The nights grew dark and damp, the forest began to rumble, and wolves
approached from the marshlands. A new couple had grown up, bowed to
the winds and wedded; half the village had perished the previous
winter, and it was necessary to breed. The people lived in their
cabins together with the calves, the sheep, and the swine. They used
splinters for lights, striking the light from flint.
Often at night starving people from the towns brought money, clothes,
foot-ware, bundles of odds-and ends--in short anything they could
steal from the towns and exchange for flour. They rapped on the
windows like thieves.
The Kononov women sat at their looms while the men went a-preying in
the forest. And so they toiled on stubbornly, sternly, alone,
fighting hand-to-hand with the night, with the forest and with the
frost. The crossways to the forests became choked, and they made new
ways to the marshlands, to the Seven Brothers, to the wastelands.
Life was hard and stern. The peasants looked out upon the world from
beneath their brows, as their cottages from beneath the pines; and
they lived gladsomely, as they should.
They knew it was the Rising. And in the Rising there could be no
falling back.
Forests, thickets, fields, a tranquil sky--and crossways!...
Sometimes the crossways joined the main-road that ran alongside the
railway.
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