Wolf Winter (20 page)

It stopped snowing. The flush of the sky waned to gray. The priest kept looking up to the mountain, making sure he was traveling close to it. Darkness drew in, and soon he could not tell the mountain’s shape. He stopped. The swamp ought to be right here, but there were no sounds of people talking or animals moving. It was now so dark that the priest couldn’t make out his own feet strapped to the skis. Maybe he should head back. If he did, he would in due time come to the river. He could follow it to one of the settler homesteads.

If he missed the Lapp camp, there was nothing beyond it.

He stepped around with his skis in a large fan and started back toward where he had come from, his exhalations pumping inside his hat.

There was a howl.

The priest stopped moving. He held his breath. Above him the sky had turned Bible-black. A shadow drew under one of the trees. Changed shape. He took a rapid step to the side, lost his balance, and then his breath, as his hip hit the ground. His cheek burned. His foot was caught in the ski. He tried to kick it free; tried to get up.

Then the shadows grew into a shape, and as the priest yelled, a woman’s voice said, “You’re so loud, anyone on the mountain can hear you.”

It was the Finn woman, a dead bird hanging from her belt. She skied up to him, squatted down, and loosened his foot from the fastening with a quick twist. She stretched her hand forward and hauled him up. All needlessly violent.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m on my way to the Lapps.” He brushed the snow off his side.

They stood for a moment without speaking.

“It’s late,” the priest said. “I’ll have to stay the night with you.”

“Paavo is not at home.”

“Nevertheless, it will have to be.”

She smiled, but it was not a pleasant smile. Scorn, he realized. As if he had misbehaved and she had expected nothing but, from him.

They continued in silence until there it was before them: a candle in a cottage window.

They had eaten, the priest ignoring the two children staring at him, the woman seemingly ignoring him. Heated by the fire, his hurt cheek throbbed. His frozen hair thawed and became wet; the skin on the back of his hands stung. He opened and closed his hands a few times. The skin was red. He breathed hot air on them.

“Crow pecks,” the younger girl said. “No point blowing. That doesn’t make it go away.”

“How are your feet?” the woman asked.

“No worse than my hands.”

“Then you’re fine.” She began to clear the table. “You can take the bed. We’ll put up a cover so you can have some privacy.”

He watched as she and the daughters moved the bedding to the floor and laid new bedclothes in the bed. They hung a large blanket from the hooks in the roof. He rose, but the woman dismissed him with a movement of her hand. She nodded to him when his bed was ready.

He lay down and listened as the noises of everyday on the other side of the blanket ceased—the blowing out of a candle, clothes being removed or folded, the clearing of a throat. The light from the fire faded to a glow. The priest lay with his clothes on and his eyes wide open, his insides twisting.

He hadn’t prayed. Lost in the forest, plummeting, the most frightened he had ever been, he had not called the name of Jesus.

There hadn’t been time,
he said to himself.
It had happened so fast.

If he was honest, he knew that wasn’t true. No, he hadn’t called on Jesus because at that moment he had felt that Jesus was powerless on the mountain. As if on Blackåsen there was no God. As if Blackåsen belonged to someone else.

He turned his head sideways to look at the blanket. It hung immovable from the roof. Behind it nothing stirred.

He sat up and bent down to open his pack. He took out the Church Book and turned the pages until he came to their names. Maija. The woman’s name was Maija. Her daughters were called Frederika and Dorotea.

“You’ll have to come with me,” the priest said. “Maija.”

“What?” She stopped cutting the bread. Her name sounded strange pronounced by him. Clumsy. As if he were tasting a new vegetable or root and didn’t want it to touch the inside of his mouth. It was just before morning. The priest ought to be on his way, not sitting here and talking nonsense about her going with him.

Dorotea and Frederika had stopped eating and watched them.

“To the Lapp winter camp. I need you to show me the way.”

Maija resumed her cutting. “Oh no. I don’t know where it is. Besides, I can’t leave my daughters.”

“Remember the piece of glass you showed me? I’ve seen them with similar pieces. And in the Church Books it was written that the Lapps complained about Eriksson. Year after year.”

Between his eyebrows the skin was coming off. Dry and white. Someone ought to tell him to put butter on that.

“What kind of complaints?” she asked, although she didn’t want to.

“Land,” he said, and his blue eyes gleamed. “The Lapps said Eriksson burned too much of it.”

“Bah,” she said. “They wouldn’t kill for land. The one thing of which we have plenty.” But, all by itself, her voice had risen at the end and become a question.

“We need to discover what happened.”

She wanted to ask if that meant he no longer called Eriksson’s death “a tragic mishap.” And there is no “we,” she wanted to say. Then she thought of what Nils had looked like when he spoke of something bad on the mountain.

“Do you still have the piece of glass?” the priest asked.

She took it out from her dress pocket, held it up for him to see.

“I don’t know where their site is,” she said.

“But you would find it. I know you would.”

He looked at her two daughters. “And Frederika and Dorotea ski, don’t they? They can come with us.”

She wound the woolen scarves around the mouth and nose of each daughter several times, pulled down the hat on Frederika, pulled up the scarf on Dorotea. She hoped the Lapps would let them spend the night with them. She didn’t think the camp was far away, but it was far enough not to make it there and back in one day. The priest was tramping beside them on the porch. She ignored him and waited until she got used to the darkness.

In the barn the goats stirred and asked as she felt with her hands along the wall until she came upon their skis.

“Hush, hush,” she hissed. “Go back to sleep. It’s barely morning. And yet here I am already engaged in idiocies,” she muttered to herself.

She carried their skis outside and took off her mittens to help insert the peak of first Frederika’s shoes into the leather loops, then Dorotea’s. Her fingers touched snow—there was a pricking pain. She breathed hot air on them and dried them on her jumper before going back into the barn and getting her own skis.

The priest came struggling toward them. Frederika and Dorotea were standing still, watching her. She set off into the forest. She was stiff and cold, but her body soon warmed up and she lengthened her strides. She slowed and waited for her girls to draw alongside her.

“Glide on each ski,” she said. “Rest on it as it goes forward, lean on it, use it. You’ll get less tired.”

The priest was quiet, listening.

Maija skied across the open area of the marsh. She slowed down to look at the position of the waning stars as the dawn approached and then adjusted her direction. Henrik had told her that the Lapps stayed one day’s journey west of the marsh and Nils’s homestead.

“You can’t force a big herd to stay in one place.” Jutta’s voice in her head. “They follow their own instinct, and it ends up being the owner who has to follow them. If you want to find a herdsman, you too need to follow your instinct, not a path.”

Maija wasn’t going to follow any instinct. One day’s journey west, and then they would see the traces of beasts, of habitation. She didn’t feel good about why they were going to see the Lapps, but the matter was better off closed.

It was long after the midday meal by the time they drew near. Maija was glad. Frederika and Dorotea were tired. Their movements were clumsier. The priest muttered and grumbled. But there was more.

She stopped. Hushed the priest. Listened.

There were sounds in the forest: nasal screams, like babies in pain. No louder than the faint echoes of nightmares. Maija began to ski again, faster, following that sound which turned real, ground through snow and tree trunks, pierced her bones, turned her inside out.

She emerged from between the spruce trees into a dell, by the first shelters of the Lapp winter village.

In front of her was a landscape of war. People were running, men calling. The snow was red from steaming blood, spotted by big lumps of white and black fur. The smell of sweat and iron churned in the air. Reindeer, torn reindeer everywhere. Some of them weighty with calves. Some still alive. A stab at the neck. A stab at the heart. The Lapps were killing.

Frederika’s eyes were large, and Dorotea had clasped her hands before her mouth. The priest’s face was a pale fleck in the dark.

Nothing to do but watch. Fearless came toward them.

“Twenty-two,” he said and gave a mirthless laughter. “The wolves got twenty-two of them before we could drive them away. Had it been wolverine … but wolf? Wolf doesn’t kill what’s healthy. They
don’t take what they don’t need. And the raven didn’t warn us. He always warns.”

He rubbed his forehead with his knuckle. His bloody fingers left a smear. “It was as if they killed for lust,” he said with disbelief.

“I am so sorry,” Maija said. “Go back to the others. We’ve come at the wrong time.”

He shrugged without looking at her. “There is nothing that can be done now anyway.”

“We’ve come at the wrong time,” she repeated.

“Yes.” The Lapp sounded tired. “And with accusations.”

He began to walk toward one of the lodgings and motioned for them to follow. By the
Lapp kåta
he held the hide away from the opening.

It was dark inside, despite the fire in the middle and the smoke hole up high. Fearless didn’t sit down, and so they all remained standing. Heads high, they were too close to the smoke. Maija squinted. Beside her the priest coughed. Fearless didn’t seem to notice. His hair was the color of pewter. In the shadows the smudge of blood on his forehead looked like the war paint on the Cossacks.

“You are coming to ask about gray-reaper,” he said. “That’s what we called him, that grower of yours, south mountain. Every year, as we visited the land we lent him, we found he’d burned more forest. He did not leave enough for the reindeer to eat. Four small children and a wife, he had. Yet he took land as if he were cultivating food for a whole village. Every year we tried to talk to him. We asked him to give back the land that was ours. Every year we complained to the priest in vain. But we left it at that. Our people do not kill settlers.”

“There was also a piece of glass,” the priest said and looked at Maija.

She clenched her teeth, but opened her satchel.

Fearless took one glance at it. “We give them away with our word whenever we make a promise.”

There was nothing but blankness in his gaze.

Maija realized she might have deceived herself into thinking she was a bit like them, the Lapps. In her mind they had become the real nobles, and she had wanted them to like her. And at once she was disgusted with herself.

Fearless folded a corner of the opening aside. “You may stay here until you are ready to return.”

“I am sorry,” she said to his back.