Wolf Winter (21 page)

Frederika was awake. Her mother’s side was rigid. Had she been on her own, her mother would have left and traveled through the night. She was still here because of her, Frederika, and because of Dorotea. Her mother wouldn’t sleep. No, she was going to lie there and stare up into the small hole in the roof and smell of anger. This time there was no blanket to hang between them and the priest, only the fire. And her mother was angry with the priest.

Frederika closed her eyes. The insides of her lids glowed orange from the light of the flames.

When the priest’s snores trilled over to their side, her mother’s breathing quieted. She turned over onto her knees. Still kneeling, her mother pulled her jumper over her head, grabbed her hat and mittens, and sneaked out.

The reindeer skin was warm. Frederika didn’t want to get up. She wanted to creep further down into her spot. Her body was heavy after the day’s skiing. Her mind was busy with the dead animals. But there was duty, and so she sat up, searched with her hands on the floor for her jumper and her hat, and then crept out of the tent, after her mother.

She waited until she could see. She shivered. When her mother was upset, she left. Just like the animals did when they were injured: the cats crept underneath the barn, the sheep hid beneath a bush, and her mother went and sat on her own, staring at something or nothing. Separate. Until she felt whole again.

Only if the animals were really hurt, they didn’t come back. They died there. You wouldn’t know, for nothing seemed different. They left, but it was final. And that was why Frederika had to watch her mother. Just in case. Her mother was more frail than she seemed.

Frederika began to walk. The cold stung her skin as if pricking it with small needles. The Lapp-cots were faint blobs in the dark, aglow
from the fires within. There was the clicking noise of the reindeers’ tendons as they moved.

In a snow drift, where her mother had dropped it or thrown it, she found the blue piece of glass. She bent to pick it up. She continued walking on the snow at the fringes of the camp, clasping the shard in her hand. The snow was dry and squeaked under the soles of her shoes. The skin on her face was becoming numb. Difficult to move, but better than when it hurt.

Then somebody stepped out right in front of her and two hands pressed her arms to her sides.

She was tilted upward and found herself looking into the face of Antti. Even though she recognized him, she cried out. He put her straight back down into the snow.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I thought you were …”

Her heart was hammering. Her mouth felt dry.

“I thought …” he began again. “Do you want to eat?” he asked.

“Is this your home?”

The ground was covered by reindeer skins. At one side of the shelter he had put his tools: fishing rods, snowshoes, a rifle. Alongside another wall were bundles of what looked like clothes rolled up in skins. It smelled smoky. Her hands clasped a cup of hot drink. It was clear but tasted salty with meat. She thought of the reindeer dying. But she was hungry.

Antti was squatting by the fire. His long hair fell forward and covered his face. His leather trousers were filthy and stiff: there was black grime, perhaps blood, on the thighs. He was staring into the flames.

“Is this your home?” she asked again.

“The forest is our home,” he said. “Only settlers have the need to own. As if humans can ever own.”

“I am sorry about your reindeer,” Frederika said.

Antti was silent.

“I thought wolf attacked the animals that were weak?”

Antti got to his feet so fast, Frederika spilled her cup. The hot drink burned her thigh. She stared at him, but he didn’t move further. The spillage turned cold. She rubbed at the wet patch, picked at her trousers.

He squatted down again. He held out his hand without looking at her, and she gave him her empty cup. He filled it from the pot over the fire and handed it back.

“We’re no longer protected by the spirits,” he said. “That’s why.”

“The spirits?”

He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Fearless used to travel between their world and ours to ensure our safety. The spirits knew him. But he doesn’t practice since his wife and child went missing. Nobody else has come forward.”

Fearless had lost his wife and child. Poor Fearless—no wonder he no longer practiced. Grief ate away at people until they had a different shape from before. Her mother had said many bad emotions could do the same: grief, hatred, fear …

“It is forbidden. You pay a high price for continuing with the practices of old,” she said without thinking. Her father’s words in her mouth tasted stale.

“Forbidden by your priests, not ours. We don’t care about your laws.”

Antti poked in the fire. “Eriksson,” he muttered. “He was killed in a sacred place. That kind of blood needs vengeance. The spirits will seek someone to avenge.”

Frederika thought of the tall, erect man in their barn. She tried to swallow. “Why?” she asked.

“It’s the way it is. Spirits need an instrument, a human being.”

“How do they pick someone?”

“They call. Some people hear.”

Dum. Tataradum.

The drumming had returned. It was low, but insistent.
Could he hear it? How could he not hear it?

“Then why don’t you do it?” she asked. It came out sounding angry. “Become their instrument, or whatever it is?”

He was silent for a while before making a face. “I don’t have the gift,” he said.

She lowered her head and thought of her father. It was hard, desiring something and not having the faculties for it.

“And the welcoming way Fearless receives you, although you are coming to accuse us,” he said.

“I think we just wanted to ask.”

Antti spat in the fire.

“It was you who complained about Eriksson. And this,” she took out the blue glass piece from her pocket, “was right by where he lay dead … where I found him,” she added, stressing the “I.”

He looked at the glass in her hand and pressed his lips together. “Eriksson was a bad man,” he said. “He sought out evil.”

“Elin liked him, though.” Frederika had thought about it as they traveled. Elin had been married to him. She assumed Elin had loved him like her father loved her mother, borne him children. Eriksson couldn’t have been all bad.

“She came here with the other one, the brother, Daniel. Eriksson stole her, like he did with all other things.”

She hadn’t known you could steal a person.

Antti was still looking at the fragment of glass in her hand. “Besides, it isn’t our glass piece but that of whoever we’ve given it to.”

Frederika was still thinking about Elin being stolen.

“And that one I gave to Nils,” he said.

The priest had woken up early. Maija lay watching the dark of his back behind the fire, knowing his eyes would be open. She stared at him until she couldn’t breathe.

A little longer,
she admonished herself.
We’ll travel back today. Then he’ll be on his way and we won’t have anything more to do with him.
It wasn’t fair. Whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t his fault.

“Are you awake?” He rolled over.

“Our women don’t sleep.”

“What did you think about what Fearless said about the glass piece?” he asked.

She sat up, pulled on her woolens, and pushed her feet into her shoes.

“It means it could have been anyone watching when Eriksson was killed.”

She opened the canvas. It was snowing. A light, sparse sprinkle dancing in the air. The Lapps had hung the flayed reindeer skins to dry. Gray-white squares, like small sails, navigating a red wave spatter. Someone had left wood for them beneath the opening. She brushed the snow off the pieces with her sleeve and lifted them inside. There was still a glow among the embers. She found her knife, pulled bark off the wood, and put the strips close to that glow, blew on it to encourage flame, careful not to suffocate the sparks.

“Makes it impossible to know what to do next,” the priest droned on.

Beside Maija Frederika sat up. She wrapped her arms around her legs and shuffled closer. She smelled funny; almost of meat.

“I guess I ought to speak to the settlers on Blackåsen next,” the priest said. “Though it might still have been a passerby.”

“Eriksson was evil,” Frederika said. She gave a shiver and then yawned. “He stole Elin.”

Frederika stood up.

“Sit down,” Maija said. “What did you say?”

“That he stole Elin. From his brother.”

“How do you know that?”

Her daughter was pondering how much to tell her. “One of the Lapps said it,” she said. “I heard it.”

Maija turned to the priest. “Did you know this?”

“No.” He shook his head so his hair bounced.

“We could have gone to see Daniel before we traveled all this way to blame the Lapps,” Maija said.

“Don’t you think I would have preferred that too?”

“Frederika,” Maija said with a stern voice. “If you know anything more, you need to tell us.”

Her daughter made herself blank until there was stillness and calm water.

“That was all,” her daughter said.

As Maija bent down to tighten the ski loop around her foot, the young long-haired Lapp who had accompanied Fearless when they left their goats arrived.

“A storm is coming,” he said.

There was no sun. An eerie white sheen filled the morning, but the sky was high.

“Perhaps,” she said.

“The first storm of the winter. And it will be big.”

Frederika gave him a long look as he left.

So he was the one who had spoken with her daughter about Elin and Daniel. Maija looked toward the sky again. In the mountains the weather changed faster than you turned a hand. They could stay, but she wanted to go home. The feeling was stronger, she had to go
home. But now that she knew where the camp was they would take a shorter route, one straight across the large hill that lay between the camp and the marsh. And if the weather deteriorated, it wasn’t as if she and her daughters hadn’t skied in snowfalls before.

There was less forest on the hill. The snow had drifted unhindered by trunks of trees and frozen in spiky waves. Like a sea caught in time. It was harder to cross than she had expected.

“I am surprised nobody told me about Daniel and Elin,” the priest said from behind her.

Maija thought about what Frederika had said. Daniel might still have loved Elin. After God knows how many years. And his poor wife—poor Anna. Had she known all that time that her husband loved another woman? Would Maija have known, if it had been Paavo? Oh yes. At least before. They’d been so close. The idea that he might love somebody else now felt strangely absurd.

“I spoke to a few individuals before coming here,” the priest said. “They said the two brothers weren’t speaking, but they didn’t say why. Then again, these individuals I am talking about might have arrived after this happened and not known. Though it is the kind of event that people would talk about for a long time. Yes, I am surprised.”

There was wind now. Currents from the east, bringing with them a cooling of the air. The sun showed itself, but it was colorless behind a layer of white. This high up they were visible at the horizon, dark clouds building fast, consuming the land as they advanced.

It wasn’t far back to the Lapp site. Maija clenched her teeth.

No, she decided. It was downhill from now on, the journey would go faster. Besides, it would take them almost as long to return there as to continue on home.

“Can we have a break?” Dorotea asked.

“No.”

Above Dorotea’s head Frederika’s eyes were serious. She too had seen the clouds.

However, going downhill wasn’t any easier. The hill was icy. Maija created a flat zigzag trail. The sky came upon them and it
began to snow. The flakes were large and wet. Soon they came in such abundance, her eyes were full of water. She blinked and blinked.

“Wet,” she shouted.

“Awful,” the priest shouted back. Then there was only the hushing of their skis.