‘Vasí-i-li! Bring along the dun horse! I can’t catch them without,’ came his voice.
One of the other drivers, a very tall man, got out of his sledge, silently unfastened his three horses, climbed on one of them by its breeching, and disappeared at a clumsy gallop in the direction of the first driver.
We and the other two tróykas started after the courier’s tróyka, which with its bell ringing went along at full trot though there was no road.
‘Catch them! Not likely!’ said my driver of the one who had run after the horses. ‘If a horse won’t come to other horses, that shows it’s bewitched and will take you somewhere you’ll never return from.’
From the time he began following the others my driver seemed more cheerful and talkative, a fact of which I naturally took advantage, as I did not yet feel sleepy. I began asking where he came from, and why, and who he was, and it turned out that like myself he was from Túla province, a serf from Kirpíchnoe village, that they were short of land there and had had bad harvests since the cholera year. He was one of two brothers in the family, the third having gone as a soldier; that they had not enough grain to last till Christmas, and had to live on outside earnings. His youngest brother was head of the house, being married, while he himself was a widower. An artél2 of drivers came from their village to these parts every year. Though he had not driven before, he had taken the job to help his brother, and lived, thank God, quite well, earning a hundred and twenty assignation rubles a year, of which he sent a hundred home to the family; and that life would be quite good ‘if only the couriers were not such beasts, and the people hereabouts not so abusive’.
‘Now why did that driver scold me so? O Lord! Did I set his horses loose on purpose? Do I mean harm to anybody? And why did he go galloping after them? They’d have come back of themselves, and now he’ll only tire out the horses and get lost himself,’ said the God-fearing peasant.
‘And what is that black thing there?’ I asked, noticing several dark objects in front of us.
‘Why, a train of carts. That’s pleasant driving!’ he went on, when we had come abreast of the huge mat-covered wagons on wheels, following one another. ‘Look, you can’t see a single soul – they’re all asleep. Wise horses know of themselves … you can’t make them miss the way anyhow … We’ve driven that way on contract work ourselves,’ he added, ‘so we know.’
It really was strange to see those huge wagons covered with snow from their matted tops to their very wheels, and moving along all alone. Only in the front corner of the wagon did the matting, covered two inches thick with snow, lift a bit and a cap appear for a moment from under it as our bells tinkled past. The large piebald horse, stretching its neck and straining its back, went evenly along the completely snow-hidden road, monotonously shaking its shaggy head under the whitened harness-bow, and pricking one snow-covered ear when we overtook it.
When we had gone on for another half-hour the driver again turned to me.
‘What d’you think, sir, are we going right?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered.
‘At first the wind came that way, and now we are going right under the wind. No, we are not going where we ought, we are going astray again,’ he said quite calmly.
One saw that, though he was inclined to be a coward, yet ‘death itself is pleasant in company’ as the saying is, and he had become quite tranquil now that there were several of us and he no longer had to lead and be responsible. He made remarks on the blunders of the driver in front with the greatest coolness, as if it were none of his business. And in fact I noticed that we sometimes saw the front tróyka on the left and sometimes on the right; it even seemed to me that we were going round in a very small circle. However, that might be an optical illusion, like the impression that the leading tróyka was sometimes going uphill, and then along a slope, or downhill, whereas I knew that the steppe was perfectly level.
After we had gone on again for some time, I saw a long way off, on the very horizon as it seemed to me, a long, dark, moving stripe; and a moment later it became clear that it was the same train of wagons we had passed before. The snow was still covering their creaking wheels, some of which did not even turn any longer, the men were still asleep as before under the matting, and the piebald horse in front blew out its nostrils as before, sniffed at the road, and pricked its ears.
‘There, we’ve turned and turned and come back to the same wagons!’ exclaimed my driver in a dissatisfied voice. ‘The courier’s horses are good ones, that’s why he’s driving them so recklessly, but ours will stop altogether if we go on like this all night.’
He cleared his throat.
‘Let us turn back, sir, before we get into trouble!’
‘No! Why? We shall get somewhere.’
‘Where shall we get to? We shall spend the night in the steppe. How it is blowing! … O Lord!’
Though I was surprised that the driver of the front tróyka, having evidently lost the road and the direction, went on at a fast trot without looking for the road, and cheerfully shouting, I did not want to lag behind them.
‘Follow them!’ I said.
My driver obeyed, whipping up his horses more reluctantly than before, and did not turn to talk to me any more.
IV
THE storm grew more and more violent, and the snow fell dry and fine. I thought it was beginning to freeze: my cheeks and nose felt colder than before, and streams of cold air made their way more frequently under my fur coat, so that I had to wrap it closer around me. Sometimes the sledge bumped on the bare ice-glazed ground from which the wind had swept the snow. As I had already travelled more than five hundred versts without stopping anywhere for the night, I involuntarily kept closing my eyes and dozing off, although I was much interested to know how our wandering would end. Once when I opened my eyes I was struck for a moment by what seemed to me a bright light falling on the white plain; the horizon had widened considerably, the lowering black sky had suddenly vanished, and on all sides slanting white streaks of falling snow could be seen. The outlines of the front tróykas were more distinct, and as I looked up it seemed for a minute as though the clouds had dispersed, and that only the falling snow veiled the sky. While I was dozing the moon had risen and was casting its cold bright light through the tenuous clouds and the falling snow. The only things I saw clearly were my sledge, the horses, my driver, and the three tróykas in front of us: the courier’s sledge in which a driver still sat, as before, driving at a fast trot; the second, in which two drivers having laid down the reins and made a shelter for themselves out of a coat sat smoking their pipes all the time, as could be seen by the sparks that flew from them; and the third in which no one was visible, as probably the driver was lying asleep in the body of the sledge. The driver of the first tróyka, however, at the time I awoke, occasionally stopped his horses and sought for the road. As soon as we stopped the howling of the wind sounded louder and the vast quantity of snow borne through the air became more apparent. In the snow-shrouded moonlight I could see the driver’s short figure probing the snow in front of him with the handle of his whip, moving backwards and forwards in the white dimness, again returning to his sledge and jumping sideways onto his seat, and again amid the monotonous whistling of the wind I heard his dexterous, resonant cries urging on the horses, and the ringing of the bells. Whenever the driver of the front tróyka got out to search for some sign of a road or haystacks, there came from the second tróyka the bold, self-confident voice of one of the drivers shouting to him:
‘Hey, Ignéshka, you’ve borne quite to the left! Bear to the right, facing the wind!’ Or: ‘What are you twisting about for, quite uselessly? Follow the snow, see how the drifts lie, and we’ll come out just right.’ Or: ‘Take to the right, to the right, mate! See, there’s something black – it must be a post.’ Or: ‘What are you straying about for? Unhitch the piebald and let him run in front, he’ll lead you right out onto the road. That would be better.’