The meadow ahead is buzzing with crickets. No rabbits so far, but they’re small and will be hard to spot. Three deer tiptoe through the vegetation. I watch the animals bend their slender necks, their snouts kiss the grass.
Two dark-tipped ears peek over the vegetation, wiggle, and hide again. A hare, maybe?
A nightingale begins to blare in a shrub beneath me. Its song seems to work like a calming call to everyone. All is good. No danger. The hare takes a hop and I take aim just beneath its shoulder blade. Click.
The animal somersaults, kicks and kicks, until it finally falls still. The deer prick their slender ears, stick their noses higher up in the wind, but find nothing suspicious. The nightingale begins its crescendo.
I strap the rifle on my back, wrap my arms around the branch I sat on, and swing down. The soft noise silences the nightingale. The deer dart into the woods.
I walk up to the hare and pick it up. Just when I turn to walk back to the reservoir, I spot a set of gleaming eyes fixed on me.
On the fallen tree, soft paws on soft moss, stands a lynx.
I feel how my cursing blood warms my skin, but it’s not caused by fear. It’s caused by a wild desire to watch the cat move silently, the wish that it would stay a minute and allow me to take in all its features, the pointy ears with the narrow black brushes of hair sticking up. The eyes, sometimes yellow, sometimes green, but never clearly defined. The markings in its face, like those of a warrior.
When the cat begins to move, it’s not retreating. It’s approaching. And that is when fear finally creeps in.
Ears folded flat, hackles rising, and throat hissing, the lynx creeps forward. I don’t think it could kill me — it’s not large enough — but it can certainly injure me. Those incisors look rather long and pointy when I imagine them cutting through my neck.
The cat jumps off the tree trunk and I take a step back. It stares at me and then at the hare. And finally, I understand. I’ve stolen its dinner.
I don’t know precisely what gets into me when I hold the hare out instead of throwing it the two metres to the lynx. Curiosity, maybe. I have a bit too much of that, I guess.
Light-grey paws are set in motion and I can see a slight limp in its right hind leg. When the cat steps out into the pale moonlight, it shows ragged fur, and underneath, ribs grinding against skin.
I wonder if I should go down on my knees to appear less threatening, but decide against it, as this will also make me look more edible. Instead, I stretch out my arm as far as it can go, the hare suspended on its ears, feet touching the ground.
Without taking its eyes off me, the lynx lunges, closes its jaws around my kill, and disappears between the trees.
I touch my hand to my chest and feel an oddly calm heartbeat.
Later, when I return from my hunt with a rabbit that has only one hole in its pelt, Runner asks where the second pellet is.
‘You’ll know once I’m an apprentice,’ I reply, and gut our quarry.
When I step through the door, it feels like being swept up and brashly thrown back into reality. The same corridor — overly clean and impersonal, the same scrubbing sounds from the kitchen, the same grumbling from the living room.
In the woods, Runner has unceremoniously touched his fingers to his hat and marched off. I don’t even know if, or when, he’ll return.
As soon as my mother notices I’m back, reality seems to vanish once more. My parents — who rarely express any other feelings but regret — now behave like two hens who’ve just laid abnormally large eggs. I let myself be wrapped up by their happiness while my doubts keep niggling in the back of my mind. Even after a week in the woods, I still cannot believe what has happened, and what might be happening to the rest of my life. Or how short this rest might be.
But I don’t run around chicken-like, making noise and repeating the same information over and over again. Micka (the loser) has done well! Micka (the loser) starts her probation time as a Sequencer’s apprentice without screwing up! Micka (the loser) returns home dirty, stinky, and unable to utter a peep.
Once the day comes to an end and my parents retreat to their bedroom, my mind uses the silence to produce its own noise. The uncertainty is unbearable. The change from hope and adventure, from feeling alive and respected to…being back home, tears me apart. My chest is aching. Hope — the hungry beast — is prowling inside. I’m prowling, too. From door to window, window to door, door to window, and back and forth. It doesn’t help. I unclasp my knife and my hands grow calm. The pain inside my chest lessens with every line I carve into it.
Part Two — Winter
Before the times of change, still is it so:
By a divine instinct men's minds mistrust
Ensuing dangers; as by proof, we see
The waters swell before a boisterous storm.
William Shakespeare (Richard III)
I stare into my soup. Bits of greyish potatoes and woody string beans drift among flecks of what must be herbs. Winter soup recipes are simple: throw leftovers into water, add salt and whatever grows beneath the snow cover looking like it might add taste. Boil until all ingredients appear very dead. Serve.
As a kid, I played “save the veggies.” My spoon was the rescue boat that scooped drowning vegetables from the soup and poured them on top of one another. The ones at the bottom would have to sacrifice themselves for the survival of the ones at the top. Funny how much my soup reflected life.
The game always ended with Mother yelling. Not anymore, though. I could play it until Christmas next year and no one would complain.
These days, when Father talks about me, he refers to me as “his daughter.” I used to be “that girl.” My mother hugs me almost daily and asks how I’m doing. I can’t stand it; the hugs give me a headache and I don’t want to talk about how I feel.
The presents that arrived today are shockingly luxurious: an air rifle, a backpack, a ground pad, and a sleeping bag — ordered by my parents eight weeks ago. The whole village pitched in. Everyone seems proud to have me.
The things are strewn across my room now. I’ve touched everything, smelled and tasted everything, and even wept into the sleeping bag. Tomorrow morning I’ll go for a hike and test my new equipment. I have to get out of this chicken run.
I know I should be grateful, humble, and nice. But I’m not. I’m still me. I didn’t change from despicable to loveable, not that I know of, anyway. Whatever changed is superficial. It’s all in what others suddenly see in me. It’s all because a stranger showed interest in me four months ago, and still does, despite me being me.
That’s why I hate the sudden attention, because it’s not for me. It’s for a man who’s deeply respected, even feared maybe, throughout the entire village.
I eat my bread and stop shovelling beans on my save-the-veggies pile. I’m too old for this stuff. As if to prove my adulthood, my chest sprouted walnut-sized boobs. All other girls my age are rather…well-developed, to put it mildly. At fifteen, one isn’t playing around anymore. One is to work a job, get married, have children, and be normal.
A mischievous grin spreads across my face. There are no job, kid, and husband duties waiting for me. Only adventures.
———
I pull the scarf higher up on my nose. The snow is deep, but the felted goat hair gaiters protect my legs from wetness and cold. I’m wrapped in wool and hair, my muscles ache and produce heat, and the backpack is heavy. I have no specific plans other than to not return this week. I know I’ll sleep little because the tarp I carry won’t be enough to keep the wind and snow out at night. But it’s wonderful to be outside and far away.
I talk to myself just to taste the words. I shout them to feel their aroma spread to the back of my head. I stick snow into my mouth and rub it over my face to savour scents and flavours. If anyone were to see or hear me, they’d think I was insane.
Who knows? Maybe I am slowly getting there. I’ve learned so much in the past four months, I have problems wrapping my h
ead around it all — the complexity of events, the ignorance of my species. For decades before the Great Pandemic, scientists knew what factors triggered cholera outbreaks. Elevated sea surface temperatures caused yearly cholera pandemics along almost all coastlines, and every August and September, people fled the coasts when the water turned thick with algae, copepods, and Vibrio cholerae. Each wave of death could be predicted, watched, and quantified. Yet nobody seemed interested in moving away from the coasts for good. Thousands of people died each year. They had homes, families, and fishing jobs there.
The seas had long risen to more than two metres above pre-climate disaster levels, and all it took was one particularly hot year with exceptional heavy rains to flood sewer systems more than ever. Then disease ran rampant, not only along the coasts but through crowded inland cities as well. Two bouts of cholera — one coming from the sea and one coming from the cities — poured over all continents, except Australia and Antarctica, which were either too arid or too cold.
It didn’t take long for people to realise that tuberculosis had spread silently for years, weakening the immune system of more than 80% of humanity before the more aggressive cholera struck. The resulting death rate was staggering. No cure was available, because bacteria had long ago learned to neutralise antibiotics. So many dead people, and who was to blame? The others. In this one year of great suffering, we began murdering each other and didn’t stop until close to ten billion of us were gone. I don’t get the logic in this. Runner keeps telling me that there is little logic, that we are not a very logical species.
He told me about the Brothers and Sisters of the Apocalypse, short, BSA. The mentioning of the BSA alone raises a lot of hackles, and I’m not to talk about them when we are with strangers. It might end badly.
Runner said the BSA formed during the Dark Ages — when people were shitting their bowels out or coughing up their lungs and they needed someone to blame for their misery. A lot of people believed in a god and a devil, and that this devil spread evil in the world and this god wanted to fix it. So god planned to wipe us all out with disease, but somehow he didn’t get it quite right because only three billion died and seven billion were still alive, and so the BSA rushed to help. Millions of people believed this crap and many still do, because when you help the cause of a god, your afterlife will be better than the shit life you’re living.
People who looked wrong died first, and people who believed wrong died next. Apparently, a lot of men and women believed there was only evil on this planet. I keep wondering if they learned to hate because their lives had been so hard. Maybe they often starved because the world was so crowded. I don’t know. Runner doesn’t want to tell me the details. Not yet, he said, but soon.
And it’s not just the BSA to blame, he argued. There were countless groups, separatists, people who acted alone and enjoyed a killing spree, helped by billions who simply turned a blind eye and didn’t care about their neighbours dying. When I asked him if it’s better now that they are all dead, he fell silent. I watched the tapping of his fingertips against his shins, and I knew I’d said something wrong.
After a long moment, he asked, ‘You don’t care about your neighbours much, do you? Do you think it would be better if I killed you now?’
Maybe it would be better, I thought, but I didn’t say it. The future scares me.
When I look at the snow now and the empty landscape, I’m left to wonder how it would be if the land were filled with people. Would I hate it? Maybe. I like it the way it is now — quiet, vast, and peaceful.
Runner showed up three days ago, little clumps of ice stuck to a three centimetre long beard, his eyebrows white with frost beneath a snow-covered hat, his hair shaggy and wet, sticking to his fur collar. Father didn’t recognise him at first. Mother hurried his backpack off and ushered him into the bathroom, where he took a hot shower for a wasteful five minutes, sucking our boiler empty. I knew the man needed to eat and sleep, but all I could think was Let’s go! Although sharing a tent with him feels awkward, our hikes totally rock.
Now he’s walking only three steps ahead of me, yet he’s barely visible. The wind blows snow down from the clouds, up from the snowdrifts, horizontally off the firs. Tiny icicles needle my cheeks. My snow goggles are caked with snow, my gaiters are leaking snow into my boots, and my neck has a snow collar.
This winter grew harsh and that’s why Runner insists on crossing the mountains to the lowlands. Snow is good there, the more the better because it helps you survive in a contaminated place, he told me. Snow can be thawed and used as drinking water, while lakes, rivers, and groundwater are unfit for human consumption. We are trading the risk of dying of disease with the risk of dying of severe cold. But I’m not complaining. I’m happy out here, and I’ve never seen the lowlands with my own eyes.
There’s just this one problem with my feet. I can’t feel them, and although I’m trying really hard not to, I’m about to topple over.
Runner turns around and shouts something I don’t understand. The wind is picking up and howls into my face.
‘We’ll dig a hole over here and get out of the snowstorm,’ he says louder, pointing to a bolder with a snowdrift piling up on its side. ‘Can you use your hands?’
I yell, ‘Yes!’ but I have my doubts.
We drop our backpacks, unstrap the snowshoes, and use them to dig a tunnel. The snow is compact — slowing the digging but making sure our bivouac won’t collapse. I hope.
Runner is shaping a cave that will barely fit the two of us. The smaller the better — less dead volume to heat and less snow to dig out.
‘Fix sleeping bags and pads. I’ll cook tea,’ he says once he drilled an air hole into the side of the cave, and that’s all we speak until each pair of ice-cold hands holds a steaming mug of peppermint tea. We are chewing strips of dried meat, handfuls of nuts, and dried cherries.
‘In the morning,’ Runner says, ‘we’ll have to eat a hundred grams of butter each. Otherwise it will be hard to take in all the calories we use up hiking through the deep snow.’
The word “calories” alone makes my mouth water.
‘How are your feet?’
‘What feet?’ I joke, but he doesn’t think it’s funny.
‘Sleeping bag,’ he says and points. ‘Take your shoes and socks off first. Anything that’s wet or full of snow, too.’
I strip down to my woollen long-johns and sweatshirt, moving about carefully so as not to brush snow off the ceiling or walls. He extracts a set of dry clothes from my backpack and stuffs them into my sleeping bag. I wiggle in and get dressed in the confined space while Runner changes his clothes, too.
‘Okay, Micka, scoot over.’
‘You want to come in here?’ Does he even fit?
‘Yes. Move.’
Now I am worried. My hunting knife is in the pile of damp clothes and just out of reach. But the chances of him doing anything funny at minus twenty-five degrees Celsius might be low. I unzip the sleeping bag and move aside as far as possible. Runner opens his sleeping bag all the way, throws it over mine, and inches himself into our cocoon, but from the other end.
‘Feet under my armpits, Micka. That’s the warmest place.’
I burst out laughing when he pulls up his shirt and pullover, but I immediately do what he says. We are both on our backs, his legs sticking up above my ears, while my icy feet find the two warm pockets under his arms. Not that I feel the warmth, but I assume it’s there, judging by his wince.
‘What about yours?’ I ask.
‘They are okay.’
Sure. I send my hands up there anyway, slipping my fingers into his socks. Ice-cold. As I thought.
‘Feet under my armpits, Runner.’
I don’t need to invite him twice. He inches his large feet under my arms and I try not to squeal from the sudden drop in temperature.
‘Once you feel a little warmer, you can stuff all your wet clothes into the foot-end of your sleeping bag. They’ll dry overnight.’
Right now, I don’t feel like moving at all. Runner’s icy toes slowly grow lukewarm. My feet are regaining a little feeling, especially my toes, which now hurt as if someone chopped them off. I bite my cheeks and close my eyes.
‘Show me your toes, Micka.’
Reluctantly, I pull one foot from the hairy, but wonderfully warm Runner-armpit. He probes and presses, then sticks my foot back into the toasty place.
‘Superficial frostbite, nothing to worry about. Have more of the hot tea.’
‘Give me a moment,’ I hum, limbs aching, eyelids heavy with exhaustion. ‘How do you stick your feet under your own armpits?’
‘Excuse me?
‘I was just wondering what you do when you hike through the snow all by yourself.’
‘I would have walked another five hours to the next settlement, stuck my feet into warm water, sipped hot tea with something stronger in it, and sat as close to the fireplace as possible.’
‘Is it annoying to have a fifteen-year-old as company?’
‘Sometimes.’
I sneak my hand into the snow, grab a piece, and throw it into Runner’s face. ‘Old people are quite annoying, but what can one do about it?’
‘Micka, you really don’t give a shit about authority.’ A sharp grumble.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say quietly.
A handful of snow hits me. ‘Question everything,’ he says without taking his eyes off the bumpy snow bivouac ceiling.
‘The next village is only five hours from here?’ I’m tired, but wiggle myself towards the teapot and pour a cup. ‘Tea?’
He hands me his mug and I hand it back, filled and steaming.
‘Five hours for me. With you, depending on how much snow falls tonight, it could be another day, or even two.’
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