At his uncle’s house, when Rudy got there, the people, thank God, looked like the people Rudy was used to. There was only one cretin there, a poor foolish lad. One of those poor creatures who in their poverty and loneliness live by turns in families in canton Valais. They stay a few months in each house, and poor Saperli happened to be there when Rudy came.
Rudy’s uncle was still a strong hunter, and in addition he was a barrel-maker. His wife was a lively little person with an almost birdlike face, eyes like an eagle, and a long and quite downy neck.
Everything was new to Rudy—the clothing, the customs, even the language, but his childish ear would soon learn to understand that. It was clear that they were better off here than at Grandfather’s home. The rooms they lived in were bigger. The walls were covered with antelope antlers and highly polished guns. Over the door hung a picture of the Virgin Mary with fresh rhododendrons and a lamp burning in front of it.
Rudy’s uncle, as mentioned, was one of the district’s best goat-antelope hunters and was also the best and most experienced guide. Rudy would now become the darling of the house, although there was already one there. This was an old, blind, and deaf hunting dog who was no longer of any use, but who had been so. They remembered the animal’s ability in earlier years, and he was now a member of the family who would live out his life in comfort. Rudy pet the dog, but it wouldn’t have much to do with strangers, and of course Rudy was still a stranger. But not for long. He soon took root in the house and in their hearts.
“It’s not so bad here in Valais canton,” said Rudy’s uncle. “We have goat-antelopes, and they won’t soon die out like the mountain goats did. It’s much better than in the old days no matter how much people talk about their glory. It’s better now. There’s a hole in the bag now, and fresh air has blown into our enclosed valley. Something better always comes forward when the old antiquated things fall away,” he said. When Rudy’s uncle became very talkative, he talked about his childhood years and about the years when his father was in his prime, when Valais was, as he put it, a closed bag with way too many sick people, the pitiful cretins. “But then the French soldiers came, and they were real doctors. They soon killed the illness, and the people too. The Frenchmen could fight all right, strike a blow in more ways than one, and the women could strike too!” and Rudy’s uncle nodded to his French-born wife and laughed. “The French were able to strike the rocks so they’d give way. They built the Simplon7 road out of the cliffs, built that road so that I could now tell a three-year-old child to go down to Italy. Just stay on the road, and the child will find Italy if he stays on the road.” And then Rudy’s uncle sang a French ballad and gave a cheer for Napoleon Bonaparte.
That was the first time Rudy had heard about France and about Lyon, the big city on the Rhone where his uncle had once been.
It wouldn’t take many years for Rudy to become a good antelope hunter because he had an aptitude for it, said his uncle, and he taught him to hold a gun, take aim, and shoot. In the hunting season he took Rudy along up in the mountains and let him drink the warm antelope blood, which was supposed to keep dizziness from the hunter. He taught him to know what time avalanches would happen on the various mountain sides, whether at dinner time or in the evening, depending on how the sun beams worked the slopes. He taught him to observe the antelope and learn from them how to leap so that you could land on your feet and stand firmly, and if there wasn’t footing in the mountain clefts, how you had to support yourself with your elbows, clinging fast with the muscles of your thighs and legs. You could even keep yourself in place with your neck if it was necessary. The goat-antelopes were smart and even posted a lookout, but the hunter had to be smarter, and get downwind from them. He could fool them by hanging his cloak and hat on his walking stick, and the antelope would mistake the cloak for the man. His uncle played this trick one day when he was hunting with Rudy.
The mountain path was narrow. It really wasn’t a path at all, just a thin ledge, right by the dizzying abyss. The snow was lying half melted there; the stone crumbled when you walked on it. That’s why Rudy’s uncle laid down on his stomach, long as he was, and crept forward. Every stone that broke off fell, careened, and broke, skipped and rolled again, bounced from cliff to cliff before coming to rest in the black depths. Rudy stood on the outermost firm cliff crag a hundred steps behind his uncle. He saw an enormous vulture approaching in the air, swaying over his uncle. With one flap of its wings, the bird could throw the creeping worm into the abyss to turn it into carrion. His uncle had eyes only for the antelope that was visible with its kid on the other side of the cleft. Rudy kept his eye on the bird, understood what it wanted to do, and so he had his hand on the gun ready to shoot. Then the antelope leaped up, and Rudy’s uncle fired. The animal was killed by the shot, but the kid ran as if it had practiced fleeing its whole life. The huge bird flew quickly away, frightened by the shot. Rudy’s uncle didn’t realize the danger until Rudy told him about it.
As they were on their way home in the best of spirits, Rudy’s uncle whistling a tune from his childhood, they suddenly heard an odd sound from not far away. They looked to both sides, and then upward, and there on the heights, on the sloping mountain ledge, the snow cover was lifting. It was waving as when the wind sweeps under a spread-out sheet of linen. The tops of the waves snapped as if they were plates of marble cracking and breaking up and then released in a foaming, plunging stream, booming like the muffled roar of thunder. It was a rushing avalanche, not right on top of Rudy and his uncle, but close—too close.
“Hold on tight, Rudy!” his uncle cried. “Tightly, with all your might!”
And Rudy threw his arms around a nearby tree trunk, while his uncle clambered over him up into the tree’s branches and held on tightly. Although the avalanche was rolling past many yards from them, all around them the air turbulence and gusts of wind cracked and broke trees and bushes as if they were but dry reeds and scattered them widely. Rudy lay pressed to the ground. The tree trunk he was holding was now a stump, and the crown of the tree was lying a long way off. Rudy’s uncle lay there, amongst the broken branches. His head was crushed, and his hand was still warm, but his face was unrecognizable. Rudy stood there pale and trembling. This was the first fright of his life, the first time he had known horror.
He brought the tidings of death home in the late evening, a home that was now a house of grief. His uncle’s wife reacted without words, without tears. Only when the corpse was brought home, did grief erupt. The poor cretin crawled into his bed. No one saw him the whole day, but towards evening he came to Rudy.
“Write a letter for me! Saperli can’t write. Saperli will take the letter to the post office.”
“A letter from you?” asked Rudy, “and to whom?”
“To the Lord Christ!”
“Who do you mean by that?”
And the half-wit, as they called the cretin, looked at Rudy with pleading eyes, folded his hands, and said so solemnly and piously:
Rudy squeezed his hand. “That letter wouldn’t reach him. That letter wouldn’t bring him back to us.”
It was hard for Rudy to explain how impossible this was.
“Now you’re our sole support,” said his foster mother, and that’s what Rudy became.
