Laska at dawn

Levin wakes at dawn, cannot rouse either companion, and goes out alone past the sleeping coachmen and drowsing horses. His old hostess shows him the path with her bare sunburnt feet and lifts a bar of the threshing-floor for him. He walks through hemp wet with dew, bees whistling past his ear like bullets, the moon gone to quicksilver, the marsh visible by its mist. Then the chapter passes to Laska: the scent of the birds mingled with roots and rust and horse dung, the run to windward, the certainty that there are many and not one, and the moment when her master's voice calls her off to a place where there can be nothing and she pretends to search to please him. Freed, she finds one five steps off and freezes, her tail tip twitching, watching him come up with his familiar face and ever-terrible eyes. Told to go in, she thinks she will no longer be able to answer for anything, and goes. Two snipe fall. The sun rises on gold grass, a boy runs up to report ducks, and Levin kills three more in front of him.

Tolstoy hands the centre of the chapter to the dog's consciousness and plays it entirely straight: Laska reasons, doubts her master's judgement, obeys anyway, and is proved right. The device works because her knowledge is of exactly the kind the novel keeps praising — certainty that shows itself in knowing what to do. Levin shoots well the moment he is alone and unwatched by anyone but a boy.