mourzouk Batyvich-that’s who you are!" The famished cub licked the finger extended to it, with a rough tongue.