63
" choose each footfall—a twisted ankle was certain death now—and I saw the tread marks before Kolya. I grabbed his sleeve to stop him. We were at the edge of a vast clearing in the woods. The glare of sunlight off the hectares of snow was bright enough that I had to shield my eyes with my hand. The snow had been corrugated by dozens of tank treads, as if an entire Panzer brigade had passed through. I didn’t know treads the way I knew airplane engines, couldn’t tell a German Sturmtiger’s from a Russian T-34’s, but I knew these weren’t our tanks. We would have already broken the blockade if we had this much armor in the woods. Gray and brown heaps lay scattered across the snow. At first I thought they were discarded coats, but I saw a tail on one, an outstretched paw on another, and I realized they were dead dogs, at least a dozen of them. We heard another howl and finally we saw the howler, a black-and-white sheepdog dragging itself off the field, its front legs doing the work its hind legs could not. Behind the wounded animal was a blood-smeared trail more than a hundred meters long, a red brushstroke slapped across a white canvas. "
― David Benioff , City of Thieves
67
" Perhaps I had always known they would disappear one day, and so I had kept them at a distance, laughed at their jokes and listened to their plans but never really trusted their existence. I had learned how to protect myself. When the police took my father, I had been a dumb boy, unable to understand how a man-- that willful, brilliant man-- could cease to exist at the snap of an unseen bureaucrat's fingers, as if he were nothing but cigarette smoke exhaled by a bored sentry in a watchtower in Siberia, a sentry who wondered if his girlfriend back home was cheating on him, who stared over the wintry woods, unaware of the great blue maw of the sky above him that waited to swallow the curling smoke and the sentry and everything on the ground below. "
― David Benioff , City of Thieves