Not a sound from outside. I can’t sit here all night, but poking my head out the door would be the same as putting it on a chopping block if he’s still alive. But there’s no getting around it. If I stay here in this hut, I’ll die of cold. I need to find Knut’s boat shed. From there it’s supposed to be a straight path up to their cabin. Knut and Nanette. Fire in the hearth, porridge in my stomach. I get up onto my knees, holding the rifle in my hands. The ceiling is too low for me to stand up. It’s now or never. Either I die or I arrive in America. With my left hand I cautiously move the birch bark aside. There he is, lying right in front of me in the moonlight. His hat has fallen off and is lying by itself a short distance away, but he’s still wearing the scarf. He’s on his back with his arms stretched out from his sides. His fur-clad boots are also pointing away. He looks like he’s sleeping.
I crawl out and stand up, right next to his feet. Then I no longer feel the cold, even though I’m naked from the waist down. Nor do I notice the pain gnawing at me from inside. I stand there, barefoot in the snow, with a fire burning in my body. No one else can be allowed to see this. What I see right now is for me alone. The Indian is lying on the hard-packed snow. He’s dead, and everything around me has turned so peaceful and quiet—inside me too. Except for a fire that’s burning in my limbs. In my arms and legs. In my heart. It’s so good to be alive in the middle of this forest, with this raging fire inside me. Now I can do anything. Should I just leave him lying here? But then someone might find him and see that he’s been shot. The safest thing would be to get rid of him. I take a couple of steps forward and then stop next to his head. I look down at his face. At the black, longish hair sticking out from under the scarf. He’s lying there in a big patch of moonlight. All around us are deep shadows. I can’t see where the bullet hit him. Or any blood on the snow. Just as I think that one of his eyes seems to have opened slightly, his hand suddenly grabs my bare ankle. I let out a loud scream. His face is completely changed. He looks like a demon from the depths of hell. He yanks and pulls at my foot, trying to make me fall. I aim the rifle at his head and fire. Nothing but a hollow clack in the silence. I do it again, but the gun only clacks.
The Indian is shouting wildly at me. I throw myself at him. Straddle his chest with my naked loins. He’s moving one hand, trying to find something. I know what he’s looking for. I hold the gun with both hands and force the muzzle under his chin. Then I use my weight to crush his throat. I hear a gurgling sound. At first I feel something blazing hot, as if a cat has clamped its teeth into me. But then he pulls out the knife and strikes again. Another stab into my arm. I scream with pain. Force the rifle farther down. Hear something break inside him. His throat goes limp and soft like a dead kitten. His mouth is wide open. His eyes roll up. But I don’t stop. I keep on killing him. It feels so good to kill. It feels so good not to be killed. It feels so good to arrive in America. I’m naked down below, and my manhood stands erect like a spear. I press harder and harder on that damned throat. A huge spasm passes through him. He shudders beneath me. The knife falls out of his hand. I’m injured, but feel only a heat in my arm where he stabbed me. I don’t want to stop. This is the best feeling I’ve ever had.
LANCE TRIED to figure out where he was. He was sitting on the ground, and next to him lay the oblong block of ice with his rifle inside. It shouldn’t be possible to get lost here, even under these conditions. It shouldn’t be possible for anyone, much less for him. But he’d been walking and walking without reaching anyplace that looked familiar. All he’d seen the whole way was the same dense, ice-covered birch forest.
The upper part of his left arm was aching from hitting the guardrail, and his whole body was probably black and blue after all the sliding around he’d done. Yet he would have preferred being back on the slippery road if he could just get out of this cold, raw stratum that formed the underbelly of the woods.
A surprising idea occurred to him. The more he thought about it, the more right it seemed. While he was sliding down the long slope, he’d spun around numerous times. When he finally came to a halt, he felt completely dizzy, and because of all the ice, both sides of the road had looked the same to him. Was it possible he’d entered the woods on the wrong side? He would have seen the same icy birch trees, no matter which side he chose.
If that was what happened, he had no idea where he was at the moment. There was no use trying to find the points of the compass if he couldn’t catch a glimpse of the surrounding landscape. He might find his way back to the highway by sheer luck, but in theory he could also just keep on like this all the way to Canada. In reality, of course, he would die long before he ever got that far. Down here, under this roof of bowed, ice-laden birches, a partial twilight had already set in. He couldn’t sit here for much longer. His only chance was to head in one direction and hope it would lead him out to the road, or to someplace else he recognized. But the problem was trying to keep moving in the same direction for any length of time when he had nothing to use to orient himself.
He stood up, feeling at once how the big, heavy icicles pressed against his back. Hunching over, he began moving forward. The strap of his rifle had become stiff, but he could still sling it over his shoulder. The big block of ice enclosing his rifle sent ripples of cold into his body. Because of all the ice touching his back and shoulder, he soon started feeling the effects of hypothermia. When he got out his cell phone, his fears were confirmed: there was no coverage. The tower on Leveaux Mountain must be down because of the ice.
For a while it felt like the terrain was rising steadily, and he wondered whether he was heading away from the lake and the road, toward the hills where he and Andy had been hunting earlier in the day. So he turned around and started off in the opposite direction, back toward where he’d come from. If he could just manage to stay on course, he should reach the highway eventually. But soon the terrain began rising again. He was about to turn around, when he realized how fruitless that would be. All he could do was keep going. If the ground was actually rising, that meant he was on his way north. And sooner or later he’d reach the belt of dense birch trees that extended from the shores of Lake Superior some distance up into the hills. In a more open type of forest he might have been able to orient himself. Right now it didn’t seem likely that he could even hold a steady course northward. He was probably walking in circles. No doubt he was just imagining the slight incline.
In the back of his mind he was dreading the darkness, which was no more than an hour or so away. He did have a flashlight in his jacket pocket, but that wouldn’t be much help as long as he could see only tree branches and ice in every direction. All day long he’d found it impossible to picture anything “after the hunt.” It just didn’t seem to exist for him. And now that was where he was headed, toward something that was simply cold and dark.
Soon he had to rest again. It was hard to walk stooped over, and besides, it felt good to put down his rifle, which was acting like a big cold-storage unit against his body. He lay down on the ground, stretching out full length. He lay there staring up at the chaos overhead. The slender birches were bowed under the weight of the ice, forming a tightly tangled web of branches visible through the shiny coating of ice. Hanging down from underneath everything were icicles of varying size, many of them so big that they might cause him serious injury. If he lay here long enough, one of them was bound to break off and fall. The biggest of them looked like they could skewer him. That was one way to die: skewered by ice.
His teeth had started to chatter. The muscles of his bulky torso were shivering. He knew this was his body’s means of defense against the cold that was threatening to invade. If he didn’t get indoors very soon, the cold would win. Yet he stayed where he was.
He tried to think of something pleasant, something that would make the time pass without too much anxiety. His thoughts stopped on three figures who were standing still, looking out across a darkened landscape, one big and two smaller figures. The moon was high in the sky, a
nd below it, far in the distance, lay the lake, which faded off into space. Everything else was dark. The world consisted of the moon and Lake Superior. And those three people. Lance was looking at them from behind, but at the same time he remembered how it had felt to stand there, as one of them. What were they really doing there? His father had talked about something—that much he recalled. But about what? No, it was impossible to penetrate deeper into his memory, to grasp the words from that night at least thirty-five years ago.
Maybe he’d said something about their ancestors who had come to this lake from the island of Halsnøy, a place Lance had heard about all his life but never seen. As far back as he could remember, he’d heard about their ancestors who had settled at the base of Carlton Peak because the area reminded them of Tofte on Halsnøy. He didn’t know whether that was true. Was that what his father had talked about as they stood there? That’s the stuff we’re made of. Men who fell through the ice all alone and afterward survived a night in the woods with temperatures below freezing. These childish ideas about how it had all started. He’d run into them his whole life. The stories about what family surnames from Sweden and Norway actually meant, or why some great-great-grandfather had chosen that specific English name, which they all carried today. Rarely anything about the mundane reality behind it all—for instance, how their surnames had been hopelessly misspelled by the immigration authorities so that they became unrecognizable.
As he lay stretched out on the cold, raw forest floor beneath all those icy birch trees, Lance realized that the world his father had known had totally disintegrated. It simply no longer existed. What had once been the family’s history had now been reduced to something so incomplete and chaotic that a life could never be built upon it. At least not the sort of life his parents had lived. The way things had turned out, Lance would have to stand on his own two feet without having an orderly and comprehensible past to support him. He would have to live with the incomplete, with the lack of logical coherence between all things, and accept that his own history was a dark abyss, a depth that could never be fathomed. He did not come from anything or anyone; he came from a big nothing.
Lance was no longer freezing. He had no idea how long he’d been lying here. By this point, he almost felt comfortable. Underneath this roof of ice, it was already dusk, but maybe dark was starting to fall outside the forest too. No one was going to come looking for him. Andy was not going to report him missing. By now he was probably back home watching TV with Tammy. An ordinary man who would continue to live a long life on the North Shore. Lance, on the other hand, was lying somewhere in the woods, noticing that he was starting to get tired, yet he did not enter the land of dreams. He felt only a numbness in his mind, as if he no longer had proper contact with himself.
I don’t know where the lake is, he thought. He couldn’t recall ever experiencing that before. The location of the lake was just as natural to him as the position of his own spine or feet, but right now he had no clue. Nor did he know where anything else was located.
A memory surfaced. They were sitting in his car outside the house where the Dupree family lived. Mary’s room was on the second floor of her parents’ home. Lance used to drive her home in the evening. This was while they were still just dating. Suddenly Mary said, “We call the moon in July Ode’imini-giizis. The strawberry moon. Isn’t that lovely, Lance?” And the strawberry moon had shone big and golden above the treetops.
He could no longer imagine any way forward. He had reached the end of the road. Lance thought about Jimmy. For some reason he pictured his son sitting in the bow of a canoe that was gliding through the water. His face was pale. No one was paddling the canoe; it was moving all on its own, swiftly carrying his son away from Lance. Finally he could see only the boy’s face, like a small pale patch off in the distance. Just as his face was about to disappear, Jimmy shouted something. He was too far away for Lance to make out what he said; it sounded like little more than a bird cheeping. Then the great expanse of water was once more empty and still.
Now he heard it again. His son was calling him from beyond the horizon. Lance opened his eyes and looked up at the threatening icicles above. There it was again, a voice far away. But this was real. Someone was shouting! He tried to sit up, but his body refused to obey. It sounded like someone was calling his name. He tried again, and this time he managed to sit. His head ached, and his teeth were chattering.
Then he heard it loud and clear, right nearby. “Lance!” He tried to answer, but he’d lost his voice. A hoarse whisper way down in his throat was all he could muster. He tried again, but he was incapable of uttering any sound that would carry farther than a couple of yards.
He got up on his knees and grabbed his ice-coated gun. Then he forced himself to stand, at the same time slinging the strap of the rifle over his shoulder. The touch of the ice on his body almost sent him toppling to the ground again, but he couldn’t lie down now. Somebody was here. He took a few hesitant steps, squeezing in between the birch trees. The icicles clinked against each other. No more shouts. That wasn’t so strange, since he hadn’t answered. Besides, it was just a voice he’d heard inside his own head. That was what he now realized, because he knew who the voice belonged to. His father, Oscar. He was the one who had called his name. And Oscar Hansen was with the dead.
Even so, Lance started walking in the direction he thought he’d heard the voice coming from. Soon he noticed a sound he hadn’t heard in a long while. Raindrops striking his hood. Up ahead was the huge, gray surface of Lake Superior.
The sight of the lake should have made him feel relieved, maybe even happy. Because now he knew where he was—except for the fact that the lake couldn’t possibly be here or he would have found it long ago. So he felt as if he’d come upon a different lake. One that looked exactly like the one he knew, with the same expanse of rocks and the same birch forest; yet it was not the same. As if Lake Superior had a twin that he only now had discovered. One that had been waiting for him in a completely different place. And now he had finally reached that other place.
I can’t die now, not when I’ve finally managed to get my frozen underwear and homespun pants back on. It feels like putting on the lake, my clothes are so cold. I drop his arms and lean against the thick trunk of a pine tree. My injured arm is burning hot and throbbing. In front of me flows the black river. All I hear is a faint gurgling sound. The rocks sticking up from the water wear tall hats of snow. In the open space, where the river runs into the lake, the moonlight glitters on the water.
“Thou shalt not kill. That is: We shall fear and love God so that we do no harm to our neighbor nor injury to his body, but rather help him and lend him aid in all jeopardy and peril.” Is he my neighbor, the man lying there on the snow? I no longer remember why I did it, only that I had to. For me to live, he had to die. I kneel down and lower my hand to the dead face. Let it hover there, an inch above the stranger’s dark skin. Then I touch him. Feel the beaked nose. Place my hand on his forehead. If I can just get him out to the open water and under the edge of the ice, they might never find him. The cross is casting a long shadow. Maybe Knut put up the cross to keep the heathens away. If so, his cabin can’t be far off.
I start dragging the Indian across the snow again, leaving a long, wide trail of blood. If anyone comes here, they’ll know what happened. I have to pray to God that snow will fall before any folks arrive. But do I have a right to pray to God for help after I’ve taken a human life? He must have been a wild savage. Someone who worshipped idols. If so, I don’t know whether it counts as murder. I let go of him again. Everything starts spinning before my eyes. The blood on the snow is from both of us. Now the lake rises up like a wall. Stars are falling down on me and inside me. They’re hot as they fall through my chest and stomach. I fall as light as a feather from a very tiny bird. But then I see that I’ve already landed and am lying on the snow. My face hurts. I must have scraped my cheek when I fell. I’m not going to make it. I see that now. I am never
going to reach Knut and Nanette. Everything was going so well. I didn’t encounter any particular hardships getting this far, but tonight everything has gone wrong. The last night. Now I’m lying here, probably not very far from their home, and I can no longer get up. The dead Indian is lying next to me. He smells terrible. Is it from the animals he has flayed? There were rows of pelts hanging outside his hut. Or is this just the way savages smell? Now I notice that he smells of shit too. He has shit his pants. I manage to wriggle out my good arm, which I landed on when I fell, and I place my hand on his chest. It takes a moment, but then I feel a faint warmth under my hand. That’s what I thought. He hasn’t gone cold yet. There’s nothing to be scared of, Thormod. The dead can’t hurt you.
Cautiously I crawl closer to him. I lie there, feeling a warmth start to seep over me. It takes awhile, because there’s not much warmth left, but I want what little there is. All I need is a little warmth. I try to climb on top of him, but it’s hard to do because of the pain. I try again, and I manage to place one leg over his leg and haul myself halfway up onto him. But his clothes are almost as cold as my own. I stick one hand under his shirt and touch his soft belly. Instantly I feel sticky blood and warmth on the palm of my hand. The warmth that I want. I take out my knife and start cutting off his clothes. Underneath he’s wearing another thick woolen shirt. I cut through everything, from his neck to his waist, and move the clothing aside so his naked skin is bare underneath me. The hole in his stomach is round and black. After much effort I manage to take off my jacket. Then I roll my shirt up under my arms as best I can. May God forgive me for this sin, but if I don’t do it, I will die.
Only the Dead Page 13