Nalle’s moped was still standing there. She hoped he’d had a good birthday.
The cottage she was sleeping in was on the opposite side of the road on the edge of the forest. A small lamp above the door lit up the number five.
I’m at peace, she thought.
She went up to the cottage door, but suddenly turned and walked a few meters into the forest. The fir trees stood in silence, gazing up toward the stars which were just beginning to appear. Their long blue green velvet coats moved tentatively over the moss.
Rebecka lay down on the ground. The pine trees put their heads together and whispered reassuringly. The last mosquitoes and black-flies of the summer sang a deafening chorus, seeking out whatever parts of her they could reach. She could cope with that.
She didn’t notice Mimmi, bringing out some rubbish.
Mimmi went into the kitchen.
“Okay,” she said, “it’s definitely wacko-warning time.”
She told him that their overnight guest had gone to bed, not in her bed in the cottage, but on the ground outside.
“It does make you wonder,” said Micke.
Mimmi rolled her eyes.
“Any minute now she’ll decide she’s a shaman or a witch, move out into the forest, start brewing up herbs over an open fire and dancing around an ancient Sami monolith.”
YELLOW LEGS
It is Easter time. The she-wolf is three years old when a human being sees her for the first time. It’s in northern Karelia by the river Vodla. She herself has seen people many times. She recognizes their suffocating smell. And she understands what these men are doing. They’re fishing. When she was a gangly one-year-old she often crept down to the river at dusk and devoured whatever the two-legged creatures had left behind, fish guts, dace and ide.
Volodja is laying ice nets with his brother. His brother has made four holes in the ice and they are going to lay three nets. Volodja is kneeling by the second hole ready to catch the cane his brother sends beneath the ice. His hands are wet, aching with the cold. And he doesn’t trust the ice. All the time he makes sure his skis are close by. If the ice gives way he can lie on his stomach on the skis and pull himself ashore. Alexander wants to lay nets here because it’s such a good spot. This is where the fish are. The water is fast flowing and Alexander has struck with his ice pick exactly where the bottom plunges down into the deep river channel.
But it’s a dangerous place. If the water rises, the river eats up the ice from below. Volodja knows. The ice can be the thickness of three hand breadths one day and two fingers the next.
He has no choice. He’s visiting his brother’s family over Easter. Alexander, his wife and two daughters are crammed together on the ground floor. Alexander and Volodja’s mother lives on the upper floor. Alexander is stuck with the responsibility for the women. Volodja himself travels all the time working for Transneft, the oil company. Last winter he was in Siberia. In the autumn in the gulf of Viborg. In recent months he’s been stuck out in the forest on the Karelian isthmus. When his brother suggested they should go out and lay nets, he couldn’t say no. If he’d refused Alexander would have gone out alone. And tomorrow evening Volodja would have been sitting at the dinner table eating fish he hadn’t bothered to help catch.
Such is Alexander’s rage, it makes him force himself and his younger brother out onto the perilous ice. Now they’re here, the weight pressing down on Alexander’s heart seems to have eased slightly. He is almost smiling as he kneels there with his hands in the water, blue with cold. Maybe that buttoned-up fury would lessen if he had a son, thinks Volodja.
And at that very moment, with a fleeting prayer to the Virgin that the child in the belly of his brother’s wife shall be a son, he catches sight of the wolf. She is standing on the edge of the forest on the opposite side, watching them. Not far away at all. Slant-eyed and long-legged. Her coat is curly, thick for the winter. Long coarse silver strands sticking up among the curls. It feels as if their eyes meet. His brother sees nothing. He has his back to her. Her legs are really extremely long. And yellow. She looks like a queen. And Volodja is on his knees on the ice before her like the village boy he is, with wet gloves and his fur cap with the earflaps sitting askew on top of his sweat drenched hair.
Zjoltye nogi, he says. Yellow legs.
But only inside his head. His lips don’t move.
He says nothing to his brother. Alexander might grab the rifle resting against his rucksack and fire off a shot.
So he is forced to release her from his gaze and take the net line off the pole. And when he looks up again she is gone.
By the time Yellow Legs has gone three hundred meters into the forest she has already forgotten the two men on the ice. She will never think of them again. After two kilometers she stops and howls. The other members of the pack answer her, they are just a few miles away and she sets off at a steady trot. That’s the way she is. Frequently goes off on her own.
Volodja remembers her for the rest of his life. Every time he returns to the place where he saw her, he peers at the edge of the forest. Three years later he meets the woman who becomes his wife.
The first time she rests in his arms he tells her about the wolf with the long yellow legs.
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 6
The meeting about involvement in a legal and economic umbrella organization was held in the home of Bertil Stensson, the parish priest. Present were Torsten Karlsson, partner in the legal firm of Meijer & Ditzinger, Stockholm; Rebecka Martinsson, a lawyer with the same firm; the parish priests from Jukkasjarvi, Vittangi and Karesuando; the leaders of the church councils; the chairman of the joint church council and the dean, Stefan Wikstrom. Rebecka Martinsson was the only woman present. The meeting had begun at eight o’clock. It was now quarter to ten. At ten o’clock coffee was to be served to finish off the meeting.
The priest’s dining room served as a temporary conference room. The September sun was shining in through the hand-blown, uneven panes of the big barred windows. Wooden shelves full of books reached right up to the ceiling. There were no ornaments or flowers anywhere to be seen. Instead the windowsills were full of stones, some softly rounded and smooth, others rough and black with sparkling red garnet eyes. Strangely contorted branches lay on top of the stones. On the lawns and the gravel path outside lay drifts of rustling yellow leaves and fallen rowanberries.
Rebecka was sitting next to Bertil Stensson. She glanced at him. He was a youthful man in his sixties. Like a kindly uncle with a bad boy’s haircut, pale silver. Sunburn and a warm smile.
A professional smile, she thought. It had been almost comical, watching him and Torsten standing and smiling at each other. You could easily have believed they were brothers, or old childhood friends. The priest had shaken Torsten by the hand and at the same time grabbed hold of Torsten’s upper arm with his left hand. Torsten had seemed charmed. Smiled and run his hand through his hair.
She wondered if it was the priest who had brought home the stones and branches. It was usually women who did that sort of thing. Who went for walks by the sea and picked up smooth pebbles until their cardigans were dragging on the ground.
Torsten had made good use of his two hours. He’d quickly shrugged off his jacket and made sure his conversation was just personal enough. Entertaining without becoming flippant or slapdash. He’d served up the whole thing like a three-course meal. As an aperitif he’d poured a little flattery into them, things they already knew. That they had one of the wealthiest associations in the country. And one of the most beautiful. The starter consisted of small examples of areas where the church was in need of legal expertise, which was more or less
