next to the axe head, one single chop, just hard enough, in exactly the right place. She keeps hold of the legs till it stops flapping, closes her eyes so she doesn’t get feathers or anything else in them. Altogether there are ten hens and a cockerel. She doesn’t bury them. The dogs would just dig them up straightaway. She chucks them in the garbage can instead.
Lars-Gunnar Vinsa is driving home to the village in the darkness. Nalle is asleep in the passenger seat beside him. They’ve been out in the forest all day picking lingon berries. Lots of thoughts. Coming into his head now. Old memories.
All of a sudden he can see Eva, Nalle’s mother, standing in front of him. He’s just got home from work. He’s been on the evening shift and it’s dark outside, but she hasn’t put the lights on. She’s standing quite still in the darkness right next to the wall in the hallway when he walks in.
It’s such peculiar behavior that he’s forced to ask her:
“What’s the matter?”
And she replies:
“I’m dying here, Lars-Gunnar. I’m sorry, but I’m dying here.”
What should he have done? As if he weren’t tired to death as well. At work he was dealing with all kinds of misery day in and day out. Then he came home to take care of Nalle. He still can’t work out what she did all day. The beds were never made. She hardly ever cooked dinner. He went to bed. Asked her to come up with him, but she didn’t want to. The following morning, she was gone. Took nothing more than her handbag. She didn’t even think he was worth a letter. He had to clean her out of the house. Packed her bits and pieces in boxes and put them in the attic.
After six months she phoned. Wanted to speak to Nalle. He explained that it just wasn’t on. She’d only have upset the boy. He told her how Nalle had looked for her, asked about her and cried at first. But things were better now. He told her how the boy was getting on, sent her his drawings. He could see people in the village thought he was being too soft. Too indulgent. But he didn’t wish her any harm. What would that achieve?
The old biddies from social services kept on about Nalle going to a residential center.
“He can stay there from time to time,” they said. “It’ll give you some respite.”
He’d gone to have a look at their bloody residential center. Just walking through the door made you depressed. Everything was depressing. The ugliness of it all, every single object screamed “institution,” “storeroom for loonies, the retarded and the crippled.” The ornaments that had been made by the inmates-plaster casts, tiles covered in beads, vile pictures in cheap frames. And the way the staff chattered on. Their striped cotton overalls. He remembers looking at one of them. She can’t have been more than one meter fifty. He thought:
Are you going to intervene if there’s a fight?
Nalle was big, that was true, but he couldn’t defend himself.
“Never,” Lars-Gunnar said to social services.
They tried to insist.
“You need respite,” they said. “You’ve got to think about yourself.”
“No,” he’d said. “Why? Why have I got to think about myself? I’m thinking about the boy. The boy’s mother was thinking about herself, tell me what good came of that.”
They’re home now. Lars-Gunnar slows down as he approaches the entrance to his property. He checks out the yard. You can see quite well in the moonlight. In the trunk of the car is his elk rifle. It’s loaded. If there’s a police car in the yard he’ll just keep on going. If they notice him, he’ll still have a minute. Before they manage to start the car and pull out onto the road. Well, thirty seconds anyway. And that’s enough.
But there’s nothing in the yard. Highlighted against the moon he sees an owl on a low reconnaissance flight along the riverbank. He parks the car and lowers the back of his seat as far as it will go. He doesn’t want to wake Nalle. The boy will wake up anyway in an hour or so. Then they can go in and go to bed. Lars-Gunnar is just going to close his eyes for a little while.
YELLOW LEGS
Yellow Legs trots out of her own territory. She can’t stay there. Over the border into another pack’s territory. She can’t stay there either. It’s extremely dangerous. A clearly marked area. Fresh scent markings are like a barbed wire fence between the tree trunks. A wall of scents runs through the long grass sticking up through the snow; they’ve sprayed here, scratched with their back feet. But she has to get through, she has to go north.
The first day goes well. She’s running on an empty stomach. Urinates low, pressing herself to the ground so the smell won’t spread, maybe she’ll make it. She’s got the wind behind her, that’s good.
The next morning they pick up her scent. Two kilometers behind her, five wolves are sniffing at her trail. They set off after her. They take turns to lead, and soon make visual contact.
Yellow Legs senses their presence. She has crossed a river, and when she turns she can see them on the other side, less than a kilometer downstream.
Now she’s running for her life. An intruder will be killed immediately. Her tongue is hanging outside her mouth. Her long legs carry her through the snow, but there is no well-trodden track to follow.
Her legs find the tracks of a scooter, going in the right direction. The others follow it, but not so quickly.
When they are just three hundred meters behind her, they suddenly stop. They’ve chased her out of their territory, and a little bit further.
She’s escaped.
One more kilometer, then she’ll lie down. Eat some snow.
The hunger is gnawing at her stomach like a vole.
She continues her journey northward. Then, where the White Sea separates the Kola peninsula from Karelia, she turns northwest.
The early spring keeps her company. It’s hard to run.
Forest. A hundred years old and older. Conifers halfway to the sky. Naked, spindly, bare of needles almost all the way to the top. And right up there, their green, swaying, creaking arms build a roof. The sun can hardly penetrate, can’t manage to melt the snow yet. There are just patches of light and the drip of melting snow from high in the trees. Dripping, trickling, dribbling. Everything can smell spring and summer. Now it’s possible to do more than merely survive. The beat of heavy wings from the birds in the forest, the fox out of its den more and more often, the shrew and the mouse scampering along the icy crust of the snow in the mornings. And then the sudden silence as the whole forest stops, sniffs and listens to the she-wolf passing by. Only the black woodpecker continues his constant hammering on the tree trunks. The dripping doesn’t stop either. The spring is not afraid of the wolf.
Bog country. Here the early spring is a torrent of water beneath a mushy, sodden covering of snow that turns to gray slush under the slightest pressure. Every step sinks deep. The she-wolf begins to travel by night. The icy crust on the snow will bear her weight. She settles in a hollow or under a pine tree during the day. On her guard even when she’s asleep.
