‘Mahommed’s coming to the mountain…’
*
The scooter rider could have been Mahommed, as far as Isak knew; he’d expected to be met by the man he’d last seen in his house in Karasjok, but he’d never set eyes on this one before.
‘You’re Isak, huh?’
This was a Sami, but from the east. He spoke North Lappish, not East Lappish or the Anar dialect; he was talking the language that was spoken by three-quarters of all Sami people, but he spoke it with an outlandish accent.
Similar accent to Johan’s.
He was looking over Isak’s head. ‘So those are your Americans…’
As if he’d never seen any before. Maybe he hadn’t. Isak asked curtly, ‘D‘you have a message?’
‘Wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t. Here it is… Turn southeast here, cross into Finland and continue southward, looking for your friends. I’m telling you now, they’ll be in the mountains beyond the Lemmenjoki. Maybe in the Viipustunturit. So you take them south, past the west flank of the Maarestunturit, and on through the High Gap. D’you know it?’ Isak nodded, scowling, and the stranger went on, ‘Right through it. That way we can’t lose you, or we can pick you up there again if we have lost you. Got it?’
‘For how long should I search?’
‘How long is a piece of string?’
Isak glared at him, waiting…
A shrug. ‘You’d search until you found them, wouldn’t you?’
‘One cannot find what isn’t there.’
‘Well, say a few days.’
*
Four hundred metres away, Sutherland said, ‘Can’t be one of our guys. Wouldn’t need such a long conversation, would he, he’d have let us know.’
Gus shrugged. ‘He’d have to explain what he’s after. Maybe have to persuade him the other one did make certain promises. I mean that he’d tell him, whatever…’
*
Isak asked the scooter rider, ‘And then what?’
‘Eventually you will return to Karasjok alone. But don’t worry about that, you’ll be told what to say, and your story will hold water, you’ll be in the clear.’
‘What kind of story?’
‘Maybe an avalanche.’ A shrug. ‘Some such—’
‘No!’
‘What?’
‘I am — not a murderer! I can’t do such a thing, I’m—’
*
Sutherland said, ‘Hell of a long confab, isn’t it?’
‘We might be in luck.’ Sophie was the optimist now. ‘He must either be from the siida or he knows where it is. Otherwise they would not have so much to talk about.’
Stenberg agreed: ‘I think you’re right…’
*
The snow-scooter rider said, ‘Johan does not ask you to kill anyone. Only to do as I have said.’
‘I would have a hand in it, though! An accomplice!’ Isak panted, ‘Johan and I have agreements, he knows I could not possibly be tainted with—’
‘Oh, listen — I almost forgot to mention — I was to tell you that your niece, Inga, is with us. Pretty little thing, eh? No harm will come to her, Johan says, as long as you see this through. Then you’ll have her back — unharmed. All Johan wants is for you to lead these Americans into Finland, into the mountains down there in the reserve. That’s not asking so much, you know. Especially if you don’t want Inga to be — well, there are nine of us, nobody’d be in any rush to cut her throat…’
It had sunk in. These things were actually being said, presented in that nasally-accented monotone. It was like something in a nightmare — unreal, incredible — but the words had been spoken, echoed and re-echoed now in Isak’s brain while he faced the scooter-rider‘s contemptuous smile.
*
‘Jesus, see that?’
Sophie squawked, ‘They’re fighting!’
‘Oh, no, surely—’
Revving, picking up speed, showering snow as the belts gripped…
Isak had aimed a swipe at him with one ski-pole, and almost fallen. The rider had been laughing as he’d opened the throttle. Isak leaning heavily on both poles now, staring after the machine as it swept away — up over the rise, a scream of sound that hit its peak as scooter and rider topped the skyline and ripped out of sight.
‘Just waved that pole, didn’t he?’
‘The hell he did.’ Gus, glancing at Sutherland, allowed amused contempt to show in his expression. Maybe for the way the older man always wanted everything to be nice, right, happy — as if by pretending everything was OK he’d make it so… ‘Ollie, you saw him hit out at the guy — right?’
Ollie nodded. Isak was on his way back. This side of the stream he had to climb, and when he got to them he was breathing in short gasps. But also, you could see the same kind of desperation in him that there’d been last night. He said in jerky Norwegian, ‘The siida has gone into Finland.’ Pointing southeast. ‘That way, now.’
‘Was he sure of it?’ Stenberg asked, ‘Does he actually know the people?’
Isak was still out of breath. Ollie, hearing Sophie tell Gus the man would know them, they all knew each other, was thinking, He’s got the frights again… Isak panted in Lappish, ‘Yes. Yes, he was sure…’
‘But—’ Sophie asked him, ‘You hit at him?’
A nod: breathing speeding up again… ‘He spoke of — my niece.’ Mud-coloured eyes pleaded with Sutherland’s pale ones. ‘Inga. You saw her, spoke with her at my house?’
‘Sure.’ Carl nodded. ‘Pretty kid, very nice manner, I was impressed. But why, what—’
‘He spoke of her—’ Isak looked sick, and it had nothing to do with drink, this had hit him in the last few minutes — ‘disrespectfully — insultingly—’
‘Then you did right to take a swing at the bastard!’
Stenberg cut in, ‘So you knew that guy, he knows your—’
‘Christ’s sake.’ Sutherland threw him an angry glance; he put one arm round Isak’s shoulders. ‘Lousy thing to happen. Try not to let it get to you, old pal…’
Ollie was given the translation a minute or two later, by Gus, to whom Sutherland had muttered, ‘They all know each other, damn it. Sophie just made that point, didn’t she. Any case, this was obviously very private business, family business.’ But the scene was fixed in Ollie’s mind for a long time afterwards, like a film stopped at a single frame. Isak’s look of anguish, Carl’s arm round the little man’s heavy shoulders, compassion in Carl’s face and — in total contrast — only sharp curiosity in Sophie’s.
6
The snow was coming down like a wall travelling horizontally on a wind of about force four. When you struggled round to look back into it, it was blinding after a couple of seconds; you’d see an upright figure at maybe forty feet — having cleared your goggles — but not much farther. Southward or southeast, the way they were going when Isak happened to be on course, you could see a couple of hundred yards most of the time, better than that when there was a lull. For the sake of maintaining contact they’d closed their distances apart by shortening the tow-lines, and Sophie was right in behind the pulk now, the rearguard not far back in her tracks. Ollie was leaving that station, passing her and the pulk, poling hard to catch up with Sutherland who was on the left; he called to Sophie as he passed her, ‘You OK?’
Her masked face turned his way: the red cap was white now, her green windproof smock also whitened. She’d ceased to be a girl, to an uninformed outsider’s eye she’d become a yeti lunging through soft snow in company with four others. His own eye, of course, was not an outsider’s, not any more, he saw through all that disguise. She’d raised a hand in answer, telling him ‘OK’: he yelled ‘Keep closed up!’ then had his head down again, pushing on hard to get up beside the professor. He was there, within a pole’s length, before Sutherland discovered he had company; then the snow-covered head and shoulders swung round…
‘So what’s new?’
‘Time to find somewhere to bivvy-up, get settled before dark �
�� shelter, trees, forest. Tell Isak?’
He wanted to find a good place to bed down, before Isak wasted more time and energy wandering off at tangents… Taking over the tow-line meanwhile from Sutherland — who had to pass the message because he himself wasn’t able to communicate with the Lapp. Sutherland let him take this side’s share of the pulk’s weight, then disengaged himself and veered clumsily away. Ollie looked back to check that Sophie was in station. Not that she needed any help, she was at least as competent on skis as he was, and a lot more so than either of the Americans, but there was always the worry — in his own head, anyway — that a few moments’ inattention would be enough to cause her to lose contact, and when there was nobody in the rearmost position — as now — it was a real danger. If she’d had to stop for some reason — adjusting a binding or her back-pack, for instance, if she’d stopped for half a minute too long nobody would have known and within another minute she could be lost, the ski and pulk tracks ahead of her filled with new snow. Sutherland was closing in on Isak, he saw. Close to the river, the Finnish border, there might be a place suitable for a camp, in the valley where the trees grew thickly. The lee side of a dense birch grove would provide shelter from the storm, for instance, and also protection against avalanches — if there happened to be any such danger.
There was no question of bivvying anywhere around here, in present conditions. This was still high fell country — Sophie’s dreamland, for God’s sake — treeless and windswept. It was a wind, incidentally, which would be converting a static temperature of just below freezing point to something more like minus fifteen. And avalanche hazards did exist, had to be looked out for. Even the slope they were on now — slight downhill gradient, no apparent threat — steepened sharply higher up where the visibility cut out any view of the summit, or ridge, or whatever it rose to…
A few days of this, and they’d all be in better shape than they were now. But there’d be some aches and pains tonight, he guessed.
Isak was slanting left, slightly upslope. Carl still with him: both hunched, leaning into the work. Aiming to skirt more closely round the high ground on this side, then — Ollie hoped — to get down to the tree-line. Carl was separating from him, side-stepping up to his left, putting himself where Ollie would be when he’d climbed that shoulder. Out to the right, Gus had just noticed that they were changing course.
Carl shouted, ‘Round this hill, then we run down into the forest. OK?’
Ollie pulled the ice-crusted headover down clear of his mouth. ‘How’s your friend?’
‘I don’t know what’s been into him. Seems OK now but — Christ, I don’t know… I’ll take this tow again now, right?’
‘Fine, I’ll join Isak. Keep an eye on Sophie, will you?’
Verbal communication, having got that basic requirement across to Isak, would not be necessary. A word or two of Norwegian, supplementing gestures, would get them to some suitable location. Isak shouldn’t have needed direction, of course, this should have been second nature to him — this was his kind of country, he’d been born in it, as likely as not in a tent, taken his first toddler’s steps on skis…
He’d laid a false trail, though.
There’d been time to think about this, and it was a solid fact, inescapable. It could have happened by chance, just turned out this way, but the plain truth was that by starting westward and then making this sharp change of direction he’d seen to it that they did a disappearing trick. The Lapp couple in that fishermen’s pub, who’d been the last people to see them before they’d left what might at a pinch be described as civilisation, had been told the party was heading west into the middle of Finnmark, and if for any reason anyone came looking for them that was the direction in which they’d been pointed.
*
Making camp…
Bulky in arctic gear, they lumbered around like divers on a seabed — clumsy, slow-moving, cocooned against the oppressive cold. Getting the gear off the pulk and the tents up was the first essential; skis and poles were dug into the snow like fence-posts marking the camp’s perimeter, inside which their boots had soon flattened the snow into a hard floor. Back-packs slung meanwhile from branches. A short distance inside the wood Sophie had the naptha stove going, with the pulk’s tarpaulin cover rigged to provide temporary shelter while she boiled water to make tea. She was handing out steaming mugs of it by the time the tents were up. They were hemispherical and well insulated, expensive items to hire. Set close together on the edge of the birch forest — which itelf was in the lee of a hillside too steep to hold much snow, so there was no avalanche danger — they formed a camp that was about as well sheltered as it could have been, in present circumstances. But it was going to be better soon: Gus had said, standing back with his mug between mittened hands, and looking at the little semi-circle of rounded tents, ‘That’s about it, eh?’ and Ollie had told him, ‘Not yet, it isn’t. If you’d lend a hand, we’ll make a shelter to cook in.’
Because the tents were small and had integral groundsheet floors in which you wouldn’t want to burn holes. Also, it was going to be necessary to boil water and if you did that in a tent you’d have condensation to make everything soaking wet, then ice on the inside of the fabric.
He put them to work cutting and stacking wood. Posts for driving into the snow as uprights, and branches to lash horizontally, forming a back wall, two end walls and a sloping roof. The cover from the pulk dictated the shelter‘s size, covering the roof to make it watertight; you ended up with a cookhouse shack that had its open side facing the tents, and it contributed to the shelter from that windward direction. Then in the space between it and the tents you could build a camp fire to help raise morale as well as temperature a little, give some light and keep a kettle simmering without using up reserves of naptha. Despite the falling snow it would burn all right, once it had a good heart to it; most of the snow was passing overhead anyway, and the bivvy gave shelter to that patch of ground. Meanwhile, getting these jobs done — and more to come yet, you’d need a lot of firewood — had served the secondary purpose of keeping them on the go while the sweat dried on their bodies; it had been hard work getting here, and that was an essential preliminary to relaxing.
Sophie said, ‘I think you are a genius, Ollie.’
‘Someone’s noticed, finally.‘ He was building a firescreen, half a dozen logs on top of each other horizontally with uprights pushed into the snow at both ends to hold them, on the lee side of where the fire would be. This was what had provoked that expression of admiration, but it was only so sparks wouldn’t blow on to the tents. He said, ‘No problem, as long as the materials are handy. As they usually are… But the next thing, lady and gents — while Gus starts collecting firewood for us — is to decide what we want to eat. Any preferences — Sophie?’
She turned to Sutherland. One hunched yeti inviting comment from a shorter, thicker one. Sutherland proposed, ‘Fresh meat ought to be used first, I’d say.’
‘All right. It’s deep-frozen now, but it’ll thaw in the pot. First task therefore is to heat a lot more water. How about baked beans with our venison?’
Sophie had a tent to herself, Ollie was sharing with Stenberg, Sutherland was to have the pleasure of Isak’s company in the third. Sutherland said he’d do the cooking; he asked Sophie, ‘Unless you’d like to?’
‘You think I’m crazy?’
‘OK, fine…’
He did most of the cooking for his family, he’d told them at some stage. His wife ran an art gallery and was on committees, she was happy to leave it to him and it happened to be one of his hobbies. He probably hadn’t done it quite this way before though — he had the largest of the pots on the naptha stove, and had to feed shovelfuls of clean snow into it until there was enough water to cook in. The meat would be boiled after it had thawed. The rest of them were coming and going, collecting and stacking birchwood and fir-cones, and Ollie stashed all the meat, fresh and salted, on the roof of the bivvy, out of reach of animals.
>
‘Especially wolverines. They’re greedy buggers.’
‘Maybe wolves too.
‘I don’t know. Not so many around now. I’m told people hunt them from helicopters with automatic weapons. Still—’ he nodded to Gus ‘— I’ll put my cannon together, just in case.’
If there were wolverines around they might be attracted by the smell of the meat. The fire would be a deterrent, if it could be kept going all night. Isak joined Sutherland, selecting the meat to be used now, and Sutherland left him to it, admitting that where reindeer were concerned a Sami had to be the expert. Only Sami men cooked meat anyway — in families or groups where the old traditions were observed — Carl said.
Isak wasn’t talking, wasn’t joining in at all. He’d been helping out with the chores but doing it as if he was one man alone, never part of a team. He might be ill, Ollie thought; having started the day with at least some degree of alcoholic poisoning, even if he’d sweated it out during the day’s trek it was bound to have some lingering effect.
Carl told them later — four of them crowded into one tent with fresh mugs of tea, Isak squatting in the bivvy tending the stove and also nursing the fire into a blaze — ‘The Sami people have their own views on which parts of the deer are best, and how to cook them. Here I expect he’ll just boil it, as I would have, but he might boil it first then just sizzle it in a pan. The tongue, tail and marrow-bones are their particular delicacies.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing.‘ Stenberg had had his head out through the tent’s opening. ‘He has a pint bottle of that poison, and he’s taking swigs out of it.’
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