Nikita awoke before daybreak. He was aroused by the cold that had begun
to creep down his back. He had dreamt that he was coming from the mill
with a load of his master's flour and when crossing the stream had
missed the bridge and let the cart get stuck. And he saw that he had
crawled under the cart and was trying to lift it by arching his back.
But strange to say the cart did not move, it stuck to his back and he
could neither lift it nor get out from under it. It was crushing the
whole of his loins. And how cold it felt! Evidently he must crawl out.
'Have done!' he exclaimed to whoever was pressing the cart down on him.
'Take out the sacks!' But the cart pressed down colder and colder,
and then he heard a strange knocking, awoke completely, and remembered
everything. The cold cart was his dead and frozen master lying upon him.
And the knock was produced by Mukhorty, who had twice struck the sledge
with his hoof.
'Andreevich! Eh, Andreevich!' Nikita called cautiously, beginning to
realize the truth, and straightening his back. But Vasili Andreevich did
not answer and his stomach and legs were stiff and cold and heavy like
iron weights.
'He must have died! May the Kingdom of Heaven be his!' thought Nikita.
He turned his head, dug with his hand through the snow about him and
opened his eyes. It was daylight; the wind was whistling as before
between the shafts, and the snow was falling in the same way, except
that it was no longer driving against the frame of the sledge but
silently covered both sledge and horse deeper and deeper, and neither
the horse's movements nor his breathing were any longer to be heard.
'He must have frozen too,' thought Nikita of Mukhorty, and indeed those
hoof knocks against the sledge, which had awakened Nikita, were the last
efforts the already numbed Mukhorty had made to keep on his feet before
dying.
'O Lord God, it seems Thou art calling me too!' said Nikita. 'Thy Holy
Will be done. But it's uncanny. . . . Still, a man can't die twice and
must die once. If only it would come soon!'
And he again drew in his head, closed his eyes, and became unconscious,
fully convinced that now he was certainly and finally dying.
It was not till noon that day that peasants dug Vasili Andreevich and
Nikita out of the snow with their shovels, not more than seventy yards
from the road and less than half a mile from the village.
The snow had hidden the sledge, but the shafts and the kerchief tied to
them were still visible. Mukhorty, buried up to his belly in snow, with
the breeching and drugget hanging down, stood all white, his dead head
pressed against his frozen throat: icicles hung from his nostrils, his
eyes were covered with hoar-frost as though filled with tears, and he
had grown so thin in that one night that he was nothing but skin and
bone.
Vasili Andreevich was stiff as a frozen carcass, and when they rolled
him off Nikita his legs remained apart and his arms stretched out as
they had been. His bulging hawk eyes were frozen, and his open mouth
under his clipped moustache was full of snow. But Nikita though chilled
through was still alive. When he had been brought to, he felt sure
that he was already dead and that what was taking place with him was
no longer happening in this world but in the next. When he heard the
peasants shouting as they dug him out and rolled the frozen body of
Vasili Andreevich from off him, he was at first surprised that in the
other world peasants should be shouting in the same old way and had the
same kind of body, and then when he realized that he was still in this
world he was sorry rather than glad, especially when he found that the
toes on both his feet were frozen.
Nikita lay in hospital for two months. They cut off three of his toes,
but the others recovered so that he was still able to work and went on
living for another twenty years, first as a farm-labourer, then in his
old age as a watchman. He died at home as he had wished, only this year,
under the icons with a lighted taper in his hands. Before he died he
asked his wife's forgiveness and forgave her for the cooper. He also
took leave of his son and grandchildren, and died sincerely glad that
he was relieving his son and daughter-in-law of the burden of having to
feed him, and that he was now really passing from this life of which
he was weary into that other life which every year and every hour grew
clearer and more desirable to him. Whether he is better or worse off
there where he awoke after his death, whether he was disappointed or
found there what he expected, we shall all soon learn.