already put down a deposit on a gun I wanted sent to me when I had saved up a little money. Now it turned out that there was no trace of game animals here, only
wolves and bears were reported, though during the first few months I had failed to see any; otherwise there were only unusually large rats which I had immediately
caught sight of running in packs across the steppe as if driven by the wind. But the game I had been looking forward to was not to be found. The people hadn’t
misinformed me; a region rich in game did exist, but it was a three-day journey away—I had not considered that directions for reaching a place in this country, with its
hundreds of kilometers of uninhabited areas, must necessarily be uncertain. In any event, for the time being I had no need of the gun and could use the money for other
purposes; still, I had to provide myself with a gun for the winter and I regularly laid money aside for that purpose. As for the rats that sometimes attacked my provisions,
my long knife sufficed to deal with them.
During the first days, when I was still eagerly taking in everything, I spitted one of these rats on the point of my knife and held it before me at eye level against the wall.
You can see small animals clearly only if you hold them before you at eye level; if you stoop down to them on the ground and look at them there, you acquire a false,
imperfect notion of them. The most striking feature of these rats was their claws—large, somewhat hollow, and yet pointed at the ends, they were well suited to dig
with. Hanging against the wall in front of me in its final agony, it rigidly stretched out its claws in what seemed to be an unnatural way; they were like small hands
reaching out to you.
In general these animals bothered me little, only sometimes woke me up at night when they hurried by the hut in a patter of running feet on the hard ground. If I then sat
up and perhaps lit a small wax candle, I could see a rat’s claws sticking in from the outside and working feverishly at some hole it was digging under the boards. This
work was all in vain, for to dig a hole big enough for itself it would have had to work days on end, and yet it fled with the first brightening of the day; despite this it
labored on like a workman who knew what he was doing. And it did good work; the particles it threw up as it dug were imperceptible indeed, on the other hand its claw
was probably never used without result. At night I often watched this at length, until the calm and regularity of it put me to sleep. Then I would no longer have the
energy to put out the little candle, and for a short while it would shine down for the rat at its work.
Once, on a warm night, when I had again heard these claws at work, I cautiously went outside without lighting a candle in order to see the animal itself. Its head, with
its sharp snout, was bowed very low, pushed down almost between its forelegs in the effort to crowd as close as possible to the wood and dig in claws as deep as
possible under it. You might have thought there was someone inside the hut holding it by the claws and trying bodily to pull the animal in, so taut was every muscle.
And yet everything was ended with one kick, by which I killed the beast. Once fully awake, I could not tolerate any attack on my only possession, the hut.
To safeguard the hut against these rats I stopped all the holes with straw and tow and every morning examined the floor all around. I also intended to cover the
hard-packed earthen floor of the hut with planks; such a flooring would also be useful for the winter. A peasant from the next village, Jekoz by name, long ago had