The farther he went, the louder and merrier foamed and bubbled the tides of spring. O Liberty!
When the fugitive was tired, he could find a shelter anywhere. He would fling himself down where he liked, cross his hands under his head, and look up at the sky till his eyes closed of themselves. The wounds on his legs caused by the iron fetters began to heal; no one who met him would have guessed who he was. But the primeval forest seemed quite deserted; no tree bore the mark of an axe, and none had been felled. Here a black scorched pine-tree had been blasted by the lightning; there a half-decayed one, whose top was entangled in its neighbour's branches, had collapsed from sheer old age. This solitude had been profaned by no one's foot; here was real freedom.
Only now and then he encountered wild animals. Once a bear came within gun-shot, but the old man spared his life. "You have nothing to give me now," he thought. "Your skin is no use in summer. Come again in winter." And he shouted at the animal in such a terrible voice, that it trotted off with its tail drawn in.
Sometimes he heard the howling of the wolves in the distance; in the deep silence it sounded weird and terrifying. It filled the old man with a strange feeling, not fear, but in his innermost being something seemed to howl and moan in sympathy with the beasts of prey. Was he not indeed like a wolf among men? Cowering by the fires he made, he would gaze for hours into the red glowing embers. The flames roared and strained towards the dark sky as though they would make themselves free; the fresh brushwood crackled and emitted clouds of blue whirling smoke; the birch-trunk over which the sparks danced, contracted itself as though in a spasm, till it finally flared up in a sheet of fire, and the solitary man felt ever more painfully conscious that he too was every one's enemy, and was only tolerated in this wilderness like those creatures whose howling so strangely thrilled his heart. The darkness which seemed to press from all sides on the fire looked between the grey pine-trunks on the gloomy face of the convict, and listened to his moody murmuring.
Ivan the Runaway wandered farther through dark forests over waste silent stretches of land and wide moors where his step left behind it little cold pools in the spongy ground, and where the wildfowl gathered on the mossy hillocks and chattered cheerfully in the sunshine. At last he came across traces of human existence. It was true that from the pine-tree which he climbed up he could perceive in the grey plain enclosed by woods neither cottage roofs nor smoke, though it was such a clear day that the streamlets which ran between the hillocks shone brightly and dazzled his eyes which were accustomed to the darkness of the forest. But yet the district seemed to be inhabited. A firm yellow road wound in a broad semicircle round the moor. The ruts left by the cart-wheels of the previous year crossed each other distinctly, but no new wheels had ground the dry clods of earth into dust. Probably the road was seldom used; at any rate the fugitive sat for hours in his tree, without hearing in the distance the creaking of the ungreased axle of a peasant's cart.