Lance soon passed the center of the river, walking around a buckled iron railing that rose from the broken ice dam like a makeshift cross. He spotted an uneven patch of ice before him where some floes crashed and piled together before freezing over. After changing his direction, he turned back and pointed them out to Kari. She changed her direction as well, advancing step by agonizing step.
Kari approached the center of the river. Realizing she’d reached the point furthest from either shore, she felt both elation and dread, and the combination made her nauseous. She suppressed the urge to throw up and continued on, and just after she’d crossed the center of the river, the ice strained and cracked beneath her. Torden stopped short at the sound, and he snorted again and shook his head.
Lance turned around and saw Kari, registering the terror in her eyes.
“Stay calm,” he said.
“Where’s the crack?” she said, glancing around and struggling to keep from hyperventilating.
“I don’t know.”
They looked for fissures in the ice, but they didn’t find any. Torden shifted back and forth and started to slip, and Kari struggled to calm him down.
“Keep moving,” said Lance.
She tugged at Torden’s reins and resumed walking, and Torden skittishly followed her, slipping and sliding on the ice. The more he lost his footing, the more panicked he became; Kari quickly went from struggling to keep him calm to merely holding onto the reins.
Lance picked up his pace and approached the opposite side of the river. Before he could reach it, he heard a loud crack somewhere to his right. Then he heard another crack somewhere to his left, and he watched in disbelief as a jagged split ran past him like a lightning bolt, fracturing the ice.
He turned back to Kari.
“Stay where you are,” he said.
She froze, and they waited, holding their breath. Seconds passed as slowly as hours, and for a brief moment, Kari thought the ice might actually hold. But then they heard another crack, and then another, even louder one, like a gunshot. Torden whinnied and rose up on his back feet, and as the ice collapsed beneath him, he sank past his hips and began struggling for purchase.
“Run!” shouted Kari.
Lance turned and bolted for the riverbank. Kari made a break for it as well, sidestepping a hole that opened in the fracturing ice, and then another, and another. Torden shrieked and whinnied as he thrashed about, trying to get his footing so he could continue on, but the more the ice broke beneath him, the more water flooded up, and they were all soon slipping and sliding in the shifting mess.
Lance reached the riverbank first and scrambled onto solid ground. He turned and looked back to see Kari approaching, struggling through the ice and water. Ten meters from reaching the edge of the river, her right foot plunged through the ice and she sank to her thigh. She struggled to pull her leg free, and after she finally managed to do so, she got back to her feet and continued on.
Just as Kari reached the bank of the river, Torden shrieked behind her, fifteen meters from shore. It was a horrible sound, like that of a person being eviscerated while alive. Kari looked back and saw that both of Torden’s back legs and the cart had broken through, and he was struggling to pull himself up onto a tilting shelf of ice, only to sink deeper and deeper into the frigid water. She took the rope off her shoulder and tied one end of it around her waist, then handed the rest of the coil to Lance.
“Tie this to a tree,” she said.
“Wait,” he said, reaching for her arm, but she was already back on the ice, stumbling toward the horse. After a few steps, Kari slipped off an ice shelf and plunged into the water. It was colder than anything she’d ever felt, and all the air left her lungs in an instant, as if a giant fist had squeezed her. She dog-paddled the rest of the way to Torden, who thrashed about in a panic, struggling to pull himself back onto the ice only to break it up even more. Once she finally reached him, he nearly kicked her in the face with a blow that would’ve killed her had it landed. She swam her way around him through the ice-choked water, giving him as wide a berth as possible so he couldn’t kick her or get tangled in the rope.
Kari patted Torden on the side of the neck when she reached him and whispered into his ear.
“Easy, boy,” she said to him. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He snorted and shook his head, but she kept patting him and started to sing a lullaby her mother had sung to her when she was a girl.
“Mamma tar meg på sitt fang,
danser med meg att og fram.
Danse så, med de små,
danse så, så skal barnet sove . . .”
Torden continued to thrash about in the frigid mess, so she sang the lullaby again, whispering it into his ear. By the time she finished, Torden was finally beginning to calm down. She took out the sheath knife she’d found in the cabin, holding it behind her back so Torden wouldn’t see it. Then she began to cut the lines of the harness that bound him to the cart.
Over on the riverbank, Lance wrapped the rope around a tree trunk and tied it fast. After she finished cutting the lines of the harness, Kari grabbed Torden by the mane and pulled herself up onto his back. He tried to buck her off, but she held on, and she signaled to Lance to start pulling them.
Lance dug his heels into the ground and tugged at the rope. Torden struggled to climb out of the water and onto the ice, but he only ended up breaking off another shelf and plunging back into the freezing river. He thrashed and brayed again, and Kari struggled to hold on.
“Keep pulling,” she said.
Lance wrapped the rope around his fists and pulled again, and Torden fought his way up and onto the ice. Again, it broke from his weight, but he managed to climb forward onto the next bit of ice, which also broke, and then the next bit, where the water was shallow enough for him to stand. Finally gaining some traction, Torden struggled forward on his own, fighting through the icy shallows and onto solid ground. Kari jumped down from Torden’s back and watched him clamber up the riverbank and out into a snow-covered field, kicking and thrashing like a bucking bronco.
Then she looked back at the river, and she watched her father’s cart disappear below the ice-choked surface of the water.
CHAPTER 8
Dark, heavy clouds loomed over the eastern mountains, swollen like sausages and ready to burst. A keening wind howled down from the hills, filing the snowdrifts smooth and erasing the bird tracks and deer sign. It was cold, stone-cracking cold, the kind of cold that hurt deep inside the lungs. The world seemed flattened, buried under a landslide of grey.
Sverre Hattestad rode his rusty bicycle off the paved country highway and onto an old dirt road. He struggled to grip the bicycle’s handlebars, his bare fingers numb from the cold. Strings of gluey snus dribble froze in his beard, and his yellow teeth rattled like wind chimes in a storm.
He turned off the dirt road and onto a narrow cart path. Though it’d been years since he’d been in the area, he still knew its roads and paths as if he’d never left. As a boy, he’d been a friend of Erling, Christian Jacobsen, and Hjalmar Prestrud; his family’s dairy farm was in between theirs, near a tributary of the Leksa. They’d gone to Sunday school together at the Hegra Church, and they’d spent their winters skiing and hunting grouse in the Skarvan Mountains. They’d been inseparable until a few bad summers had forced Sverre’s father to sell the farm that had been in the Hattestad family for six generations. After the family had moved to a small apartment in town, Sverre’s father left to work on the whaling ships up in Svalbard, and he never came back, leaving fourteen-year-old Sverre to take care of his mother and three sisters. Sverre dropped out of school and went to apprentice for a local baker, and the boys lost touch, eventually becoming strangers who didn’t even bother greeting in town.
The cart path dipped around a bend, then rose up a slight incline through the hillocked forest. Sverre pedaled as hard as he could, but the snow was deep and thick, forcing him to hop off the bicycle when it came to a s
tandstill. He push-started the bicycle and managed to pedal it a few more times before it came to another stop. Then he climbed down from the bicycle, racking with a fit of coughing, and pushed it onward, continuing on foot.
He left the cart path after passing the dirt road leading to the Prestrud farm and made his way through the darkening forest. Walking the bicycle through the woods took twice as long as walking it along the path, and it took twice as much energy, but the thought of seeing his family’s farm made his stomach turn. Once he was certain he was well past the property, and past the old apple orchard next to it where he used to read Captain Marryat novels and had his first kiss with Solveig Nielsen, he emerged from the forest and resumed pushing his bicycle along the path. Before long, he spotted the Dahlstrøm farmhouse in the distance. Even though it’d been decades since he’d seen it, it was exactly as he’d remembered.
Sverre leaned the bicycle against a tree and looked toward the farm. A flood of memories washed over him. Here were the birch trees they’d cut branches from to whittle arrows, and there was the granary where they’d hid their slingshots and bawdy French postcards; over there was the hayloft where they’d slept during the endless July nights, and at the edge of the forest was the old foot path that wound down to the lake, where they’d swum and fished for grayling and wild trout. Of all the boys in the valley, Erling had been Sverre’s closest friend; Sverre had followed Erling around like a dog, even though they were the same age. Whereas he was slight and weak, Erling was strong and rugged; while he was nervous and insecure, Erling was confident and liked by all. Sverre had looked up to Erling as if he was his older brother, which had made Erling’s abandonment of him even more painful than the rest.
He made his way to the rear of the farmhouse, staying close to the tree line and its long shadows. If they were indeed harboring the downed pilot, he first needed proof. The last thing he wanted to do was to lose favor with the Germans; despite disagreeing with their politics, he saw them as his only hope of getting another chance, since no one in Hegra would even look at him. He could live with himself ignoring some of the Nazis’ excessive ways and means; living hand to mouth any longer seemed like a far more unpalatable fate.
Sverre left the tree line when he reached the back of the farmhouse and crept his way toward the cellar door. He looked up at the rusty chimney on the farmhouse’s slanting roof; no smoke rose from it, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone inside. If anything, if they were hiding someone, he figured, they’d go out of their way to seem like they weren’t.
He made his way toward a window, advancing at an angle in case anyone was standing near it. Then he slowly peered in, but there was nothing to see—the kitchen and living room were both empty. He walked around the house, looking inside each window more openly than the last. He didn’t see anyone, though, nor any lamps or fires, despite it being past the hour most families retired.
Before long, Sverre reached the point he’d started from, noticing that his own halting footprints were the only ones marring the snow. If the snow had started falling midday, he presumed, then it appeared that no one had been there since morning. He left the house and walked toward the barn, feeling more confident that his suspicions were valid. Where else would they be, at this time of day? he wondered. It didn’t seem likely they were still in town, with the curfew in effect, and there weren’t any reasons to be visiting anyone overnight, especially without leaving someone to watch over their stock.
He began to walk with a spring in his step, and he hardly noticed the hunger that gnawed at his stomach, or the grinding pain of his gout. He fantasized about meeting with the local Waffen-SS head, who would be so appreciative that he’d return the family farm to Sverre, or perhaps put him in charge of one of the paper mills out by the Åsenfjord. He envisioned himself wearing a new suit, and moving out of that louse-filled boarding house behind the train station; he imagined twirling out a fat stack of money from his pockets and paying for plates of fist-sized meatballs with gravy and red whortleberries at the Vertshuset Tavern in Trondheim, following them with a bottle of single malt scotch and a fat cigar.
Sverre confidently approached the barn. Once he reached it, he looked inside, but all he saw were sheep. He slid open the door, and a few lambs squeezed through the slats of the holding pen and approached him, nosing at his pockets for food. The rest of the sheep clustered in their pens and bleated at him, restless and hungry, and behind them, the horse stalls were empty. There was no sign of the pilot anywhere.
His spirits sank, and his fantasy came crashing to a halt. He turned and left the barn, shooing the lambs out of his way and closing the door behind him. Had he just imagined seeing Erling? he wondered. He quickly shook the thought from his mind and made his way around to the other side of the barn, nearly falling over when he spotted a rectangular, cart-shaped patch of earth, covered only by the recent snowfall. A set of hoof prints led away from the patch, followed by a pair of deep wheel tracks, which Sverre assumed had been made by a cart.
Following the tracks were a smaller pair of hoof prints, which looked like they belonged to a mule.
CHAPTER 9
An icy mixture of sleet and hail fell in gobs and spatters. The bitter winds made it come sideways and slanting, roundabout and indirect. It was colder than snow and stung like buckshot when it hit the skin, and it lacquered the world with a transparent layer, hardening to ice as the sun set.
Kari and Lance picked up the road on the other side of the river and followed it for a while, riding double through an open valley. Lance sat in front, casually holding Torden’s reins. Kari sat behind him with her arms around his waist, shivering in her wet clothes. She buried her face in the back of his coat, breathing in the rich scents of his cigarettes, hair wax, and sweat.
They soon left the valley and made their way into the hills. In the distance, they could see snow on the blue mountain ranges to the north. To the east, there were even more white-capped mountains, a long line of them stretching as far as the eye could see. The horizon looked like the open mouth of a shark, with row upon row of jagged white peaks.
After riding through the forest for a while, they left the road and pushed Torden up a hill. Kari had to hold on tightly as they ascended, and she could feel Lance’s taut muscles through the coat. Her heartbeat accelerated, and in the quiet of the forest, she became aware of the sound of her own breathing. She noticed her father’s scent in the coat as well, and she felt guilty for a moment, but she quickly shook the thought from her mind as they continued on their way.
They soon crested the hill and made their way toward a small clearing. Lance glanced behind him as they reached it and saw that it couldn’t be seen from the road. He pulled up on the reins and dismounted, then helped Kari down from the horse. When she no longer had him to hold onto, the cold finally caught up to her, and her teeth chattered so much that she could taste the enamel.
Lance tied the horse to a nearby tree and cleared a section of snow from the frozen earth. Then he built a crude fireplace out of rocks and stones. He gathered some birch bark and pine needles from the surrounding area, cut them into tinder, and covered them with broken branches. Then he lit it with his Zippo and took a step back, watching as the small flames spread and took hold in the frozen wood.
Kari walked stiff-legged toward the fire and stood as close to it as she could without burning herself. Without saying a word, Lance went into the forest to gather more wood. He came back after a moment with an armful of snow-crusted logs, the driest-looking of which he carefully placed in the center of the fire. He stacked the rest of them next to the ring of stones before nodding toward Kari’s wet clothes.
“Better get out of those before you catch cold,” he said.
She hesitated, part of her wanting to, but another part of her afraid. Sensing her uncertainty, he continued.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m a gentleman.”
Before she could reply, he turned his back to her, then cut a green br
anch from a tree and began to scrape off its bark with his knife. After a long moment, she started to remove her clothing. She took off her jacket, then her sweater, and then her boots and trousers, hanging them by the fire to dry. She hesitated for another moment before removing her long underwear as well, struggling to do so with trembling fingers.
Kari slowly approached the fire, holding her hands out in front of her to warm them but also to be ready to cover herself if Lance turned around. Naked, in the fading dusk light, she was so pale that she almost seemed invisible, blending into the snow. Her heart thudded in her chest, and it became difficult for her to breathe. She’d never been naked in front of a man, least of all a handsome American pilot, and it felt both terrifying and exhilarating. Goose bumps spread across her stomach and limbs, and a warm, queasy feeling grew at the pit of her stomach.
After a moment, Lance spoke without turning around, his words startling her.
“That was quite a show back there,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d have risked my neck for a horse.”
“We’ve had him since I was a kid,” she replied, out of instinct.
“We?”
She inwardly cursed herself, realizing her mistake.
“I mean, the people in the valley,” she said, her voice wavering. “My family used to borrow him every now and then. We didn’t have our own.”
“Where’s your family now?” he asked.
She hesitated.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked—”
She interrupted him.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“Sometimes I forget there’s a war going on,” he said.
She didn’t reply, and an awkward silence passed. She felt bad for lying to him, even if only by omission, but she knew he wouldn’t be with her if she’d been telling him the truth. The silence soon became unbearable, so she finally broke it.
Land of Hidden Fires Page 5