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Earlier, the Tribune "with gentry had spent his life, eating, at assemblies, {{...}} or at council meeting",<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book V, verses 427–428</ref> were he mastered the ancient art of knife-throwing. But it was in the realm of hunting that the Tribune was considered a real expert. He had learned this skill as a young man serving at the court of Tadeusz Rejtan, a Polish national hero. But the Tribune remembered him not as a model patriot, but as a master hunter. As for his choice of game, he was prone to going for two extremes: on the one hand he believed that only large animals with horns, claws or fangs were worthy of being hunted by a nobleman. In his view, chasing hares was a good sport for youngsters and servants. "Hreczecha is my name – was his saying – since King Lech, it's no habit of a single Hreczecha to follow a rabbit."<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book I, verses 816–817</ref> On the other hand, he spent a lot time hunting flies. He would always carry a flyswatter around and, when mushrooming, he picked fly agarics, only to get rid of those pesky insects.
The Tribune was also a big talker. He could talk for hours about astrology, flies' mating habits, local legislatures and, most of all, about hunting. The poem is interspersed with the Tribune's chatter – often in episodes as he keeps getting interrupted. He manages to finish only some of his stories by the end of the epic; there's one whose ending the poet had to tell in a footnote. Silence made the Tribune feel tired, so anytime whenever he couldn't find anyone to converse with, he would run off to the noisy kitchen.
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