The Poacher

Peter Rossegger, from unpublished journal entries for

Geschichten aus der Steiermark (Tales from Styria), 1871

St. Kristoff is approached by minor roads. It was on one of those roads little wider than a cow-path, one of the many byroads known locally as a Wildererweg or poacher’s path, that I came down off the mountains one evening many years ago. It being late, I beheld the last remnants of the dying sunset over the crags and forests above the village as the darkness descended, but not before I perceived the splendid views of an innumerable multitude of hills to the southeast.

It is a farming village and its people retire early. But as I plodded up one of the narrow lanes that leads to its church, I heard voices within, and soon the tones of an organ. The sound of that instrument has from childhood filled me with a strange mixture of mirth and foreboding, and that night this sensation descended upon me again as though the decades of living in our cities had vanished, and I was a child again, listening.

It was expertly played, and the old hymns that had sounded here for centuries floated out on the night air to me. Soon they were joined by voices, both men’s and women’s, and I passed a strange and not unhappy half-hour. Around me was the sweet scent of woodsmoke from houses unseen, and the smell of the earth with its autumnal exhalations. I fell into a reverie, where the events of the long day arranged themselves alongside tender thoughts of my wife and little ones awaiting me back in Vienna. Such were the exertions of the day in these mountains as wild and remote as any on the continent, that in a matter of minutes I passed from reverie to sleep there on the grassy bank below the church.

It was with a violent fright that I awoke not long after, and in the manner of a primitive ancestor awakening in terror at the cave-mouth where he stood guard over his clan, I was on my feet before being quite awake.