Read Online Caravans by James A. Michener - Free Book Online

‘Then you have no right to have an opinion upon this matter. Sir Herbert, you must not shoot this particular bear, really you mustn’t.’ I thanked him for his pains and marched out of the bar, but on the way to the shoot, one of my guides asked me in Kashmiri if I had ever hunted the bears of his country, and when I said no, he suggested that we go back. This so whetted my appetite that I spurred the horses and we came to that part of Kashmir where the brown bears are to be found.
    “We hunted for some time and saw nothing, but toward dusk we came upon a thicket, and although I didn’t get a clear sight on the beast, I could see it was a bear, and I let fly. I didn’t kill the bear, and more’s the pity, for I had wounded it mortally.”
    Sir Herbert stopped his narrative, and for a moment I thought he had undertaken in his telling rather more than he had anticipated. He did not want to continue, that was obvious, but he took a gulp of whiskey and said, “I suppose no one in this room has ever heard a Kashmiri bear. He has a voice like a human being … like a woman in extreme pain. When he is wounded, he beats his way through the thicket crying like a stricken mother. You can almost hear the words. He moans andwails and is obviously about to die of mortal pain. It is …” He fumbled for words, extended his right hand and punched the air. “It is …”
    From a place near the fire Lady Margaret said, “It is shattering to the mind. Sir Herbert wanted to leave the thicket, but the bearers warned him that he must finish off the bear. That was his duty. So he plunged in—the men told me—but the bear had limped off into the deeper woods.” Husband and wife fell silent, and we listened to the rising wind, blowing down the last of the winter’s blizzards.
    “I tracked that sobbing bear for about an hour,” Sir Herbert said quietly. “It was easy, because constantly the beast screamed and wept. It was positively uncanny. That bear was not an animal. It was all the grieved things that men shoot, the partridges, the deer, the rabbits. I tell you, that bear spoke to me, crying out in its pain. I finally found it exhausted by a tree. Even as I came upon it, it wept new laments. By God, I tell you that bear …”
    “Did you shoot him?” the French ambassador asked in French.
    “Yes. I don’t know how, but I did. Then I rushed back to Srinagar to find the man who had warned me in the bar, but he was gone.”
    “What is the point of this story, Sir Herbert?” Moheb Khan asked. “Surely if tonight we shoot a wolf it will not behave so.”
    “The point is, Moheb Khan, that none of us in this room was prepared for what we expected in Afghanistan. You, Miss Maxwell, didn’t your government in Washington hand you a neatly typedreport on Kabul? Mean temperature. Dress warmly. Expect dysentery.”
    “Yes,” Miss Maxwell laughed.
    “And it was all the truth, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “But did it prepare you for today? Getting up at six to type a play because you wanted to be here with us? Being assaulted by mullahs in the bazaar? Seeing wolves rushing at your car?”
    “No,” Miss Maxwell said calmly. “The reports in Washington did not prepare me for any of that. I never dreamed that I could find a room anywhere in the world as warm, as human as this one. Almost everyone I care for deeply is right here, tonight. As for the mullahs and the wolves, I wasn’t prepared for them, either. Right now I don’t believe they happened.”
    “Exactly what I meant,” Sir Herbert said, holding his hands up toward the group. “Reality in no way prepared me for the Kashmiri bears. I’m sure that dreadful incident never happened. But, Miss Maxwell, sometime years from now, those wolves will be as real to you as that stricken bear is to me. And to each of us, years from now, Afghanistan will be real, too.”
    “You make it sound far too difficult to understand my country,” Moheb Khan contradicted. “It’s very