seven in the evening
And here , too , he did not follow the ruts of a Caucasian officer 's life . It came quite naturally to him to wake up at daybreak . After drinking tea and admiring from his porch the mountains , the morning , and Maryanka , he would put on a tattered ox-hide coat , sandals of soaked raw hide , buckle on a dagger , take a gun , put cigarettes and some lunch in a little bag , call his dog , and soon after five o'clock would start for the forest beyond the village . Towards seven in the evening he would return tired and hungry with five or six pheasants hanging from his belt -LRB- sometimes with some other animal -RRB- and with his bag of food and cigarettes untouched . If the thoughts in his head had lain like the lunch and cigarettes in the bag , one might have seen that during all those fourteen hours not a single thought had moved in it . He returned morally fresh , strong , and perfectly happy , and he could not tell what he had been thinking about all the time . Were they ideas , memories , or dreams that had been flitting through his mind ?