Lev Tolstoy
A PRISONER IN THE CAUCASUS
And he rode off up the
slope on the left. Zhilin’s steed was a hunting
horse, which he had bought as a wild foal for a hundred rubles and broken in
himself. Like lightning it carried him up the steep incline,
and no sooner had he reached the top than he beheld a troop of Tatar horsemen –
about thirty of them – right under his nose. He turned back at once, but the
Tatars had seen him, and gave chase, drawing their guns as they rode. Zhilin raced down the hill in full gallop, crying to Kostylin to get out his gun and praying that his own horse
would not fail him: ‘ If you stumble, I’m done for.
But if I can only get to the gun, I’m damned if I’ll be caught by them’.
But Kostylin,
instead of waiting, was off like a shot to fortress the very moment he caught
sight of the Tatars, lashing his horse on either side. Only the horse’s tail
could be seen waving in the dust.
Zhilin could see he was in a mess. The gun
was gone, and with only a sabre he could do nothing.
He spurred his horse back where they had come from, but saw that six Tatars
were riding across to cut him off. He had a fine mount, but theirs were even
better, and now they were cutting across his path. He tried to turn his horse,
but she was at a full gallop and he could not stop her from making straight
towards them. He could see a red bearded Tatar on a grey horse coming closer, screaming,
with his teeth bared and his gun at the ready.
‘Well,’ thought Zhilin, ‘I know that you devils are like: if you take me
alive you’ll put me in a hole in the ground and thrash me with whips. Well, I
shan’t give myself alive.’
Zhilin may have been a small man, but he
had spunk. Unsheathing his sabre, he steered his
horse straight towards the Tatar with the red beard. ‘Either I’ll knock you
down with my horse,’ he thought, ‘or I’ll hack you down with my sabre.’
But before Zhilin reached his foe, his horse was hit by gunfire from
behind and crashed to the ground, landing on Zhilin’s
leg.
He tried to get up, but
two stinking Tatars were already upon him, twisting his arms back. He broke
free, and threw off the Tatars, but three more of them jumped from their horses
and began beating him on the head with the butts of their weapons. His head
swam and he reeled. The Tatars seized him, took the spare girths from their
saddles, twisted his arms behind his back, tied them with a Tatar knot, and
dragged him away. They knocked his cap off, pulled off his boots, stripped him
of his money and watch, and ripped his clothes. When Zhilin
looked back at his horse he saw the poor animal lying on its side just where it
had fallen, kicking its legs but unable to make contact with the ground. There
was a hole in its head, through which dark blood was gushing, soaking the dust
for a yard all around.
One of the Tatars went
up to it and set about removing the saddle. Still it kicked about, until he
took his dagger and slit its throat. There was a hiss from its neck, and the
horse shuddered and died.
The Tatars removed its
saddle and harness. The red-bearded one mounted his horse, and the others
seated Zhilin on the saddle behind him, tying him
round the waist to the Tatar so that he could not fall off. Then they bore
him away into the mountains.