‘Why stop? We’ve got in and must get out. Hey, pet! Hey, darling! Gee up, old fellow!’ he shouted in a cheerful tone to the horse, jumping out of the sledge and himself getting stuck in the ditch.
The horse gave a start and quickly climbed out onto the frozen bank. It was evidently a ditch that had been dug there.
‘Where are we now?’ asked Vasili Andreevich.
‘We’ll soon find out!’ Nikita replied. ‘Go on, we’ll get somewhere.’
‘Why, this must be the Goryachkin forest!’ said Vasili Andreevich, pointing to something dark that appeared amid the snow in front of them.
‘We’ll see what forest it is when we get there,’ said Nikita.
He saw that beside the black thing they had noticed, dry, oblong willow-leaves were fluttering, and so he knew it was not a forest but a settlement, but he did not wish to say so. And in fact they had not gone twenty-five yards beyond the ditch before something in front of them, evidently trees, showed up black, and they heard a new and melancholy sound. Nikita had guessed right: it was not a wood, but a row of tall willows with a few leaves still fluttering on them here and there. They had evidently been planted along the ditch round a threshing-floor. Coming up to the willows, which moaned sadly in the wind, the horse suddenly planted his forelegs above the height of the sledge, drew up his hind legs also, pulling the sledge onto higher ground, and turned to the left, no longer sinking up to his knees in snow. They were back on a road.
‘Well, here we are, but heaven only knows where!’ said Nikita.
The horse kept straight along the road through the drifted snow, and before they had gone another hundred yards the straight line of the dark wattle wall of a barn showed up black before them, its roof heavily covered with snow which poured down from it. After passing the barn the road turned to the wind and they drove into a snow-drift. But ahead of them was a lane with houses on either side, so evidently the snow had been blown across the road and they had to drive through the drift. And so in fact it was. Having driven through the snow they came out into a street. At the end house of the village some frozen clothes hanging on a line—shirts, one red and one white, trousers, leg-bands, and a petticoat—fluttered wildly in the wind. The white shirt in particular struggled desperately, waving its sleeves about.
‘There now, either a lazy woman or a dead one has not taken her clothes down before the holiday,’ remarked Nikita, looking at the fluttering shirts.