In his uncle’s house, where Rudy eventually arrived, the people looked, thank God, as Rudy was accustomed to seeing them. Only one solitary creitin was here, a poor, witless lad, one of those pitiable creatures who in their poverty and loneliness are always taken in by families in Canton Valais, staying a couple of months in every household. Poor Saperli was in just this position when Rudy arrived.
Rudy’s uncle was still an energetic huntsman and an accomplished cooper, and his wife was a small, lively person, with something of a bird’s face, eagle eyes and a long, rather downy neck. Everything was new for Rudy, clothes, customs and practicalities, even the language, but this his child’s ear soon learned to understand. It all looked so well-to-do here compared with his home at his grandfather’s. The house his uncle and aunt lived in was larger, walls decorated with chamois horns and brightly polished guns. Over the front door hung the Madonna; fresh alpine roses and a burning lamp were placed before her.
Rudy’s uncle was, as has been said, one of the region’s most knowledgeable chamois-hunters, and also the best and most experienced mountain guide. Rudy would become the darling of this household, though in truth there was one of these already. This was an aged, blind and deaf hunting-dog who couldn’t make himself useful any longer but had formerly done so incomparably. People remembered the animal’s great abilities of earlier years, and so now he was part of the family, living with it in comfort. Rudy embraced the dog, but the dog no longer had anything to do with strangers, and this was what Rudy still was, though not for long: he soon took root in the household and in people’s hearts.
‘Things are not so bad here in Canton Valais!’ said his uncle, ‘we have chamois; they haven’t died out so soon as the ibex. It’s far better here now than in the old time. However much they say in praise of that, our own is much better. The bag’s had a hole punched in it, and fresh air has got into our shut-off valley. Something better always emerges when the old and decrepit fall,’ he said, and Uncle became really talkative when he spoke about his childhood years, which were his own father’s heyday, when Valais was, as he put it, a closed bag containing far too many sick people, pathetic creitins. ‘But then the French soldiers came along, they were real doctors, they were; straight-away they put down sickness pretty thoroughly, and sick persons too. The Frenchmen know how to give blows all right, they can deal knock-out blows of many different kinds, and their girls know how to knock you out too.’ And so saying his uncle nodded to his French-born wife and laughed. ‘The French even dealt blows to the stones so that they surrendered. They struck the Simplon Pass out of the rocks and knocked a roadway into shape right up there, so that now I can say to a three-year-old child: ‘Take a walk down into Italy, just keep to the main road!’ – and the young ’un will find his way down into Italy sure enough, just by sticking to the highway.’ And accordingly Rudy’s uncle sang a French song and shouted out: ‘Hurrah for Napoleon Bonaparte.’
Then it was that Rudy first heard about France, about Lyons, the great city on the River Rhône, which his uncle had been to.
It wouldn’t be many years before Rudy became a clever chamois-hunter himself, he had a real flare, said his uncle, and he taught him how to handle a gun, how to take aim and shoot. In the hunting season he took him into the mountains, getting him to drink warm chamois blood because it keeps dizziness at bay from the hunter. He taught him how to tell the time when, on the various mountainsides, the avalanches would roll, at midday or in the evening, according to how the sun cast its beams. He taught him to pay careful attention to the chamois themselves, and learn from the way they leaped, so that you fell on your feet and stood firm. And if in a mountain ravine there wasn’t support for your feet, then you had to look for supports for your elbows, and cling on tight with every muscle you had in your thigh or calf. Even the nape of the neck could hold on firmly if it were necessary. The chamois were clever, they’d position their own kind as forerunners. But the hunter has to be cleverer still and put the animals off the scent. He can deceive them too, he can hang his coat and hat on an alpenstock, and the chamois will take the clothes for the man himself. This trick his uncle played one day when he was on a hunt with Rudy.
The mountain-path was narrow, there really wasn’t one at all; a thin ledge, it was close to the dizzying precipice. The snow was half thawed out, the stone crumbled when you trod on it, his uncle therefore lay with the whole length of his body on the ground and crawled forwards. Every stone that broke off dropped, knocking against others, then bounced and rolled again, causing many others also to bounce from rock-wall to rock-wall, before coming to a stop in the black depth below. Rudy was standing a hundred paces from his uncle, on the furthest firm pinnacle of rock, and saw coming through the air, to hover over his uncle, a powerful vulture, which with one blow from its wings would hurl the crawling worm into the precipice to turn him into carrion.
Uncle had eyes only for the chamois which, with her young kid, was in view on the far side of the chasm. Rudy fastened his gaze on the bird, realised what it meant to do, and therefore put his hand on his gun to shoot. When the chamois sped off, Uncle fired, and the parent animal was killed with one deadly bullet, but her kid, the poor young animal, ran away, as though to show and to overcome the fact that its whole life consisted of flight from danger. The gigantic bird, terrified by the bang, opted for another route. Rudy’s uncle did not know the danger he’d been in; he heard of it first from Rudy.
As now, in the best of spirits, they made their way home, his uncle whistling a song from his boyhood, a strange noise suddenly boomed out not far away. They looked to the side of them, they looked upwards, and there, way up on the sloping mountain ledge, the snow coverlet was heaving; it was billowing just like a stretched piece of linen when the wind gets in under it. The rippling heights above them were being smashed up as if they were marble slabs, which then burst and let loose frothing, tumbling waters, resounding all round like a muffled thunderclap. It was an avalanche which was falling, not down over Rudy and his uncle, but near them, far too near them.
‘Hold tight, Rudy!’ Uncle shouted, ‘as tight as you can manage!’
And Rudy grasped the tree-trunk close to him. His uncle scrambled over him up into the branches of the tree and clung on fast, while the avalanche moved down many yards away from them. But its aftershock, the gusts of storm-wind in its train, broke up and extensively laid into all the trees and bushes as if they were dry reeds, and flung them far and wide. Rudy lay face pressed down on the ground. The tree-trunk he’d taken hold of was as if it had been sawn through and its crown hurled a good distance away. There among the broken branches lay his uncle with his head crushed. His hands were still warm, his face was quite unrecognisable. Rudy stood by him pale and trembling. This was his first experience of fear, the first moment of horror he’d faced.
He came back in the late evening with tidings of death to a home which was now a house of mourning. Its mistress stood there without a word, without a tear, and not till the dead body was brought in did she give vent to her anguish. The poor creitin crept up to his bed; he wasn’t seen for the whole of that day. Then towards evening he came to Rudy:
‘Write a letter for me! Saperli doesn’t know how to write! Saperli can go with the letter to the post-office.’
‘A letter from you?’ asked Rudy, ‘who to?’
‘To the Lord Christ!’
‘Who do you mean by that?’
And the half-wit, as they called the creitin, gave Rudy a pleading look, clasped his hands, and said so solemnly and piously: ‘Jesus Christ. Saperli will send him a letter, praying to him that Saperli should lie dead and not the man of this house.’
And Rudy shook him by the hand. ‘That letter wouldn’t ever reach him! That letter wouldn’t ever give us him back.’
Rudy found it hard to explain the impossibility to him.
‘Now you are the mainstay of the house!’ said Rudy’s foster-mother, and that’s what he became.