The Year of the Hare (11 page)

A
s July turned to August, Vatanen got as far as Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle. The last logs had floated down past the town, and there were fewer tourists than usual.

In the ground-floor room of Rovaniemi’s Lapland Restaurant, Vatanen met an old lumberjack, a luckless drinker named Kurko. In his youth, in the hard-bitten lumber camps of those days, Kurko had been known in Lapland as
metsien kuningas
—“the king of the forest.” This had been shortened to the nickname “Kurko,” Finnish for an evil spirit.

Kurko was grumbling about his fate: there was no work for him nowadays in the forests: too old, and a drunk besides. He ought to be seeing about an old-age pension, but that’d hardly keep a free-ranging maverick like himself going. Life was hard for an old tree-feller.

Vatanen was pondering how he could help the old man.

He managed to get a temporary job with the Lapland branch of the TVH, the Water and Forest Authority. His contract was to break up three log rafts on the Ounasjoki River, north of the village of Meltaus.

Kurko was eager to come along as partner, and they took off upriver for their job.

Once there, they winched the rafts ashore. They had rented a mechanical saw, and they began dismantling the cumbersome old rafts with iron handspikes and other tools. The work went well in the early autumn weather. They lived in a tent and did their cooking over a campfire in front of the tent. Kurko grumbled that there was nothing to drink, but otherwise he, too, was content enough with the demolition work.

People from the village wandered to the site from time to time. They marveled, in their slow northern way, at the hare. Vatanen asked the farmers not to let their dogs loose, and only rarely did the hare come tearing in from the village with a dog at its heels. When that happened, the hare dashed into the camp, leaped into Vatanen’s arms, or slipped into the tent, and the dogs had to trot back to the village, disappointed.

When two of the rafts had been dismantled and the timber stacked, Vatanen paid Kurko two weeks’ wages. At once Kurko ran off to Rovaniemi. He was away for three days. When he came back, he was dead drunk and broke, to which he was accustomed. The binge went on for another night, and it might have taken a very nasty turn, for Kurko wanted to show what a good logger he was. He went dancing along the floating logs that girdled the riverbank, missed his footing, flopped in the river, and was on the point of drowning, for he couldn’t swim. Vatanen hauled the drunken old-timer out of the chilly river and carried him to their tent. In the morning, Kurko woke up with a blinding hangover. Feeling aggrieved, he opened his mouth to complain and realized his false teeth had gone to feed the fish. Life can sink you sometimes.

A day later, Kurko was back to his usual self. He couldn’t eat anything but gruel, though, and naturally he felt the pangs of hunger. “Teach me to swim,” he begged.

Vatanen began swimming lessons the very same evening. Strip, he told him; and when Kurko was stark naked, Vatanen made him lie on his belly in the water, gripping the bank with his hands.

If it’s difficult to teach an old dog to sit, as they say, then it’s even more difficult to teach an old Lapland roué to swim. Poor old Kurko did his best, but progress was slow. Evening after evening the routine went on. Vatanen was astounded at Kurko’s dead-set persistence.

Finally, a miracle occurred.

Kurko learned to dog-paddle. The water held him up! Roars of triumph echoed around the banks when he discovered his new prowess. He was so excited, he splashed around till late evening, sometimes swimming underwater for long spells, letting the current take him and then bobbing up, snorting, yards and yards downstream. His hardened old carcass withstood the cold water well, and joy in his newfound lifestyle beamed from his wrinkly face.

“It’s Sunday tomorrow; I’ll go diving for those false teeth,” he decided. He was so besotted with swimming, he didn’t even go for the Saturday-night sauna but went on fooling around in the river.

Kurko could stay underwater for minutes. It showed the next day, when he went diving to the bottom of the Ounasjoki for his false teeth. A crowd of villagers gathered to watch him from the bank; some had come to see the hare. In general, the two demolitionists were thought rather weird, and no doubt with reason: one of them went around with a tame hare, and the other spent the whole day floundering around in the chilly river. A tourist bus pulled up at the spot, and about forty Germans came to gape at the spectacle. Someone took out an amateur camera and filmed Kurko. The guide explained to his compatriots that this was training for the coming Lapland logging competitions.

In the evening, Kurko told Vatanen he hadn’t found his false teeth but had come up with something much more valuable.

“Somewhere near midstream, it’s over thirty feet deep. I found something down there—a hundred tons at least of war gear. Twenty-odd big guns, at least one tank, some large boxes, loads of stuff. That’s what all the diving was about.... Give us five hundred and I’ll sell that junk.”

A remarkable find, and a remarkable man, this Kurko. Vatanen slipped his clothes off, picked his way over the floating logs to the river, and dived down deep. The current was very strong, and it was difficult to get to the right spot.

Kurko had not been making it up. Vatanen banged his knee on a steel snag, examined the obstacle close up, and concluded that an artillery piece was indeed lying on its side on the riverbed. Amazing that it hadn’t been discovered earlier! But the top of the gun was covered with sunken, waterlogged lumber from decades of felling.

Vatanen gave Kurko his five hundred, and the old guy left at dawn for Rovaniemi. Vatanen stayed behind and proceeded to break up the last raft alone.

Again Kurko was delayed in town: two days this time. Back again, he was drunk but happy. There was still some of the cash left; and there was booze: many a bottle of high-class brandy. Tipsily Kurko bragged: “Take a look at King Dick. Tomorrow morning you’ll see things rolling.”

This said, he was out like a light, and Vatanen had no idea what Kurko had set in motion.

In the morning, three massive trucks marked HEAVY-DUTY HAULAGE rumbled into the camp. Kurko had evidently inaugurated a mega-operation.

Disregarding his hangover, Kurko set to work. He took charge, ordering Vatanen and the truck drivers to maneuver a large winch into position between two massive red pines on the shore. It was a heavy contraption with a hauling power of twenty tons. They anchored it to the massive pine trunks with thick cables. A smaller winch, set up on the opposite shore, pulled the big winch’s tow cable into the river.

Kurko took a dive, leading the heavy end of the tow cable down with him. He was out of sight for a long time. Then he emerged, snorting. He gave a shout: “Haul away!”

The tow cable tightened; the tops of the pines swayed, but the winch’s anchorage held. The riverbank’s girdle of floating logs sank under the pressure of the cable, which slowly wound itself around the hub of the winch. A minute later, a mighty rusty howitzer rose out of the water: a six-incher. German-made. Kurko splashed to the shore in glee and took a swig of the brandy. “To warm myself up,” he explained.

The rusty weapon was hauled onto a truck and fastened down. Vatanen made a note of its weight, since the crane sported a hydraulic balance.

All day long, Kurko swam from shore to midstream and tirelessly pursued his exhausting work. Eleven pieces of heavy artillery were hauled up, a score of antiaircraft guns, one fifteen-ton tank, and many boxes of ammunition. The whole caboodle must have been dumped during the German retreat in the Lapland War, but it was amazing that the cache had not been spotted before.

“And now drive it off to Kolari Station. You’ll find the railroad cars there waiting, reserved in my name. Load this stuff on them, and here’s the bills of lading.”

Kurko handed the truck drivers a bundle of papers.

“As soon as you’ve got the stuff in the trucks, come back for the rest, even if it’s night. You’ll get the money in a week, and you can have my signature now.”

Kurko signed for the haulage costs, and the great trucks rumbled off. Vatanen had been somewhat flabbergasted by the spectacle, and he was not the only one. The people from Meltaus had heard about Kurko’s new role and were marveling at his business transactions.

The next day the last of the war materiel was hauled out of the river, and in the early afternoon the vehicles made their last trip from Meltaus to Kolari. Kurko said he’d sold the scrap metal directly to the steelworks in Koverhar, on the south coast; now all they had to do was wait till Friday, when the money would be wired to the bank in Rovaniemi. Ovako, the firm, would pay for the scrap metal only when it was on the factory rails.

A reporter from the
Lapland News
turned up, but too late. He tried, with journalistic cunning, to worm some news out of Vatanen and Kurko, but had no success. Kurko was helping Vatanen break up the last raft. The big winch had been taken away, and when the reporter asked if it was true that a hundred guns had been found in the river, Kurko chortled: “A hundred guns! You must be crazy. This is a raft disposal, not an arsenal.”

By Friday, the work on the rafts was complete and the two men were in Rovaniemi. Vatanen signed for his pay in the TVH office, and Kurko sat impatiently in the downstairs room of the Lapland Restaurant. He’d been calculating the return on his business.

“The costs were 2,870 dollars, including your five hundred. Ovako pay 8 cents a kilo at the works, and there were 96,000 kilos, or nearly 100 tons. So figure it out yourself. The whole thing should be 768,000 cents: 7,680 dollars! Take away 2,870 dollars for costs and what am I left with? A cool 4,810 dollars. Nice little sum!”

In the afternoon, the check arrived.

Kurko was so happy, he wept in the bank.

“I haven’t had money like this since 1964, when I spent three months straight felling at Kairijoki. Now, pal, I can take off ... God knows where . . . Oulu, even!”

Kurko departed.

Vatanen decided to leave town, because there was an item in the
Lapland News
: legally, weapons the Germans left behind belonged to the Allies. An army major was reported as “very surprised” to hear a rumor that “private individuals” had salvaged war materiel left behind in the Lapland retreat and had allegedly sold it for their own profit.

Vatanen folded the paper and put it aside. He wondered where Kurko was now. No doubt he’d gotten himself some new false teeth.

“Shouldn’t we be off, too?” Vatanen asked the hare, who was sitting by his feet.

And so they left Rovaniemi behind. It was already well on into August. There’d been a little snow in the morning, but it had soon melted away.

B
efore the snow set in, Vatanen took the bus to Posio, in South Lapland.

There he took a forest-thinning job five miles from the highway that crosses the deserted forest tracts north of Lake Simojärvi. It was between the Kemijoki and Simojoki rivers, a desolate watershed, but the work brought in money, and the main thing was that the hare didn’t have to live in a built-up area.

Vatanen established camp in a clump of red pines on a marsh islet at the edge of an extensive swamp. He lived in a lean-to canvas bivouac reinforced with a covering of spruce branches. Twice a week he went to Lake Simojärvi for food and cigarettes, and to borrow a few books from the local library. He spent several weeks in the Posio marshes, and he read quite a few good books during this period.

The conditions here, near the Arctic Circle, were very primitive.

The work was heavy, but Vatanen liked that. He knew he was getting stronger, and he wasn’t weighed down by the thought of having to do this work till the end of his life.

Sometimes, as the sleet came down in the failing light of evening, and he felt very tired, he reflected on his life: how different it was now from only last spring, in those days before midsummer!

Totally different!

He spoke aloud to the hare, and the hare listened religiously, without comprehending a word. Vatanen poked the campfire in front of his lean-to, watched the winter coming on, and at night slept with his ears pricked, like a wild animal.

Right at the start, in this deserted and sleety marshland, he met a setback. While he was still fixing up his frugal camp between the little floating island’s dried-up trees, the most villainous bird in the forest was settling in, too—a raven.

Scrawny, it flew several circuits of the islet with sleet-drenched wings, then, noticing no harassment, settled on a tree near Vatanen and shook off the sleet like a rheumaticky dog. It was a most melancholy sight.

Vatanen looked at the bird and felt a profound compassion for it. Everything showed that the poor, ill-shaped bird had not been having a very cheerful time of it recently: it was utterly wretched.