A large trout came swimming up from the bottom and passed right near where I was floating, its body slowly undulating, as though it were showing off its handsome scales. Golden sunlight filtered down, glinting brightly off the fish’s belly. It was so pretty that I decided not to tell the boys. The trout sank again below me, swimming majestically away upstream. It occurred to me that the fish must be some powerful being that inhabited the river, and it made me happy to think that I was the only one who had caught a glimpse of it.
I climbed up on the bank and let the bright sun warm my chilled body for a few minutes, and then we all headed off on a walk downstream. Branches had fallen from the trees and were floating in the river. The boys fished out two that had been smoothed in the water and used them for a swordfight. The girls wandered slowly along the bank, searching for oddly shaped rocks and pretty pebbles. Adju found one that was snow white. It was so pure it seemed almost translucent, like a piece of smoky glass. “Maybe it’s a gemstone,” she said, and I thought she might be right. Hejdanatt and I were a bit jealous of her discovery and began searching more carefully among the stones on the shore, but neither of us could find anything like the white jewel.
Before long we realized it was lunchtime, so we climbed up from the river and walked back to the village. My mother and father had returned from work for lunch, and the smell of grilling fish wafted from the house. After promising to continue our adventures in the afternoon, we went our separate ways.
My mother was in the kitchen stirring a pot of soup, while my father sat on the sofa in the living room finishing the newspaper he had started this morning. I decided to interrupt his reading by climbing onto his lap.
Then we waited a long while, stomachs growling with hunger, for Olle to come home from soccer. I suggested we eat without him, but my father said we must wait, so I was forced to simply imagine how delicious the fish and soup and all the rest would taste.
But at last it became apparent that Olle was really much later than usual. What could have happened to him? I would have liked to go look for him at school, but the walk there took more than an hour, which was beyond my strength, especially since I had eaten nothing since morning. I was so weak I doubted I could rise from my chair.
I caught sight of Nulla and the others outside our window. Hejdanatt came to the door and called for me. I barely managed to drag myself over to meet her.
“Let’s go,” she said. I just shook my head, unable to speak. “Haven’t you eaten yet?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “We haven’t even started. Olle’s not back from school and we have to wait for him.”
“He must have stopped off somewhere on the way home,” Hejdanatt said.
“I suppose so,” I said. But I doubted he’d have lingered long if he were as hungry as I was. He was usually so prompt when it came to meals.
“You should go ahead without me,” I told Hejdanatt. “I’ll come along once I’ve eaten. Where do you think you’ll be?”
“You know,” said Hejdanatt, ignoring my question, “for some reason I think Olle may have gone to the Western Forest. It’s right on the way home from school, almost like a shortcut. Maybe he tried to go through.”
This thought took my breath away. The Western Forest? Hejdanatt was right that it stood between our village and the school. Our normal route went far out of the way to steer clear of the forest. But there was a path—a narrow and dark one—that went straight through. The grown-ups sometimes took it, and the boys too, as a test of courage if there were several in a group, but we girls never went that way.
Had Olle, in his hurry to get home, gone that way alone? If he had, perhaps the monster we’d heard about had got him! I stood there in the doorway, terrified, even forgetting how hungry I was.
Hejdanatt tried to reassure me, insisting he would be home soon, but I could only shake my head. “If he were coming home, he’d be here by now,” I told her. I knew he would never skip a meal if he had a choice. I turned to see my father get up from the kitchen table and go into the living room to telephone the school.
“Is Olle still there?” he asked. Hejdanatt and I watched for any change in his expression. He listened for a moment, gripping the phone tightly. “I see,” he said. “Thank you.” Then he put down the receiver.
“Is he still playing soccer?” I asked him, but he just shook his head.
“They said practice ended quite some time ago and everyone has gone home.” Before these words were out of his mouth, a shiver went through my body. I was sure now that he had taken the road through the forest and that the monster had caught him.
But I wasn’t about to tell my mother and father what I was thinking. I knew how much they loved Olle, and if they thought he’d been captured by a monster, cut into pieces, and carried away to some secret spot in the forest, they would have gone mad with grief. I didn’t want to cause them such terrible pain.
But what was I to do? The rumors said that the monster cut up the children but didn’t kill them right away. Instead he took them deep into the forest to
