No, here he was, already beyond the village. The runners of his sleigh were creaking smoothly over the hard snow. Chalgan had been left behind. The solemn tones of the church bells came floating along his trail, and on the black line of the horizon bands of dark horsemen in tall, pointed hats were silhouetted against the bright sky. The Yakuts were hurrying to church.
The moon went down, and a small, whitish cloud appeared in the zenith, shining with suffused, phosphorescent lustre. It gathered size, it broke, it flickered, and rays of iridescent light spread swiftly from it in all directions, while the dark, semicircular cloud in the north grew blacker and blacker, more sombre than the forest which Makar was approaching.
The road wound through a dense, low thicket with little hills rising on either hand; the farther it advanced, the higher grew the trees, until at last the taiga[B] closed about it, mute and pregnant with mystery. The naked branches of the larches drooped under their loads of silvery rime. The soft radiance of the Aurora filtered through the tree-tops, and strayed across the frosty earth, unveiling now an icy glade, now the fallen trunk of some giant of the forest half buried in the snow.
Another moment, and again all was sunk in murky darkness, full-fraught with secrecy and silence. Makar stopped. Here, almost at the side of the road, were set the first units of an elaborate system of traps. He could see clearly in the phosphorescent light the low stockade of fallen timber and the first trap—three long, heavy logs resting upon an upright post, and held in place by a complicated arrangement of levers and horse-hair ropes.
To be sure, these traps were not his, but might not a fox have been caught in them, too? Makar quickly got out of his sled, left the clever piebald standing in the road, and listened attentively.
Not a sound in the forest! Only the solemn ringing of the church bells came floating as before from the distant, invisible village.
There was nothing to fear. Aliosha, the owner of the traps and Makar’s neighbour and bitter enemy, was no doubt in church. Not a track could be seen on the smooth breast of the new-fallen snow.
Makar struck into the thicket—no one was there.
The snow creaked under foot. The log traps lay side by side like a row of cannon with gaping jaws, in silent expectation.
Makar walked up and down the line without finding anything, and turned back to the road.