Out Stealing Horses Read Free Page A

said.
    'I was just eighteen,' he said. 'It's long ago, but I shall never forget it.'
    'Then I can well understand why you will never shoot a dog again,' I said.
    'We'll see about that/ said Lars Haug. 'But now I'd better take this one inside. It is late. Come, Poker/ he said, his voice sharp now, and started to walk down the road. Poker followed him obediently, some metres behind. When they came to the little bridge, Lars Haug stopped and waved his torch.
    'Thank you for the company/ he said through the darkness. I waved my torch and turned to walk up the gentle slope to the house and opened the door and went into the lighted hall. For some reason I locked the door behind me, something I have not done since I moved out here. I did not like doing it, but all the same I did. I undressed and lay down in bed under the duvet staring at the ceiling waiting for the warmth to come. I felt a bit foolish. Then I closed my eyes. At some point while I was asleep it started to snow, and I am sure I was aware of it, in my sleep, that the weather changed and grew colder, and I knew I feared the winter, and I feared the snow if there was too much of it, and the fact that I had put myself in an impossible position, moving here. So then I dreamt fiercely about summer and it was still in my head when I woke up. I could have dreamt of any summer at all, but I did not, it turned out to be a very special summer, and I still think of it now when I sit at the kitchen table watching the light spread above the trees by the lake. Nothing looks as it did last night, and I cannot think of a single reason for locking the door. I am tired, but not as tired as I expected to be. I will last until evening, I know I will. I get up from the table, a little stiff, that back is not what it used to be, and Lyra, by the stove, raises her head and looks at me. Are we going out again? We are not, not yet. I have enough to do, thinking about this summer, which begins to trouble me. And that it has not done for many years.

2

    WE WERE GOING OUT STEALING HORSES. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and one of the first days of July. Three years earlier the Germans had left, but I can't remember that we talked about them any longer. At least my father did not. He never said anything about the war.
    Jon came often to our door, at all hours, wanting me to go out with him: shooting hares, walking through the forest in the pale moonlight right up to the top of the ridge when it was perfectly quiet, fishing for trout in the river, balancing on the shining yellow logs that still sailed the current close to our cabin long after the clearing of the river was done. It was risky, but I never said no and never said anything to my father about what we were up to. We could s'ee a stretch of the river from the kitchen window, but it was not there that we did our balancing acts. We always started further down, nearly a kilometre, and sometimes we went so far and so fast on the logs that it took us an hour to walk back through the forest when at last we had scrambled onto the bank, soaking wet and shivering.
    Jon wanted no company but mine. He had two younger brothers, the twins Lars and Odd, but he and I were the same age. I do not know who he was with for the rest of the year, when I was in Oslo. He never talked about that, and I never told him what I did in the city.
    He never knocked, just came quietly up the path from the river where his little boat was tied up, and waited at the door until I became aware that he was there. It never took long. Even in the morning early when I was still asleep, I might feel a restlessness far into my dream, as if I needed to pee and struggled to wake up before it was too late, and then when I opened my eyes and knew it wasn't that, I went directly to the door and opened it, and there he was. He smiled his little smile and squinted as he always did.
    'Are