Snipe at dusk, and Kitty's illness

They take their stands by a stream among young aspens, Levin at a forked birch with old grey Laska at his heels. In the silence he can hear the grass growing and watches a wet slate-coloured leaf move against a blade. Hawks pass, a tawny owl hoots, a cuckoo calls twice and gets out of time. Then the whistles come and the birds appear against the light-blue sky with a sound like cloth steadily torn; Oblonsky fires first and Laska brings the snipe back seeming almost to smile, and Levin is immediately envious. The shooting is splendid, Venus and the Great Bear come out, and Levin will not go home. Standing fifteen yards apart in the dark he finally asks whether Kitty is married. Oblonsky answers that she is not thinking of marrying, that she is very ill, sent abroad, and that they are afraid for her life. A woodcock comes over mid-conversation; both fire, and it belongs to both.

Tolstoy hands a paragraph to the dog's point of view in the middle of the novel's most consequential piece of news, and the joke is exact: Laska finds the conversation an interruption. The question Levin waited a whole chapter to ask is answered in the dark, at fifteen yards, and the shared woodcock lets him put it down at once.