Wolf Winter Read Free Page B

roots under her feet in all the other that yielded. The marsh water was not always black. Sometimes it wore a large sheet of silver. Sometimes it mirrored what was above. Then the sun came out and it pretended to be blue.
    On the other side of the swamp the ground was dry, rosy with Lapp heather.
    “Why did the boy say the mountain took him?” she asked.
    Gustav bent down to study the twigs on the ground.
    The sun edged over the sky. The heat changed and the air became tight. It pressed two thumbs against her temples. She would get a headache. At this time of year light won over time. Only the change in sounds and the detachment of the sun told her that evening had fallen, and then when night had come.
    “Are the tracks easy to follow?” she asked.
    Gustav stopped. He waited so long before answering she assumed he wouldn’t.
    “Yes,” he said at last. “He’s not trying to hide.”
    “How long ago?”
    “The tracks are a few days old.”
    He rubbed his chin. “We’ll stop here,” he said. “The beast is long gone.”
    Yet they stood for a while and stared in among the trees before them.
    When they turned around, clouds were building a stack at the horizon. There would be a storm. Milk-blue and sickly yellow, the clouds swelled and stirred, like unfinished business.

“I hate this,” the priest said out loud.
    He kicked at a tree, and a branch swung and smacked him on his bare leg under the cloak. “Good Lord in heaven,” he said.
    He didn’t say anything more. It was his one chance that God or the bishop would have mercy on him and return him south. He had to be careful.
    Here he was, roaming the forests to make sure the settlers’ names and those of their spawn were registered in the Church Book. The region had a town, at least in name. Surely newcomers ought to think to go there before they set out to make their mark on the wilderness. And thinking you could make a mark on these wastelands—preposterous.
    He was overcome by a yawn and felt how tired he was. It was most likely evening—impossible to tell time with all this light. He chose a large spruce tree and crawled on all fours in beneath it, wrapped his cloak closer, listened to the ticking and croaking in the forest and didn’t like it. He should have known to dress better. Summer here was summer only in name. Though the cool weather meant fewer mosquitoes. He could pretend he had not heard of the new settler family on their way to Eronen’s old homestead, he thought. There was an owl’s call, and he tensed. Nothing more.
    Better to think of singing stone towers. Of natives in bright wide trousers and turbans shuffling around them in pointed shoes. Of dinner conversations with the young King that could at any point end with their horses racing down roads gleaming in the moonlight. “I dare you.” “You dare me?” As the court priest, he had been invincible, or so he’d thought. But he had paid for thinking thus. The Church had seen to that.
    There was a violent cracking of branches. The priest sat up, his back pressed against the tree. Something tore through the forestbefore him. There was a rumbling growl and a black shape between the trunks, then silence.
    An animal.
    He must have fallen asleep.
    Elk?
    No, it ran too fast.
    When all had been silent for a long time, he stood up. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep more, so he might as well continue his journey. He glanced over his shoulder twice as he walked, but there were only trees.
    At a bend in the river he became uncertain of the way and slowed down. He had been at Blackåsen one time only for the Catechetical meeting—pointless affair—the peasants dressed in their best rags, hair combed with sugar water, ears scrubbed hot and red. Him noting in the Church Book while focusing on producing beautiful handwriting: Some reasoning, Lazy, Weak intelligence. He couldn’t remember having passed this place. Here, the river had slowed. It more resembled a tarn than something that was