Hadji Murád by Leo Tolstoy — Read

On the day Peter Avdéev died in the hospital at Vozdvízhensk, his old father, the wife of the brother in whose stead he had enlisted, and that brother's daughter -- who was already approaching womanhood and almost of age to get married -- were threshing oats on the hard-frozen threshing floor.

The day before, there had been a heavy fall of snow followed towards morning by a severe frost. The old man woke when the cocks were crowing for the third time, and seeing the bright moonlight through the frozen windowpanes, got down from the oven-top, put on his boots, his sheepskin coat and cap, and went out to the threshing floor. Having worked there for a couple of hours, he returned to the hut and awoke his son and the women. When the woman and girl came to the threshing floor they found it ready swept, with a wooden shovel sticking in the dry white snow, and beside it birch brooms with the twigs upwards, and two rows of oat sheaves laid ears to ears in a long line the whole length of the clean threshing floor. They chose their flails and started threshing, keeping time with their triple blows. The old man struck powerfully with his heavy flail, breaking the straw; the girl struck the ears from above with measured blows; and his daughter-in-law turned the oats over with her flail.