Stepan Arkadyevitch hit one at the very moment when it was beginning its zigzag movements, and the snipe fell in a heap into the mud.  Oblonsky aimed deliberately at another, still flying low in the reeds, and together with the report of the shot, that snipe too fell, and it could be seen fluttering out where the sedge had been cut, its unhurt wing showing white beneath.

Levin was not so lucky:  he aimed at his first bird too low, and missed; he aimed at it again, just as it was rising, but at that instant another snipe flew up at his very feet, distracting him so that he missed again.

While they were loading their guns, another snipe rose, and Veslovsky, who had had time to load again, sent two charges of small-shot into the water.  Stepan Arkadyevitch picked up his snipe, and with sparkling eyes looked at Levin.

“Well, now let us separate,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and limping on his left foot, holding his gun in readiness and whistling to his dog, he walked off in one direction.  Levin and Veslovsky walked in the other.

It always happened with Levin that when his first shots were a failure he got hot and out of temper, and shot badly the whole day.  So it was that day.  The snipe showed themselves in numbers.  They kept flying up from just under the dogs, from under the sportsmen’s legs, and Levin might have retrieved his ill luck.  But the more he shot, the more he felt disgraced in the eyes of Veslovsky, who kept popping away merrily and indiscriminately, killing nothing, and not in the slightest abashed by his ill success.  Levin, in feverish haste, could not restrain himself, got more and more out of temper, and ended by shooting almost without a hope of hitting.  Laska, indeed, seemed to understand this.  She began looking more languidly, and gazed back at the sportsmen, as it were, with perplexity or reproach in her eyes.  Shots followed shots in rapid succession.  The smoke of the powder hung about the sportsmen, while in the great roomy net of the game bag there were only three light little snipe.  And of these one had been killed by Veslovsky alone, and one by both of them together.  Meanwhile from the other side of the marsh came the sound of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s shots, not frequent, but, as Levin fancied, well-directed, for almost after each they heard “Krak, Krak, apporte!”

This excited Levin still more.  The snipe were floating continually in the air over the reeds.  Their whirring wings close to the earth, and their harsh cries high in the air, could be heard on all sides; the snipe that had risen first and flown up into the air, settled again before the sportsmen.  Instead of two hawks there were now dozens of them hovering with shrill cries over the marsh.

After walking through the larger half of the marsh, Levin and Veslovsky reached the place where the peasants’ mowing-grass was divided into long strips reaching to the reeds, marked off in one place by the trampled grass, in another by a path mown through it.  Half of these strips had already been mown.