Astrid the Unstoppable

by Maria Parr

  Then she fell. There was a wretched rock there, all ready to trip her up. She just managed to throw herself to one side as the wild ram thundered towards her. He grazed her elbow with his rock-hard head.

  “Ow!”

  Ugh, it was so typical of Gunnvald to buy such a rubbish ram! And just think: this ram would be the father of half of Gunnvald’s lambs. He was going to end up with the world’s barmiest sheep.

  Now Gladiator would be coming back for her, sure as mutton.

  Astrid clambered to her feet and stumbled on. She’d had an idea – she could seek safety on the roof of the summer barn. There are many things rams can do, but they can’t climb. Astrid, on the other hand, is more closely related to the apes than most people, as Auntie Idun says. She took a quick turn to the right, just as Gladiator threw himself at her again, then five steps over to the barn, where she jumped up onto the pallet leaning against the wall like a ladder, and then grabbed the roof with her hands. Astrid dangled there for a while, thrashing about between heaven and earth. Gladiator managed to butt her on the leg, but eventually she succeeded in swinging one foot onto the roof and was able to twist the rest of her body up after it.

  She was safe.

  Snorri flew up and landed next to her. Down in the field, the furious Gladiator stamped his hoof hard and insistently on the ground, again and again. Astrid pulled herself even further away from the edge of the roof. Then she took a deep breath and shouted out into the spring air of Glimmerdal:

  “Gunnvaaaaaald!”

  “What in every blasted Saturday’s burnt gruel and porridge are you doing up there?”

  Gunnvald squinted against the sun, clearly annoyed. Astrid pointed down at the ram. She could see Gunnvald sigh. He shouted to her that now she’d got herself into such a hopeless fix, she could just stay up there. Gladiator would probably be fed up of waiting after a while and go into his nice summer barn. Then Astrid could climb down and slam the door shut.

  “No!” she shouted. “What if he never gets fed up? You have to come over here and distract him.”

  “Do I look like I’ve got red hair to distract him with?” Gunnvald plonked his coffee pot down on the steps outside his house and went inside.

  “Gunnvald!”

  Was he just going to leave her sitting there? She knew Gunnvald was a stubborn old mule, and he’d been worse than ever recently, but Astrid would never have expected this. Imagine leaving your best friend on a roof to fend for herself with a deadly ram from Barkvika below her!

  Astrid had just decided never to visit Gunnvald ever again for the rest of her life, when he came back out with his Christmas tablecloth. She would’ve recognized that tablecloth from the other side of the glen, as she was the one who’d embroidered it. With her own hands. The whole tablecloth was covered with bullfinches and Christmas trees made out of tiny little cross stitches.

  “Do you have to make it so big, Astrid?” her teacher, Dagny, had asked her when Astrid was still toiling away at the enormous tablecloth – which was meant to be for Christmas, after all – long into February.

  “Yes, because Gunnvald’s a big man with a big table,” Astrid had answered.

  And Gunnvald had been just as pleased with the tablecloth as Astrid had hoped. He’d almost cried a little tear when he opened the parcel.

  “Holy muskrat,” Astrid whispered now, when she realized what Gunnvald was about to do.

  He walked into the field with the tablecloth flapping about in one hand. Then he stood up straight like a general.

  “Olé!” said Gunnvald, stomping on the ground.

  Suddenly Gladiator wasn’t the slightest bit interested in Astrid on the roof any more.

  There was a bullfight in Glimmerdal that day. True enough, no weapons were used, and true enough, it was between an old and stiff bullfighter and a crazed ram from Barkvika instead of a bull, but still. Gunnvald swung the tablecloth so elegantly that you would’ve thought he’d been bullfighting all his life. Time after time, Gladiator thundered down the field, ramming his head straight through the cross-stitched bullfinches and out into thin air. The old matador glanced up at Astrid triumphantly and took a bow. Swoosh, there went Gladiator diving into the tablecloth again. It looked pretty impressive.

  But gradually Gunnvald found himself on the back foot. He started waving the tablecloth more frantically, and Gladiator got closer to hitting him each time. Eventually Gunnvald was running around the field with the tablecloth flying out like a red flag behind him.

  “Olé!” he howled in desperation.

  “Get up here, Gunnvald!” Astrid waved at him, but Gunnvald just shook his fist.

  “Blasted blackberries, I’m going to get that psychopath of a ram into the summer barn if it’s the last thing I do!” he bellowed, rushing towards the open door.

  Then the enormous Gunnvald ran inside the summer barn with a crash, closely followed by a galloping Gladiator. Snorri took off from the roof like a jet aircraft.

  After a few seconds of tremendous racket, the door slammed shut. Astrid crawled forward nervously and peeked down.

  “Are you alive, Gunnvald?” she asked warily.

  Gunnvald dried the sweat from his forehead with the tablecloth. “That’s the last time I buy anything in Barkvika,” he said, getting into position so Astrid could reach his shoulders with her feet and climb down.

  It’s hard to believe what happened next. There was Gunnvald, who’d just put on a breakneck performance of a bullfight and come away from it without a scratch, and then he only went and tripped over his own coffee pot. Astrid was walking just behind him and saw as Gunnvald, who’d forgotten that he’d put his coffee pot on the steps, caught his foot on the handle, lost his balance and fell as far down the stone steps as he was tall.

  There was a terrible sound of bones breaking.

  And then silence.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In which Gunnvald is

  mightily scared in hospital

  It was such a lovely day in Glimmerdal. People had opened their windows for the first time since the winter. The mountains were gleaming, and you could almost see the snow melting on the slopes. It’s strange that such terrible things can happen on days like that.

  But they can. Right at the top of Glimmerdal, an old man was lying by the steps outside his house, and next to that man was his little best friend, sitting there and looking anxiously down the glen.

  “If you die, Gunnvald, then I’ll kill you,” Astrid said. She had a lump in her throat, but she wasn’t crying, because then Gunnvald would be even more scared. Poor, poor Gunnvald.

  Astrid had done everything Dagny, her teacher, had taught her to do if there was an accident. She’d phoned for an ambulance, and she’d draped a woollen blanket over Gunnvald. Luckily he hadn’t fainted. He’s so enormous that she would’ve needed a winch to put him in the recovery position.

  “It’s nothing serious,” she said to comfort him, but she didn’t believe her own words.

  It looked serious. Gunnvald’s face had gone grey, and he wasn’t saying anything.

  But when the ambulance finally arrived, Gunnvald suddenly regained his speech, and with a vengeance. He turned into as much of a beast as Gladiator, yelling at the ambulance workers for all he was worth. There was no way he was going to any hospital! He’d sooner lie there and die, in the peace of the steps outside his own home.

  The poor paramedics.

  “You can’t lie here and die,” Astrid said in a strict voice. “I’ll come with you.”

  Then Gunnvald closed his mouth and squeezed her hand so hard it made her whimper.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting home, little one?” the ambulance man said as he prepared the stretcher.

  Astrid shook her head. The paramedics looked at Gunnvald’s hand clutching Astrid’s. They would’ve needed angle grinders to loosen that grip.

  “Then you’d better come with us.”

  But when Astrid and Gunnvald were in the ambulance, Gunnvald let go
of her hand all by himself.

  “Astrid,” he struggled to say. “I need to take the letter. The letter. It’s on the bookshelf.”

  Astrid didn’t ask him which letter he meant. Even though she’d neither seen nor heard about it since the winter, she realized which one it must be. The letter saying that Anna Zimmermann had died. She ran inside and wasn’t surprised in the slightest when she found it on the bookshelf. But she was a little surprised when she saw how frayed the envelope was. Gunnvald must have read the letter hundreds of times. Astrid grabbed it and ran outside.

  Then they set off. They drove all the way to town, to the big hospital.

  It was a tough day. Gunnvald was sure that he was going to die. The doctors and the nurses were busy, almost only speaking among themselves. Astrid had never been ignored that much in her life. Eventually she grabbed a doctor by his coat so he had to stop and talk to her, whether he wanted to or not.

  “Is Gunnvald going to die?” she asked sharply.

  The doctor looked at her, astonished. “No, of course not.”

  “Do you promise?”

  The doctor promised. So that she was sure, he took Astrid by the hand and gave her a good old-fashioned word-of-honour pledge.

  Gunnvald wasn’t going to die, but try explaining that to a stubborn old mule who has never been in hospital before. He was beside himself with worry. Astrid comforted him, talking to him and holding his hand, but now and then she couldn’t help getting angry.

  “If you don’t calm down, I’m going to take you for recycling!” she shouted at one point. “Then they can turn you from the fool you’re being today into a new, nicer Gunnvald!”

  When Astrid’s dad appeared at the door, she was completely worn out, and flung herself into his arms. Astrid’s poor dad had thought it was Astrid who had been injured. When he’d come home from the shop, Sally had been out by the road, waving him down. Spluttering, she’d managed to tell him that she’d seen Astrid up on the roof of Gunnvald’s summer barn, and that the ambulance had gone past soon afterwards.

  “Poor girl,” Sally had wailed, putting her hand over her heart. “She may have been injured for life!”

  Now Astrid’s dad held her close: he was so relieved that it was Gunnvald and not her in the hospital bed. “You’ve done a really good job, Astrid,” he said.

  Everybody was suddenly less busy. The doctors explained what had happened and answered the questions Astrid’s dad asked from behind his beard. Gunnvald had a nasty fracture to the neck of his femur – his thigh bone – they said, and he’d need an operation that very evening. He’d also broken his ankle, but they wouldn’t be able to operate on that for a few days. The swelling had to go down first.

  “I want to go home,” Gunnvald sniffed. He was calmer now. They’d pumped a shedload of medicine into him. But he couldn’t go home. It would be many weeks before Gunnvald could return to Glimmerdal. First he needed an operation on his thigh, and then he needed an operation on his ankle, and after that he’d have to get fit enough to walk again.

  “I’m going to die,” said Gunnvald.

  “Me too,” Astrid muttered glumly. “I’m going to be bored to death.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In which Astrid reads the

  green book, and Gunnvald

  gives her a secret mission

  There would be twice as much for Astrid and her dad to do now. Lambing would be starting in a couple of weeks, and they’d have to look after both their own sheep and Gunnvald’s. Luckily there were lots of good helpers in Glimmerdal. Peter had volunteered to lend a hand with the lambing. It would all be fine, Astrid reassured Gunnvald over the phone. But Gunnvald didn’t think so. He still thought he was going to die.

  “Stop being silly,” said Astrid, promising to feed Hulda.

  The next day, when Astrid got off the school bus down at the roadside by the boxes where their post was delivered, she trudged up the hill to Gunnvald’s farm instead of her own. She prepared the cat’s food and sat down in the rocking chair, watching Hulda tuck in. The clock ticked. Astrid rocked back and forth. It was strange being there without Gunnvald. She looked around the empty kitchen, her gaze landing on the bookshelf. There, at one end of the third shelf, was where she’d found the letter the day before.

  Astrid stood up. Wasn’t that the green book? The one that Gunnvald had been reading once when she’d come barging in; the one he’d slammed shut and hidden under the table? Astrid tilted her head. Heidi, it said on the spine. She pulled it out. It looked like a book for grown-ups, as there wasn’t a picture on the front cover. Or maybe it had just been torn off. But when Astrid opened the book, she saw a beautiful illustration of a boy with a hat, a girl with curly dark hair, and some goats.

  Astrid took the book and sat back down in the rocking chair. The pages smelt old. To begin with, there were lots of difficult names, some talk about a mother’s grandmother who was somebody else’s cousin, and other things that Astrid didn’t understand, so she was about to put the book right back down again, but then it all became more interesting.

  It was about a little girl called Heidi. She was only five at the start, and both her parents were dead. Now she was on her way up the mountains with her aunt, who was called Aunt Deta.

  “Aunt Deta.” Astrid tried saying the name out loud. She liked it. But she didn’t like the aunt. She wasn’t very kind.

  Heidi, the girl with the curly dark hair, was going to her grandfather’s house, Aunt Deta had decided. Heidi’s grandfather lived far up in the mountains, all alone with two goats. All the villagers were afraid of him because he was angry and dangerous and had eyebrows that had grown to meet each other in the middle. When they heard that Aunt Deta was going to leave Heidi with him, the villagers tried everything they could think of to persuade her to change her mind. How could she leave an innocent young girl up there with that terrible man?! Some people even said that her grandfather had once murdered another man in a fight. Still, Aunt Deta took the orphaned Heidi up the steep mountain slopes. She couldn’t look after her any more, she said, even though she’d promised Heidi’s mother that she would. She didn’t have the time. Heidi would have to stay with her grandfather, no matter what the villagers thought.

  What would happen to Heidi all alone up there with her terrible grandfather? Astrid read on, her heart in her mouth. Luckily, as the book went on, she grew sure the villagers had been wrong. He didn’t seem that bad, Heidi’s grandfather, even though he was a bit grumpy. He lived in a small cabin, up where the wind blew through the spruce trees and the mountains gleamed.

  It must be like the mountain pasture at Glimmerdal Shieling, Astrid thought to herself. She remembered how the wind whistled round the walls when they spent the night in the old hut up there in the summer. Lots of beautiful flowers grew there in the summer months too, just like in the book about Heidi.

  Astrid forgot she was sitting in Gunnvald’s kitchen. She lost track of time; she lost track of everything. It was almost as if she had become Heidi, as if the whole story were taking place in Glimmerdal. Heidi slept in the hayloft at her grandfather’s house; Astrid had often slept in the hay too, in the summer. And the best part was when Heidi got to go with Peter the goatherd, herding goats far, far up into the mountains, where the sunset lit the snow on fire in the evenings. Just like up on Storr Peak, Astrid thought. She could picture it quite clearly.

  Heidi was happier living with her grandfather than she’d ever been before. She looked after the two goats, Schwänli and Bärli, and she drank goat’s milk, which made her strong. And her fierce grandfather was nothing but kind to her.

  “Astrid?”

  It was Astrid’s dad. He came into Gunnvald’s kitchen carrying a bag. “We’d better get a toothbrush and some clean undies for our patient in town,” he said. “What are you reading?”

  Astrid held up the green book, and her dad squinted to read the title. “Heidi.” His face took on a strange expression. “Where did you find that?”
<
br />   Astrid pointed at the bookshelf.

  “Hmm,” said her dad.

  Astrid didn’t tell Gunnvald she’d found the green book. Somehow she felt that he wouldn’t like it. His mood was still as tangled as an inside-out jumper. Everything was wrong at the hospital: the doctors ran around like whipped cats, the nurses weren’t doing things properly, and the food tasted like tinned crow.

  “On top of all that, I’m fresh out of snus,” Gunnvald moaned.

  When Astrid’s dad went down to the shop to buy the poor man some more of that disgusting snus, Gunnvald immediately stopped complaining and beckoned to Astrid. He looked over at the door to make sure nobody was listening.

  “I’ve got an important mission for you, Astrid.”

  The curtains fluttered a little, the rays of sunshine making a beautiful pattern on the floor.

  “Do you want me to blow up the coffee pot into a thousand pieces?” Astrid asked.

  She was very welcome to do that, Gunnvald said, but that wasn’t the mission. He glanced over at the door yet again, then he put his hand under his shirt collar and pulled out a letter.

  “You’ve got to post this.”

  Astrid took the letter in astonishment.

  “This is important,” Gunnvald went on. “If I die—”

  “Stop going on about all this dying,” Astrid scolded him. “You’re not going to die.”

  “You never know. Operations are dangerous,” Gunnvald said, clearly scared. “I only just survived that thigh bone operation. Now I’ve got to have an operation on my ankle in three days. This might be the last time you see me.”

  Astrid huffed. Then she bowed her head to look at the address. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Ms A. Zimmermann.

  “Anna Zimmermann!” she shouted.

  Gunnvald’s finger shot up to his lips and he said “shh!” so loudly that he almost blew himself out of bed. “It’s a secret, you little troll!”

  “All right, but, Gunnvald, you can’t send letters to dead people! Are you losing it?”