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By Root 3900 0

place waiting for the beast. From the way the chase approached or withdrew, from the giving tongue of the dogs he knew, from the approaching, withdrawing, and rising voices of the kennelmen, he could sense what was happening in the island. He knew that there were growing (young) and seasoned (old) wolves; he knew that the hounds had broken up into two packs, that they were chasing somewhere, and that something had gone wrong. He expected the beast on his side every second. He made thousands of different conjectures about how and on which side the beast would come running, and how he would chase him down. Hope alternated with despair. Several times he addressed God with a plea that the wolf come out at him; he prayed with that passionate and guilty feeling with which people pray at moments of strong agitation arising from insignificant causes. “What would it cost You?” he said to God. “Do it for me! I know You are great, and it’s a sin to ask it of You, but, for God’s sake, make it so that the old wolf comes my way and Karai, before my uncle’s eyes, gets a death grip on his throat.” A thousand times during that half hour, Rostov cast intent, strained, and anxious glances around the edge of the woods, with two meager oaks above the aspen undergrowth, and the ravine with its eroded edge, and his uncle’s hat barely showing from behind a bush to the right.

“No, such luck is not to be,” thought Rostov, “and yet what would it cost? It’s not to be! I’m always unlucky, in cards, in war, in everything.” Austerlitz and Dolokhov vividly but fleetingly flashed in his imagination. “If only once in my life I could chase down a seasoned wolf, I’d ask for nothing more!” he thought, straining his hearing and sight, looking to the left and then to the right, and listening to the smallest nuances in the sounds of the chase. He again looked to the right and saw that something was running towards him across the empty field. “No, it can’t be!” thought Rostov, sighing deeply, as a man sighs at the accomplishment of something he has long awaited. What was accomplished was his greatest happiness—and so simply, without noise, without splendor, without portent. Rostov could not believe his eyes, and this doubt continued for more than a second. The wolf ran on and jumped heavily over a hole that lay in his path. He was an old beast, with a gray back and a well-stuffed, reddish belly. He ran unhurriedly, obviously convinced that no one could see him. Rostov, holding his breath, glanced at the dogs. They were lying down or standing, not seeing the wolf and understanding nothing. Old Karai turned his head and, baring his yellow teeth, clacked them along his haunch, angrily searching for a flea.

“Hallooloo,” Rostov said in a whisper, protruding his lips. The dogs, jingling the metal rings of their collars, jumped up, cocking their ears. Karai finished scratching his haunch and stood up, cocking his ears and slightly wagging his tail, from which tufts of fur hung.

“Loose them, or not?” Nikolai was saying to himself all the while the wolf moved towards him, drawing away from the woods. Suddenly the wolf’s entire physiognomy changed; he shuddered at the sight of human eyes, which he had probably never seen before, directed at him, and turning his head slightly towards the hunter, stopped—go back or go on? “Eh! it makes no difference, I’ll go on!” he seemed to say to himself and started forward, not looking around now, at a soft, long, free, but resolute lope.

“Halloo!” Nikolai shouted in a voice not his own, and of itself his good horse raced headlong down the hill, leaping over gullies, to head off the wolf; and still more quickly, outstripping the horse, raced the dogs. Nikolai did not hear his own shouts, did not feel that he was galloping, did not see the dogs or the space over which he was galloping; he saw only the wolf, who, quickening his pace, loped down the hollow without changing direction. The first to turn up near the beast was the black-spotted, broad-haunched Milka, who began to close in on him. Closer, closer…there she was right next to