Wolf Winter Read Free

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 onhis 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 gardenpatch 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