Wolf Winter (2 page)

“We need to do something,” Maija said.

Frederika had let go of her. Now it was Dorotea who was on her hip, fingertips on Maija’s shoulders, face in her collarbone. Holding this child was like holding no weight at all. She clung on. Like a little spider.

“Your uncle said there were other settlers on the mountain. We need to find them,” Maija said.

Her husband, Paavo, rubbed his forehead with his knuckle, pushed at his hat with the back of his hand, pulled it down again with two fingers. Maija’s chest tightened.

“He belongs somewhere,” she said. “This man. He belongs to someone.”

“But which glade are you talking about? I don’t know where it is,” Paavo said.

Maija put her nose in her younger daughter’s thin hair. Inhaled sunshine and salt. “I’ll go,” she said into the hair. “I’ll see if I can find anyone.”

The sun doesn’t help,
she thought, as if that excused him. Its glower made them seem brittle, beige quaking grass anticipating a storm.

They hadn’t seen anyone during the three days they’d been on Blackåsen, but surely eastward there must be others who, like them, had come from the coast. People who had been there longer than they had. Maija walked fast. Blueberry sprigs nipped at her skirt. The sun was high; her body left no shape on the ground. She noticed her nostrils were flared. That little pull of dislike that was more and more often on her face. She wrinkled her nose, relaxed her features, and slowed her pace.

“It’s not his fault,” she said to herself.

She imagined her dead grandmother, Jutta, walking beside her: the snub nose, the forward-slanting forehead, and the underbite, elbows lifted, as if she were wading through water. “It’s not his fault,” Jutta agreed. “He’s going through hard times.”

Hard times for everyone,
Maija couldn’t help thinking.

The men in Paavo’s lineage were of a weaker makeup. Fainthearted, it was often whispered back in the village. When Paavo proposed to Maija, he’d told her himself. Told her some among his family were prone to fear. It didn’t bother her. She didn’t believe in such a thing as destiny. And she had known the man in front of her ever since he was a long-haired boy pulling her braid.

“You are solid,” she said, and touched his temple.

Neither of them expected what was to come.

As soon as they were married, they started. The terrors. As if being wedded brought damnation down on him. At night Paavo threw himself back and forth. He moaned. He woke up soaking wet, smelling salty of seaweed and rank like fish.

Paavo began to avoid the edge of his boat when they pulled up the nets. She tried to warn him, said, “Don’t.” But soon her husband no longer took the boat out in the brackish bay, where herring swam in big silver clouds and the backs of gray seals were oily slicks of joy. Then he decided he did not need to accompany the other men at all. His hair darkened and he cut it short. His skin became pale. He thickened. Little by little his world shrank until he could no longer bear the sight of water in the washbasins in the house or the sound of someone slurping soup.

And that was when Paavo’s uncle, Teppo Eronen, came to visit from Sweden last spring and said, “Swap you your boat for my land.” Teppo sang of a country with ore in every mountain and rivers full of pearls, and it awoke in Paavo a desperate longing to leave the waters of Finland for the forests of Sweden.

Yes, Uncle Teppo wasn’t the shrewdest. And he told tall stories, everybody knew that, but might there still not be some truth to what he said? After all, the Swedes had tried to possess the north for
centuries. Besides, Finland was being destroyed by the war. And it might do them both good, a fresh start?

Maija’s heart felt heavy. If it wasn’t the Tsar’s soldiers hounding their coasts, burning their villages and looting, it was the Swedes, and that’s where her husband wanted to move.

“It is not easy to leave something behind, you know,” she said.

“I know that.”

“It is possible though,” she had to admit.

She put her hand to his cheek, forced him to look at her. “Then if we go, you must promise you will not take this with you.”

His face told her what he felt. He wasn’t sure a promise like that could be made. The fear might be braided in with his very fiber.

“People hang on to their past way beyond what’s necessary,” she said. “Swear you won’t take it with you.”

In a burst, he promised. And she trusted him.

The walk over the ice on the throat of the Baltic Sea ought to have taken them a few days, a week at most with the snow, but wind pressed down between the two landmasses. It lashed at their eyes with grains of ice until they couldn’t continue. They dug a hole in the drifts and lay down with their daughters, as the wind ripped layer after layer of snow off them, until all that was left was the reindeer skin they clung onto. Paavo shouted in her ear. The wind cut out his words.

“What?”

“Forgive me.” He shouted again. “… lied. … There was a boat … I couldn’t go by boat.”

And then, as fast as it had angered, the wind mellowed, leaving behind blue sky, deep green ice.

But inside Maija the wind still screamed. All those things they had left behind, and yet her husband had chosen to bring his fear.

Maija stopped to wipe her forehead with her sleeve. June warmed spruce and pine trees all the way to their cores, worked on their frozen centers until they loosened and gave and the heat could reach
into the ground along their roots, to break the frost at the deep. But for June this was hot. It was a good beginning. If it continued like this, nature would provide. Above her a high wind tugged at the crowns. At ground level all was still, a golden-green smell of resin and warm wood.

And then, instead of silence, there was the murmur of water. She began to walk again, head tilted, following the only timbres that were familiar in the midst of the woodland. And as the rumble of rapids became louder, she lengthened her steps, anticipated the opening, the air. She came out onto a large rock on the shore above a river and stopped. The water in front of her churned, screamed against stones and gushed down. She knew this, had seen it before, and yet she had never come across anything like it in her whole life. Once, he would have loved this, she thought.
No,
she could almost hear her husband say.
I never liked anything like that.

She turned right, walked alongside the river torrents until they fell into a lake, faint swells on a blank surface the only signs of the violent struggle beneath. And on the south shore, about a kilometer away, there was a cottage.

The settlement lay on a grassy hill overlooking the lake. Behind the house the forest was lofty pine, not the craggy spruce of the mountain. Maija came out in a yard surrounded by four small buildings, sheds to store wood and food for winter. There were the rhythmic whacks of an axe, and she followed them toward the back of the barn. Along the wall scythes, rakes, shovels and levers stood in a well-ordered row. She passed cages where meat must be kept to dry in early spring before the flies. Four fat graylings hung on a hook, a string through their gills, bodies still glistening, their mouths agape. This was what a homestead should look like. She hadn’t said it to the others, but she’d been shocked at the poor state in which Uncle Teppo had kept his. She walked around the corner and a man looked up. His dark hair was cropped close to his skull. There was a glitter of beard on
his cheeks and a scar on his upper lip that pulled his mouth aslant. He steadied the piece of wood on the chopping block and split it in one blow. He reached for another log on the ground.

“My name is Maija,” she said. “We’ve taken over Eronen’s land. We arrived a few days ago.”

He remained silent. His eyes lay so deep that they were like black holes under his eyebrows.

“This morning my daughters found something—someone—dead in a glade on the top of the mountain. Frederika, my elder, said his stomach was slit.”

He stared at her.

“We don’t know who he is,” she said.

The man spat on the ground and drove the axe into the block. As he walked away, his hips were stiff, as if he had to will each leg to lift. Maija took a few steps until she was standing by the chopping block. A personal thing, a chopping block. A man needed to pick one with care. This man’s was long used. You could no longer see the year-rings of the tree, so destroyed was its surface with gashes. It resembled their own back home. Their new one here was still clean and white.

He returned, holding a pack. In his other hand was a rifle. He began to walk, and she assumed she was supposed to follow.

“Has something like this happened before?” she asked his back, breath in her throat.

He didn’t respond. She kept her distance. He ought to have asked about her, her husband, their origins, but he didn’t. Above them the head of Blackåsen Mountain was round and soft—a loaf of bread on a tray in the sunshine.

The yard they came to at the mountain’s north base was as disordered as the first man’s had been tidy. Tools were scattered over the ground, a mound of planks lay along one side of the cottage, and laundry hung on a sagging clothesline. A sheep was in the garden
patch eating the weeds. There was a lethargy to it all that didn’t fit with long-term survival.

A blond man came out on the porch. He was thin and his shoulders narrow. His hair grew in a crest like a fowl’s.

The man beside Maija tensed.
They don’t know each other,
Maija thought.
Or they know each other and they don’t like each other.
He tilted his head toward her and the scar pulled his mouth large and diagonal as he spoke. “A body on the mountain.”

“What? Who?”

“Don’t know. Perhaps bring your eldest.”

The blond man opened the cottage door and said something into the opening. He was joined on the porch by a younger version of himself: the same blond wave of hair, the same bony figure, hands like large lids by his thighs.

“What did you see?” the man said. There was a grayness to his skin even though he couldn’t have been more than ten years her senior. His son had a surly look on his face. Older than Frederika, perhaps sixteen–seventeen.

“I didn’t,” she said. “My daughters found him.”

The man was still looking at her.

“I am Maija,” she said.

“Henrik,” he said.

“And who did I come here with?”

“That,” he said, staring at the back of the man who had already begun to walk away, “is Gustav.”

Henrik nodded for Maija to pass ahead of him.

“How are your daughters doing?” he asked.

“They’ll be fine.”

Dorotea was still little. She would forget. And Frederika was strong.

“Where are you staying?”

“Teppo Eronen is my husband’s uncle. He traded us his homestead for ours.”

“Oh,” Henrik said, with a tone that made her want to turn around to see his face.

“Well, Eronen’s land is good,” he added after a while. “It’s better on the south side of the mountain than here. You’ll have more sun.”

The shadow side of the mountain was full of thicket underneath the spruce trees. The ground was cool and the grass, wet. Maija pressed each foot down hard so as not to slip. Her breathing was rapid. Beneath them the river trailed all of the north side of the mountain and beyond, flexed through the green like a black muscle, or a snake. A snake shooting for the blue mountain chain at the horizon.

She didn’t know what they might find at the top of the mountain. Frederika hadn’t made much sense. But she had cried. Frederika didn’t often cry.

“I thought the girls could take the goats to that glade close to the summit,” she said, as if to explain.

“There is the marsh too,” Henrik’s son said. “But she’s treacherous. Better not send girls there.”

When they reached the summit, she hesitated. Henrik passed her. His son made as if to pass her as well, but she shook her head and walked ahead of him, in.

The glade was basking in color and light. And then she saw the man for herself.

He was ripped from throat to genitals, the body split apart, turned inside out, shaken until what was within had collapsed and fallen out on the ground.

Behind her, Henrik’s son moaned.

“Eriksson,” Henrik said.

Gustav walked to the body and knelt down.

Maija took a step to the side, her hand searching in the air for a tree trunk—something, anything.

When she looked back, Gustav’s hand was on the body. “Bear,” he said. “Or wolf.”

“Bear?” Maija asked.

But what kind of a monster would it take to do this?

“We’ll take the body to the widow,” Gustav said.

Maija thought of Dorotea, her bony chest and pouting belly, her shape still that of a baby. She thought of Frederika, the bulging vein at the base of her neck where the skin was so thin it was clear, the blue tick making her feel both joyful and frightened.
Half an hour,
she thought.
Half an hour’s walk at most to their cottage.

“We need to track it,” she said.

The men turned to her.

“We can’t have a killer bear on the loose.”