Wolf Winter

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  The man spat on the ground and drove the axe into the block. As he walked away, his hips were stiff, as if he had to will each leg to lift. Maija took a few steps until she was standing by the chopping block. A personal thing, a chopping block. A man needed to pick one with care. This man’s was long used. You could no longer see the year-rings of the tree, so destroyed was its surface with gashes. It resembled their own back home. Their new one here was still clean and white.

  He returned, holding a pack. In his other hand was a rifle. He began to walk, and she assumed she was supposed to follow.

  “Has something like this happened before?” she asked his back, breath in her throat.

  He didn’t respond. She kept her distance. He ought to have asked about her, her husband, their origins, but he didn’t. Above them the head of Blackåsen Mountain was round and soft—a loaf of bread on a tray in the sunshine.

  The yard they came to at the mountain’s north base was as disordered as the first man’s had been tidy. Tools were scattered over the ground, a mound of planks lay along one side of the cottage, and laundry hung on a sagging clothesline. A sheep was in the garden patch eating the weeds. There was a lethargy to it all that didn’t fit with long-term survival.

  A blond man came out on the porch. He was thin and his shoulders narrow. His hair grew in a crest like a fowl’s.

  The man beside Maija tensed. They don’t know each other, Maija thought. Or they know each other and they don’t like each other. He tilted his head toward her and the scar pulled his mouth large and diagonal as he spoke. “A body on the mountain.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Don’t know. Perhaps bring your eldest.”

  The blond man opened the cottage door and said something into the opening. He was joined on the porch by a younger version of himself: the same blond wave of hair, the same bony figure, hands like large lids by his thighs.

  “What did you see?” the man said. There was a grayness to his skin even though he couldn’t have been more than ten years her senior. His son had a surly look on his face. Older than Frederika, perhaps sixteen–seventeen.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “My daughters found him.”

  The man was still looking at her.

  “I am Maija,” she said.

  “Henrik,” he said.

  “And who did I come here with?”

  “That,” he said, staring at the back of the man who had already begun to walk away, “is Gustav.”

  Henrik nodded for Maija to pass ahead of him.

  “How are your daughters doing?” he asked.

  “They’ll be fine.”

  Dorotea was still little. She would forget. And Frederika was strong.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Teppo Eronen is my husband’s uncle. He traded us his homestead for ours.”

  “Oh,” Henrik said, with a tone that made her want to turn around to see his face.

  “Well, Eronen’s land is good,” he added after a while. “It’s better on the south side of the mountain than here. You’ll have more sun.”

  The shadow side of the mountain was full of thicket underneath the spruce trees. The ground was cool and the grass, wet. Maija pressed each foot down hard so as not to slip. Her breathing was rapid. Beneath them the river trailed all of the north side of the mountain and beyond, flexed through the green like a black muscle, or a snake. A snake shooting for the blue mountain chain at the horizon.

  She didn’t know what they might find at the top of the mountain. Frederika hadn’t made much sense. But she had cried. Frederika didn’t often cry.

  “I thought the girls could take the goats to that glade close to the summit,” she said, as if to explain.

  “There is the marsh too,” Henrik’s son said. “But she’s treacherous. Better not send girls there.”

  When they reached the summit, she hesitated. Henrik passed her. His son made as if to pass her as well, but she shook her head and walked ahead of him, in.

  The glade was basking in color and light. And then she saw the man for herself.

  He was ripped from throat to genitals, the body split apart, turned inside out, shaken until what was within had collapsed and fallen out on the ground.

  Behind her, Henrik’s son moaned.

  “Eriksson,” Henrik said.

  Gustav walked to the body and knelt down.

  Maija took a step to the side, her hand searching in the air for a tree trunk—something, anything.

  When she looked back, Gustav’s hand was on the body. “Bear,” he said. “Or wolf.”

  “Bear?” Maija asked.

  But what kind of a monster would it take to do this?

  “We’ll take the body to the widow,” Gustav said.

  Maija thought of Dorotea, her bony chest and pouting belly, her shape still that of a baby. She thought of Frederika, the bulging vein at the base of her neck where the skin was so thin it was clear, the blue tick making her feel both joyful and frightened. Half an hour, she thought. Half an hour’s walk at most to their cottage.

  “We need to track it,” she said.

  The men turned to her.

  “We can’t have a killer bear on the loose.”

  Henrik looked to Gustav.

  Gustav rose. “Fine,” he said, his mouth a twisted, black hole.

  But he had shrugged.

  “I’ll come with you,” Maija said.

  “There is no need.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “Fine.”

  “Eriksson,” Henrik’s son said. “The mountain took him.”

  “What do you mean?” Maija asked.

  There was a sheen on his upper lip as his blue eyes jumped from his father to her. “The mountain is bad,” he said.

  Gustav bent to open his leather satchel and took out a piece of canvas and ropes. He spread the sheet on the ground beside the body and sat on his heels. Henrik squatted beside him. After a brief hesitation, she did the same. The boy remained standing.

  The three of them rolled the body onto the cloth. Heavy and spumey, it crawled and came undone in their hands. Behind her the boy dry-heaved. Maija focused onto the rim of Gustav’s hat, let her hands work without looking.

  “We’ll wait for you at Eronen’s old homestead,” Henrik said. A quick glance at Maija. “At your homestead,” he corrected himself.

  He pushed his son to get him moving, and the two of them wired the ropes around their wrists and lifted. They became a flicker between tree trunks before they vanished.

  Gustav hunched down. He poked with a twig in the squashed grass. Then he rose and walked over to some mountain carnations at the side of the glade. He moved the tiny purple flowers with their black stems and emerald blades aside to look at the silvery moss beneath. At once their strong perfume was in the air, tangled with the smell of rot.

  The tracks led them west down Blackåsen Mountain. At the foot of the mountain was marshland, black water, green spongy tufts.

  Maija stepped on it, and water welled up around her shoe, and—she waited—yes, there it was through the leather, cool between her toes, filtering up and down, becoming warm. She tried to put her feet in Gustav’s footsteps. The ground smacked each time she lifted a foot. This was the kind of land that didn’t know how to let go.

  “Walk close to the trees,” Gustav said without turning around.

  She did as he said. Kept so close her side scraped the bark. Felt their roots under her feet in all the other that yielded. The marsh water was not always black. Sometimes it wore a large sheet of silver. Sometimes it mirrored what was above. Then the sun came out and it pretended to be blue.

  On the other side of the swamp the ground was dry, rosy with Lapp heather.

  “Why did the boy say the mountain took him?” she asked.

  Gustav bent down to study the twigs on the ground.

  The sun edged over the sky. The heat changed and the air became tight. It pressed two thumbs against her temples. She would get a he
adache. At this time of year light won over time. Only the change in sounds and the detachment of the sun told her that evening had fallen, and then when night had come.

  “Are the tracks easy to follow?” she asked.

  Gustav stopped. He waited so long before answering she assumed he wouldn’t.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “He’s not trying to hide.”

  “How long ago?”

  “The tracks are a few days old.”

  He rubbed his chin. “We’ll stop here,” he said. “The beast is long gone.”

  Yet they stood for a while and stared in among the trees before them.

  When they turned around, clouds were building a stack at the horizon. There would be a storm. Milk-blue and sickly yellow, the clouds swelled and stirred, like unfinished business.

  “I hate this,” the priest said out loud.

  He kicked at a tree, and a branch swung and smacked him on his bare leg under the cloak. “Good Lord in heaven,” he said.

  He didn’t say anything more. It was his one chance that God or the bishop would have mercy on him and return him south. He had to be careful.

  Here he was, roaming the forests to make sure the settlers’ names and those of their spawn were registered in the Church Book. The region had a town, at least in name. Surely newcomers ought to think to go there before they set out to make their mark on the wilderness. And thinking you could make a mark on these wastelands—preposterous.

  He was overcome by a yawn and felt how tired he was. It was most likely evening—impossible to tell time with all this light. He chose a large spruce tree and crawled on all fours in beneath it, wrapped his cloak closer, listened to the ticking and croaking in the forest and didn’t like it. He should have known to dress better. Summer here was summer only in name. Though the cool weather meant fewer mosquitoes. He could pretend he had not heard of the new settler family on their way to Eronen’s old homestead, he thought. There was an owl’s call, and he tensed. Nothing more.

  Better to think of singing stone towers. Of natives in bright wide trousers and turbans shuffling around them in pointed shoes. Of dinner conversations with the young King that could at any point end with their horses racing down roads gleaming in the moonlight. “I dare you.” “You dare me?” As the court priest, he had been invincible, or so he’d thought. But he had paid for thinking thus. The Church had seen to that.

  There was a violent cracking of branches. The priest sat up, his back pressed against the tree. Something tore through the forest before him. There was a rumbling growl and a black shape between the trunks, then silence.

  An animal.

  He must have fallen asleep.

  Elk?

  No, it ran too fast.

  When all had been silent for a long time, he stood up. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep more, so he might as well continue his journey. He glanced over his shoulder twice as he walked, but there were only trees.

  At a bend in the river he became uncertain of the way and slowed down. He had been at Blackåsen one time only for the Catechetical meeting—pointless affair—the peasants dressed in their best rags, hair combed with sugar water, ears scrubbed hot and red. Him noting in the Church Book while focusing on producing beautiful handwriting: Some reasoning, Lazy, Weak intelligence. He couldn’t remember having passed this place. Here, the river had slowed. It more resembled a tarn than something that was alive and flowing. There was an islet just by the shore, covered with shrubs. The water was murky, yet the outline of the islet seemed to descend and descend. He hadn’t realized the river was this deep. The base of the atoll appeared made out of leaves. One single leaf drifted in the water, just underneath the surface. It orbited around itself in the dark, as if ensnared.

  He stepped backward.

  But the lake was behind him, the mountain was still ahead. It must be this way, he thought, it couldn’t be far.

  The small house the settlers called Eronen’s lay dark in the middle of the empty yard. For all the priest knew, it might still be night. The air smelled of mud, nettles, and … he couldn’t remember the name of the tall crimson flowers, but he could see the sticky milk inside their stems tarnishing his cloak. Then there were voices, strands of words in the air, coming from up by the outbuilding.

  On stones, their outlines dark blocks in the faint light, sat three men. A fourth man was standing up and, beside him, a woman. At first they didn’t hear him. Then, at once, the five lifted their heads. The men got to their feet and removed their hats. Henrik, one of his sons, and the other one, the one who kept to himself, who had a limp—Gustav. The new settler was thick and slow. The woman stood without moving.

  “What’s this?” the priest said. “A little parish meeting?”

  “No, no,” Henrik said. “Not without you.”

  “I am the priest,” he said to the newcomers, “your priest, Olaus Arosander. I have come to register you.” He found he was speaking to the woman. She was small, but her chin was lifted. Though young, her hair was a blonde gray or white, but that could have been the light. Beside her the new man’s hat was going round in his hands. Round and round.

  “Eriksson is dead,” Henrik said.

  The priest stopped sharp. “Eriksson?”

  “We found him on top of the mountain,” Henrik said, “by the Goat’s Pass.”

  The priest felt his insides fall, fall from the top of the mountain and all the way down. He felt giddy. Then unwell.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Bear,” Gustav said. “Perhaps wolf. Tracks were old. We have been out all night.”

  The woman was staring at Gustav. “It’s unusual,” she said, “for bear or wolf to attack. Especially during summer.”

  “Land isn’t giving,” Gustav said. “Predators too are starved.”

  “What did you do?” the priest asked. “I mean, where is he now?”

  “We took him to Elin,” Henrik said.

  “She was in the yard waiting for us,” his son said.

  The new settler stirred. “What do you mean? She knew?”

  “There have been problems with Elin,” the boy said.

  “That’s your mother talking,” Henrik said.

  Father and son stared at each other.

  “What do we do now?” the woman asked.

  “Whatever you used to do,” Gustav said. Without saying good-bye, he set off down the yard.

  As the priest followed the newcomers toward the house, he heard things insist and stir in the tall grass and from the barn. Morning was coming.

  He sat down on the bench inside the kitchen, took his black book from his satchel, and put it on the table in front of him. He found the ink and the pen, wet his fingers, and touched its tip. They stood in a half-circle before him. Both daughters had their mother’s large gray eyes and blonde hair. They had their father’s round cheeks, though, and the same solemnity—something knotted about their mouths.

  “I will need your names. You are all baptized, of course?”

  The man nodded.

  “My name is Maija,” the woman said. “My father’s name was Harmaajärvi. This is my husband, Paavo Ranta. And this is Frederika and Dorotea.” She touched each daughter’s shoulder in turn.

  The priest wrote the names with large letters.

  “Dates of birth?”

  Again it was the woman who answered: “Me, January 1680, Paavo in August the same year. Frederika was fourteen this March, and Dorotea, six in April.”

  “From?”

  “Ostrobothnia. In Finland. All of us.”

  Finns. Of course. He saw it now—the pale complexion, the profusion of moles. “F-i-n-n-s,” he spelled aloud. “These are your offspring?”

  “Yes,” she said—the Finn woman.

  “And you will farm this land?”

  “Yes,” she said again. “Though I am earth-woman by training—midwife. I might be able to help the women here in their difficult times.”

  The priest noted it down, clos
ed the Church Book, and placed it on the table in front of him. The Finn woman nodded, and her older daughter put a pan on the fire. The man handed the priest a ladle filled with water.

  He drank until it was empty.

  So Eriksson was dead.

  The first time the priest had met Eriksson was on Blackåsen’s marsh, the autumn after the priest’s arrival. The pine forest south was on fire, crackling with a smell of burning wood, millions of angry orange sparks in black smoke hurtling toward the sky. The priest had turned to run, and Eriksson was in front of him. “I’m clearing land,” he said.

  “It’s forbidden,” the priest said.

  “Don’t get close then.”

  That was what he had been like, Eriksson. No respect. Sometimes God did take the right people.

  The kitchen sizzled and smelled of fried butter and grayling. The priest’s stomach rumbled.

  And at once he remembered his sudden awakening, the animal tearing through the forest. How did a bear kill a man? Strike him? Bite him? He found himself shuddering. He didn’t really want to know.

  The Finn woman put a plate in front of him. Fish. She cut a thick piece of bread and covered it with yellow butter and gave it to him. He nodded to her, thank you.

  He grabbed the fish with both hands, bit into its side, and tasted salt and charcoal. The bread was proper bread with no additions of bark or haulm.

  When he had finished, he leaned back. They had rinsed the walls, scrubbed the floor with birch twigs so its wood was white. There were fresh rags around the windows.

  “What will happen now?” the Finn woman asked.

  She sat down opposite him. The mounting light that came in through the window turned her blonde tendrils into the gold Crown of the Righteous. “Will you go and see her now? The widow?”

  He took a cloth from his pocket and wiped his mouth. “Of course,” he said, biting down around the words.

  “Then I’ll come with you,” she said. “She might need the company of another woman.”

  The air was cold, but the priest was soaked with sweat. His cloak caught on twigs and branches. Elin would bury the body of her husband in a temporary grave. The coffin would be dug up and sent to him for its proper burial in the graveyard in town in October or November, when the snow allowed for transport. This whole venture was unwarranted. He should have just said no. He stepped wrong and imagined the Finn woman sneering behind him. He slowed down until they were level, and they continued in silence on the trail.