interlopers :: essays research papers

In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the easterly spurs of the Karpathians, a man stood one winter night watching and listening, as though he waited for some beast of the woods to come within the clench of his vision, and, later, of his rifle. But the game for whose presence he kept so keen an outlook was none that figured in the sportsmans calendar as lawful and meet for the chase Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled the dark forest in quest of a human enemy. The forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well stocked with game the narrow sack of precipitous woodland that lay on its outskirt was not remarkable for the game it harboured or the shooting it afforded, but it was the most jealously guarded of all told its owners territorial possessions. A famous law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty landowners the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the assessment of the Courts, and a long se ries of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations. The neighbour feud had grown into a personal one since Ulrich had come to be head of his family if there was a man in the world whom he detested and wished ill to it was Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the quarrel and the tireless game-snatcher and raider of the disputed border-forest. The feud might, perhaps, have died down or been compromised if the personal ill-will of the two men had not stood in the way as boys they had thirsted for one anothers blood, as men each prayed that adventure might fall on the other, and this wind-scourged winter night Ulrich had banded together his foresters to watch the dark forest, not in quest of four-footed quarry, but to detect a look-out for the prowling thieves whom he suspected of being afoot from across the land boundary. The roebuck, which usually kept in the sheltered hollows during a storm-wind, were running like co mpulsive things to-night, and there was movement and unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours. Assuredly there was a disturbing element in the forest, and Ulrich could guess the fundament from whence it came. 2 He strayed away by himself from the watchers