Wolf Winter

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  He laughed. It was sudden and hearty, a very loud sound. When he laughed he wasn’t beautiful, but … striking. The kind of person you’d want to please, and not only out of fear. You’d never have forgotten meeting Eriksson, she thought, even when he was alive.

  “I don’t have any illusions there,” he said. He fell serious. “The second time you saw her, Elin wasn’t just changed. She was destroyed. What destroys a person?”

  Frederika shook her head.

  He moaned and tapped his head with the heel of his hand. “Think.”

  She frowned. Lots of things could destroy someone.

  “She’d found something out,” Eriksson said, and then he was gone.

  Hopeless, the priest thought, late that afternoon. He tried to get his strides to hook into one another like he’d seen others do, but his skis refused. The strides came separately and in spurts. He focused. One-Two. One-Two.

  No. No matter how he tried, this wasn’t one smooth act but several at once. Flakes poured through the air; small, but peppery. The priest bent his head and shuffled forward. The verger had told him that the Lapp winter camp was close by, somewhere beyond the marshlands west of Blackåsen. The priest had never before visited the Lapps during winter. He’d have to stay in one of those cots they lived in—thick branches standing in the snow, forked together at the top and clad with reindeer skins.

  He must have taken a wrong turn, for before him lay the river, the frozen waterway a white ribbon tied around blue land. The verger had told him not to venture out on any stretches of ice. “They are not yet solid,” he’d said. Further down steam rose from open black water. The priest’s legs felt weak. It had been a long time since he’d had any strenuous physical exercise. He admired the view until the cold of his frozen clothes clutched at his body and he became aware of the sound of his breath inside his hat. He had to get going again.

  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.

  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.