The Long Road a Novel

re sturdy ones. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, and spring again, the little feet had padded sturdily alongside the heavier ones. In the summer and autumn they covered twice the necessary distance each day, for then the steppes were gay with flowers and the woodlands rich with fruit. There were endless leagues of soft green grass enamelled with daisies and primroses, mile- long stretches of vivid yellow buttercups, and here and there blue forget-me-nots in such profusion that the small boy stood and looked first at the ground and then at the sky, to see if by chance some of it had not fallen on the earth. Oh, a wonderful place, those great Siberian steppes at their best, when the sun shone out of a cloudless sky, and quite to the liking of a small boy of an inquiring turn of mind. All day long he was never still for a moment. A dozen times a day he would break from his mother's side with a whoop and speed away after sparrows and cuckoos, and the little tufted steppe-quails which ran up fearlessly to see what all these strangers meant. And sometimes his mother's eyes would grow anxious, when he disappeared completely among the grasses which reached far above his head. But always, sooner or later, he came running in again from here and there, laden with flowers, and full of deeds of prowess almost done. And sometimes the way led through mighty forests of elms and poplars and maples and lofty silver birches, and in the thickets he would find wild cherr... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.