The cruelest game
The cruelest game (The Most Dangerous Game or The Hounds of Zaroff) is a short story by Richard Connell . It was published in Collier's Weekly on January 19, 1924.
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Sanger Rainsford from New York City and his friend Whitney take a yacht to Rio de Janeiro to hunt jaguars . After discussing the hunter and the hunted, Whitney decides to go to bed while Rainsford stays on deck to smoke. The ship is located near a Caribbean island , which is notorious for stranded ships and shipwrecks and which is terrifying even for the experienced Swedish captain.
Rainsford heard gunfire during the night and fell overboard trying to catch his pipe. His fall into the sea goes unnoticed and after realizing that he cannot swim back to the boat, he swims to the island. There he hears a strange scream, which he cannot attribute to any animal, and hears pistol shots.
There he finds a palatial castle that is inhabited by two Cossacks : the owner, General Zaroff, and his gigantic deaf and mute servant Ivan. The general is also a big game hunter . He knows Rainsford because he is the author of a book on hunting snow leopards in Tibet . Zaroff takes Rainsford out to dinner and tells him how bored he is from the hunt. Zaroff was trained as a hunter as a young boy and hunted everything there was to hunt. After the October Revolution he had to leave his home . But since he had invested in American securities , his assets were largely untouched. He bought the island and built the castle so that he could hunt a new, dangerous game in peace.
Zaroff tells the shocked Rainsford that he decided to go hunting for humans. Occasionally, it lures ships into the vicinity of the island with false light signals , causing them to crash. Then he picks up castaways and equips them with food, a knife and hunting clothing. These are released in the jungle and are given a three-hour lead. Then the hunt begins, which ends with him killing the people. If the prisoners are able to escape him, Iwan and a pack of hunting dogs for three days, Zaroff lets them go, but no one has ever succeeded. At the moment he is holding some sailors prisoner in the basement, whom he releases one by one to hunt in the jungle. Zaroff tells Rainsford that he is either being hunted or whipped to death by Ivan. Rainsford chooses the former.
Rainsford is released into the jungle and climbs a tree where he is quickly found by Zaroff. But this lets him live in order to continue playing with him and let him escape again. Rainsford builds a complex trap, originating in Malaysia , that injures Zaroff's shoulder with a dead tree trunk. Zaroff therefore has to spend a night in his castle. Rainsford, who took part in World War I in France, is building a Burmese tiger pit, but it only kills one of Zaroff's dogs. Finally, he sets up a Ugandan knife trap in which a knife is attached to a young shoot that leaps out when touched. This trap impaled Ivan and kills him, but the knife was lost. Rainsford flees from Zaroff and jumps off a cliff into the sea. Zaroff, believing that Rainsford couldn't have survived the jump, returns home. In the bedroom, however, Rainsford reappears and claims to have swam around the island. Zaroff congratulates him on winning the "game", but the strong young Rainsford decides to fight with the much older Zaroff. The general accepts the challenge and says that the loser will be fed to the dogs. The winner will sleep in his bed. Although the following fight is not described, the story ends with Rainsford remarking that "he has never slept in a better bed," meaning that he defeated and killed Zaroff.
Award
The short story was awarded the O. Henry Prize in 1924 in the “Best Short Short” category.
additional
- The story formed the basis of the feature film Graf Zaroff - Genie des Evil . Numerous modifications of the basic theme followed, such as A Game of Death (1945) - here the villain is German and not Russian. There followed for the Sun ( Run for the Sun ) from 1956, Surviving the Game - Hunt through hell (1994), the Spanish film "King of the Hill" (2007) by director Gonzalo López-Gallego. A novel with this topic is Jagdzeit (Open Season) by David Osborn , which was filmed as Open Season in 1974.
- The term Most Dangerous Game has a double meaning in English, as game on the one hand stands for game and on the other hand for game that can be hunted. Zaroff once described manhunt to Rainsford as a game, as chess in the open air, and he sees humans as the most dangerous game, as they have a brain that is equal to that of the hunter.
- According to the production, the thriller The Hunt by Craig Zobel is loosely based on the short story, but only uses the idea of the manhunt.
Web links
- Full Text in the Internet Archive (English)
- Analysis on Gradesaver (English)