The Year of the Hare

by Arto Paasilinna

  Vatanen felt his stomach. He was seeing pink and white stars, and his stomach was wet. Had it disemboweled him? Horror! He reached for his gun, crouched out into the yard, and fired into the darkness. The bear had fled. The moon was shining.

  He went back inside, lit a lantern, and examined his stomach. It was slippery with blood and bear slobber, but nothing lethal, it seemed. The bear had bitten experimentally; actually, it was more of a nip. He was not disemboweled.

  The hare was limping. The bear must have stepped on it accidentally, for if it had struck a blow, the hare would undoubtedly have been smashed to a pulp against the wall.

  Vatanen kicked the remains of the table against the wall, nailed a blanket across the window, and bandaged a sheet around his stomach. The wound ached: the bear had lacerated him enough for that.

  He picked the hare up and hugged it, stroked its innocent white coat, and promised: “Before dawn tomorrow, I’ll be following that bear’s tracks. Its time has come.”

  The hare’s sensitive white whiskers trembled earnestly. It looked as though it agreed: the bear had to be killed! A hare was thirsting after a bear’s blood!

  22

  The White Sea

  The moon set. Vatanen stuffed his knapsack with several days’ provisions, thrust twenty cartridges into the flap-pocket, loaded his gun, and sharpened his ax. He took along five packs of cigarettes for good measure, some matches, and some ski wax. To the hare he said: “You’ll come along, too, won’t you?” He left a note on the table: I’m off after a bear. May be gone a few days.—Vatanen

  He closed the bunkhouse door behind him, waxed his skis, put them on, and shouldered his knapsack and his gun. There were bear tracks all over the place, but in spite of the dark he identified fresh tracks farther out, showing the bear leaving at a high trot. He pushed off on their trail; the snow was pretty firm under his skis.

  “Now, Mr. Bloody Bear, we’ll see.”

  The tracks led across the gorge itself. Vatanen skied off at a strong and even pace; his back began to sweat under the pressure of the knapsack. The hare limped along at his side.

  The March sun rose into a brilliant sky. The air was exhilaratingly crisp; the snow squeaked as the sticks prodded; skiing conditions were excellent. He relished the motion and the glittering snow—so bright in the rising sun, it made his forehead ache if he opened his eyes wide.

  The tracks showed that the bear had calmed down: probably it felt it had escaped. Vatanen speeded up: he might well catch up with his quarry.

  In the afternoon, he swooped into a thick grove of spruce and saw that the bear had been lying down there. It may have heard the skis coming and taken to its heels. More skiing, this meant, perhaps many days of it before he caught up with the beast, if then. Fortunately, the snow gave way under the bear more than under the skier.

  He came to an open sweep of marshland, where the tracks led south. Across a prospect of six or seven miles he glimpsed his quarry: the bear was a little black dot slinking into snowy forest at the far side. That spurred him on. Thrusting hard, he flew across the flats.

  The sun went down. Where the underlying growth was thickest, the tracks were hard to make out. It was time to stop and eat. He felled a large dead tree and made a fire from the top branches; he fried some reindeer meat in his pan, drank some tea, and slept for a few hours. When he woke, the moon had risen in a perfectly clear sky; it was possible to follow the tracks again.

  The brilliant night and snowy Lapland wilderness had a cruel beauty. It was too exciting for Vatanen to feel fatigue. Sweat froze on his back as the frost took hold. His lashes froze, clogging his eyes; he had to take off a glove from time to time and melt the clots with his hand. Occasionally the hare started nibbling edible bits from brookside osier bushes. “Careful! Don’t get left behind,” Vatanen warned. “This is no time to eat.”

  Twice the bear had lain down: it must be tiring. But each time, it had evidently heard the skis through the crisp night air and had made off. Now it was heading southeast. In a single day they’d crossed the Tanhua road; now they were approaching the great northeastern wilderness, with its fells. They’d been over many rivers that night; at one point the snow had melted and the bear had drunk the ice-cold water. Vatanen bypassed the spot carefully: it would have been death to ski inadvertently into the icy black water.

  The moon set; it was dark; he had to stop. He made a fire and slept in its warmth. The hare nibbled a little and then dropped off to sleep, too.

  When the sun rose, Vatanen set off again. They were somewhere in the desolate wilderness west of the tiny hamlet of Martti. Now, he figured out, they must be heading toward the parish of Savukoski. The bear seemed to be running straight to the little village itself. Soon they should hit the highway; and soon there it was, the road. The bear had crossed the Savukoski-Martti road about halfway between the two villages. The ridges thrown up by the snowplows had exasperated the beast: it had torn up the road sign as it went by and bent it over like a twig, a sort of message to Vatanen: “Human, I’ve still got all my power. Keep away!”

  But Vatanen continued his pursuit.

  In the afternoon, the sun turned the snow slushy. It began to stick to the skis, and the going became all huffing and puffing. The tracks in the snow were fresh, but progress was beginning to seem hopeless. Snow caked the skis to the point where he had to stop.

  The snow didn’t harden till evening. Then Vatanen skied a couple of hours, but it became too dark to see: this night the moon wasn’t visible. He had to spend the night by his campfire. He guessed he was already in the parish of Salla, at most twenty-odd miles from the Soviet frontier. The hare was tired out, but it didn’t complain; it never did. Vatanen felled an aspen sapling and split the bark with his ax. The hare ate and then collapsed into sleep, legs stretched, warming its belly in the fire’s circle of light. Never before had the hare seemed so tired.

  “I wonder if the pace is as punishing for the bear?”

  As soon as there was light enough to see the tracks again, Vatanen continued his pursuit. The knapsack was lightweight, the food finished. Now he was in a hurry: the bear had to be killed before it reached the Soviet frontier. The trail was leading through the northern regions of the Tenniönjoki River Valley toward the hamlet of Naruska, he estimated. He’d skied off the limits of his maps a few days earlier; now he had to rely on his memory of the overall map of Finland. The village of Salla itself, he knew, was a mere twelve miles from the border.

  It was a dragging, grueling day.

  By evening, he was just south of Karhuntunturi—“Bear Fell”! He gave up the trail and took the road to a village, so tired he had a fall on the slippery, snowplowed road. Children came out of the hamlet to meet him, and they all greeted him, for it’s the custom in the north for children to greet adults. He asked where the shop was.

  But the shop had closed down long ago. A mobile shop drove up twice a week. Vatanen took off his skis and stopped at the house next to the old shop. The man of the house was having a meal in the living room; his wife was peeling hot potatoes near the stove and bringing them to her husband one at a time.

  An exhausted man looks, in a way, alarming, and yet not an immediate threat. He has rights in the north, which people observe with an intuitive discretion. The host gestured to the chair beside him and invited Vatanen to eat.

  Vatanen did eat. He was so tired the spoon shook to the beat of his heart. He’d forgotten to take off his cap. The reindeer stew was delicious and substantial. He ate the entire helping.

  “So when does the mobile shop come?” he asked.

  “Be here tomorrow.”

  “I’m in a rush. You couldn’t let me have a few days’ food yourself, could you?”

  “Where’d you ski from?”

  “From Sompio. Läähkimä Gorge.”

  “Is it a wolverine you’re after?”

  “Something of the sort.”

  The children came in and started a ruckus. The host ordered them
out and took Vatanen to a bedroom. He drew back the coverlet from a double bed and told Vatanen to get some sleep. Vatanen could hear him instructing his wife in the living room: “Put four days’ food in a bag and tell the children to be quiet out there. I’ll wake him in a little while.”

  A couple of hours later, Vatanen came to without anyone’s waking him. He realized he’d been sleeping on top of the sheets, fully clothed, with his boots on. In the living room the children were stroking the hare. When they saw Vatanen was awake, they began chattering.

  Vatanen put some money on the table, but the host handed it back. They went outside. He felt stiff; his stomach was hurting.

  “You don’t have any boric acid, do you?”

  “Leena, go and get some antiseptic from your mother.”

  The girl ran in and came out again with a bottle. Vatanen undid his trousers, and his host saw the tooth-marks.

  “A hellish big mouth it had!”

  The host dressed the inflamed bite with the antiseptic and wound gauze around Vatanen’s stomach two or three times. Then Vatanen set off to pick up the trail again. From the edge of the forest he called back: “Is this Kotala or Naruska?”

  “This is Naruska!”

  Soon he found the trail, and the hunt was on again.

  He could see that the bear was tired and in a fury: it had been slashing trees that were in its way with its claws, and bashed down several dead trees; chips of wood had been flying around everywhere. Was the bear, Vatanen wondered, going to disappear over the frontier?

  “But nothing’ll save you now, mister. No use defecting to a great power.”

  Overnight, a freezing wind blew in. The clouds allowed only occasional glimpses of the moon. He was forced to stop for hours. By morning, the wind had swept the tracks clean: he had to ski hither and thither before he located some fresh tracks among the snow.

  How many days was it now? It no longer mattered.

  He pushed the worn-out hare into his knapsack and set off again. Snow was falling more and more heavily, and it became a storm. In the whirl it was difficult to see the tracks, even though they were fresh. If he stopped the pursuit now, he knew, the whole trip would be a flop. His stomach was hurting him; the gauze had slipped down to his groin, but he couldn’t afford the time to adjust it.

  The tracks climbed a plateau. Here the wind was strong enough to bowl the sweating man over, but he soldiered on. He had to! Now his eyes, he noticed, seemed to be failing him. Was he getting snow-blind after all the days and days of staring at tracks? More than likely.

  “But you won’t escape my claws, you devil!”

  It was dreadful weather: the storm kept him from seeing more than a yard or two ahead. Mechanically, he traced the powdering-over tracks. Gone was that joy he’d felt at the start. All day long the storm raged. He was no longer sure which way he was going, but he fastened on to the tracks like a leech. As he went, he occasionally sucked on some Naruska pork fat, now frozen solid, or clawed some of the snow stuck to his shoulders to quench his thirst. Then, suddenly, the tracks dropped out of the forest to the snowplowed road. The bear had gotten so tired, it had taken to running along the highway.

  It had been skidding on the icy surface: there were great claw marks in the blowing snow. Vatanen shuddered. An icy chill went down his spine.

  He came to a crossroads, with signposts. Excellent! Now he could find out where he was.

  He stopped and, leaning heavily on his ski poles, began peering at the signs. But he didn’t understand the language.

  He’d skied across the border into Soviet Russia. The signposts were Russian, in Cyrillic script. The surprise made sweat break out on his brow.

  Should he turn back now? Should he report to the Soviet authorities?

  “So this is where we are, damnit!”

  His indecision at the crossroads was brief. He pushed off again in pursuit, skiing doggedly till evening, when he did get a glimpse of his quarry; but then darkness covered the beast. Again he felled a pine, made a campfire, and settled down for the night, his first in Soviet territory. Ahead of him were the immeasurable forest wildernesses of the Kola Peninsula and the White Sea: they’d test his mettle.

  The next day, the weather improved a little, and Vatanen charged along like a mad bull. He crossed several large roads, with the bear tending eastward and showing no sign of ever turning westward. From the south, a supersonic aircraft sped overhead, off to Murmansk. He had to stop and look at the glittering-winged, faster-than-sound projectile. It made a deep impact on an exhausted skier: what disparate modes of transport human beings had!

  The bear was avoiding villages and making its way through the deserted places. Vatanen didn’t encounter a single soul but did cross several ski tracks in the wilderness. Could his violation of the frontier have passed unobserved? Possibly: in the storm, Vatanen himself hadn’t noticed the boundary. Talk of an iron curtain was evidently misplaced: there hadn’t been a single strand of barbed wire to snag his skis.

  His food had run out two days earlier, but the hunt went on. He came to a hamlet. The bear had slept the night in the ruin of a stone building, apparently an old salt factory, Vatanen concluded. That meant they were getting close to the sea: the White Sea.

  He suddenly emerged onto the Murmansk railroad tracks. His skis clanked in the frosty air as he made his way over the many pairs of rails. The track was electrified—which called for caution as he hurried by.

  His only nourishment was some pork rind he’d boiled the previous evening. He was hungry, but nothing except the bear mattered to him now.

  And then—he came to the seashore. The bear was dashing out onto the ice; far out, a black icebreaker had several small cargo ships trailing in its channel.

  The bear was scudding across the ice of the Kandalaksha Gulf, with Vatanen in hot pursuit. A few miles north, the factory chimneys of Kandalaksha were staining the clear, frosty sky. The bear, with Vatanen after it, loped up to the icebreaker’s channel; the last battle of this fearsome trek was being waged on the dazzlingly immaculate ice of the White Sea.

  The bear rose on its hind legs at the edge of the channel. It gave a howl and a roar; the brilliant white neck-band in its black coat flashed in the sun. The bear turned on its pursuer, bellowing outrage and hatred. Vatanen took off his skis; he lay prone on the ice, melted the rime on the rifle with his thumb, released the safety catch, and shot the bear right in the chest.

  The great bear collapsed on the ice: no second shot was needed. Vatanen crawled up to the bear, opened its gullet, and let the blood flow out, black and clotted. He cupped his hands and supped two handfuls. Then he sat on the huge carcass and lit a cigarette, his last. He wept; he didn’t know why, but the tears came. He stroked the bear’s fur, stroked his hare, which was lying in his knapsack with its eyes closed.

  Two large airplanes landed on the ice, and soldiers leaped out. About twenty men came over to Vatanen, and one of them addressed him in the Russianized Soviet Karelian Finnish dialect: “So, well, comrade, you got it! On behalf Red Army, congratulations! Now I arrest you as spy. But no worry—this formality. Have drink.”

  A burning-cold swig of vodka took the tears from Vatanen’s eyes. He introduced himself and said: “Excuse me for crossing the border, but otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten this bear.”

  “Well! Comrade, excused! Some ski trip! Now, into plane. These men skin bear. You bringing this hare with you?”

  They embarked, and the aircraft left the ice. A few minutes later, it landed on a mainland airstrip.

  “Well! First sauna, then sleep. Interrogation tomorrow.”

  23

  In Government Hands

  Vatanen and the hare were held in custody in the Karelian ASSR for two months. During this period, Vatanen was interrogated several times and probed for information about Finland. It emerged that the Soviet frontier troops had tracked his crossing of the frontier and kept his ski journey under continuous observation day by day as far as the White Se
a.

  Vatanen had been mentioned on Karelian ASSR radio. The Karelian ASSR News interviewed him, and photographs showed him, bearskin on shoulder, with the hare under his arm.

  All the officials were well disposed. He was not confined to prison but permitted to walk about freely in the streets of Petrozavodsk, after giving his word that he would not attempt to ski to Finland before the formalities were completed.

  Finland was sent a two-hundred-page interrogation report, which included a detailed account of Vatanen’s movements on both sides of the border. The Soviet authorities in Petrozavodsk requested the Finnish minister of the interior to investigate the validity of Vatanen’s statements. A month later, Petrozavodsk received a reply from the Finnish authorities confirming the correctness of Vatanen’s statements; the document pointed out that Vatanen had been charged with a large number of crimes in Finland.

  Vatanen had (1) committed adultery. He had misled the authorities by (2) not providing notice of removal on (3) deserting his family the previous summer. He was consequently (4) a vagrant. (5) He had retained a protected wild animal in his possession for several days without a valid permit. (6) In Nilsiä, Vatanen, together with a certain Hannikainen, had engaged in clandestine jacklight fishing and other piscatorial ventures without a permit. (7) In the course of a forest fire, he had contravened the alcohol regulations by knowingly consuming an illegally distilled spirituous liquor. (8) Additionally during the said forest fire, he had neglected his duties over a twenty-four-hour period while consuming alcohol with a certain Salosensaari. (9) In Kuhmo, he had desecrated a recently deceased body. (10) At the village of Meltaus, on the Ounasjoki River, he had been party to unlawful appropriation and illegal sale of German war booty. (11) In Posio, he had been guilty of cruelty to animals. (12) At Vittumainen Ghyll, he had inflicted grievous bodily harm on a ski instructor named Kaartinen. (13) He was charged with neglecting to give due and timely warning of a dangerous bear inhabiting the vicinity of Läähkimä Gorge, Sompio. (14) At Sompio, he had also contravened the law by taking part in a bear hunt without a permit to carry a weapon. (15) At Vittumainen Ghyll, he had obtruded without invitation on a state occasion organized by the minister for foreign affairs. (16) Under false pretenses, he had obtained treatment for the hare in his possession at the National Institute of Veterinary Science, Helsinki, a state research institute, and, furthermore, had failed to provide monetary compensation. (17) He had assaulted the secretary of the Coalition Party’s Junior League in the bathroom of a Helsinki restaurant and inflicted grievous bodily harm. (18) He had endangered life by riding a bicycle in an inebriated condition on the major road to Kerava. (19) While traveling between Turenki and Hanko, he had illegally become engaged to a certain Heikkinen while already married. (20) In Sompio, he had for a second time committed the offense of bear hunting without a permit to carry a weapon. (21) In the course of hunting a protected animal, he had violated the frontier of the Soviet Union without a passport or relevant visa. Thereafter (22), he had been guilty of the crimes that he had confessed to the Soviet authorities.