The Hunter Gracchus

-          Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

 While the public were doing their usual businesses, the boat arrived ashore. Two men in dark coats with silver buttons carried a bier covered with a silk cloth. A man was lying in it. But nobody paid attention to them.

      A woman with loosened hair and a child at her breast appeared on the deck of the boat. The boatman indicated a yellowish two-storey house. Then, they entered the house. A boy saw them and was scared. He immediately closed the window. A flock of doves gathered around the house. One of them flew up to the first storey and pecked at the window-pane. The woman provided them with grains.

      An unhappy man with a top hat on his head arrived at the house. As soon as he knocked at the door, it was opened, and around fifty little boys standing in two lines welcomed him.

      The boatman took the man up to the first floor, into a cool spacious room. There was a man with wildly matted hair, who looked somewhat like a hunter, lying on the bier. He lay without motion and without breathing. His eyes were closed, and his clothes showed that he was dead.

      The man kneeled down beside the bier and prayed. Everybody else left the room. At once the man on the bier opened his eyes, and asked the gentleman who he was.  The man answered that he was the Burgomaster of Riva. The man on the bier said he was the hunter Gracchus and informed that he always forgot in the first moments of returning to consciousness.

      The Burgomaster said he had got the information of the hunter’s arrival at midnight by a dove as big as a cock. The hunter showed his willingness to remain in Riva.

      The hunter said he had been dead many years before. He had fallen off a precipice in the Black Forest, Germany, when he was hunting a deer.

      He was alive, too, in a certain sense. His death ship has lost its way. By mistake, his pilot had taken a wrong turn. As a result, he had been sailing through earthly waters though he was on a death ship.

      The hunter said he had been in constant motion- up and down, left and right- on the infinitely wide and spacious stair that leads one to another world. When he sees the gate of another world shining before him, he is awaken on his old ship. His death had been a mistake. Julia, the wife of the pilot, knocks at the door and brings him on his bier the morning drink of the place they chance to be passing.

      The hunter said that he had been happy to live when he was alive, and happy to die when he had to. He had happily thrown away his hunting rifle and bag when he had to wait for his death ship.

      He said he didn’t share any blame for his present terrible fate. He didn’t see any sin in his profession, the hunting. He was called in the black forest to kill foxes. He killed the foxes and flayed the skins from his victims. His labours were blessed, and he was given the name: ‘The great hunter of Black Forest’. There was no sin in it.

      The Burgomaster also did not see any sin in what the hunter had done. He wondered who the guilty was. Nobody could and would help the hunter because his existence was so mysterious for the others. That’s why he does not shout for help.

      The Burgomaster proposes the hunter to stay in Riva, but the hunter is no more willing to. He excuses himself and says that his ship has no rudder. The hunter’s ship is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death.