Out Stealing Horses Read Online Free PDF Page B

with an open mouth, and from that mouth came sounds that made my blood run cold, I had never heard anything like it; throaty noises like an animal I had never seen and had no wish to see. He opened his hand again and slammed his palm against the tree trunk and rubbed it on the bark, and small flakes fluttered down, and finally all that was left was a smear I couldn't look at. I closed my eyes and kept them shut, and when I opened them again Jon was a good way down. He almost slid from branch to branch, I looked straight down at his unruly brown hair, and he did not once look up. For the last few metres he just let himself drop, and he landed on firm ground with a thud I heard right up where I was sitting, and then he fell on his knees like an empty sack and beat his forehead on the ground, and stayed there huddled up for what seemed an eternity, and for the whole of that eternity I held my breath without stirring. I didn't understand what had happened, but I felt it was my fault. I just didn't know why. At last he stood up stiffly and started to walk down the path. I let my breath out and drew it slowly in again, there was a whistle in my chest, I heard it clearly, it sounded like asthma. I knew a man who had asthma, he lived just up our street in Oslo. It sounded like that when he breathed. I've got asthma, I thought, shit, that's how you get asthma. When something happens. And then I started to climb down, not as fast as Jon, more as if each branch was a landmark I had to hold on to a long time so as not to miss one single thing that was important, and the whole time I thought about breathing.
    Was it then the weather changed? I think it was. I stood on the path, Jon was nowhere to be seen, vanished down the way we had come, and suddenly I heard a rushing sound above me in the trees. I looked up and saw the tops of the spruces sway and whip against each other, I saw tall pines bend in the wind, and I felt the forest floor sway beneath my feet. It was like standing on water, it made me dizzy, and I looked around me for something to hold on to, but everything was moving. The sky, which just npw had been so transparently blue, was steely grey with a sickly yellow light over the ridge on the other side of the valley. And then there was a violent flash over the ridge. It was followed by a crash I could feel all over my body, I sensed the temperature dropping, and my arm began to hurt where the barbed wire had cut it. I started walking as fast as I could, almost running, down the path we had come up, towards the horse paddock. When I was there I looked over the fence and in through the trees, but there were no horses that I could see there now, and for a moment I thought of taking the short cut across the clearing, but then instead I went along the fence on the outside, for the full circuit until I met the path to the road. I turned left there and started to run down, and the wind had stopped, the forest was breathlessly still, and the newly discovered asthma had my chest in a fierce grip.
    Then I was standing on the road. The first drops hit my forehead. I caught sight of Jon further down. He had not been running, he was too close for that, and he was not walking fast, he was not walking slowly either. He just walked. I thought maybe I should call to him and ask him to wait, but I was not sure I had the breath in me. Besides, there was something about his figure that made me hold back, so I started to walk after him and kept the same distance between us the whole way, up past Barkald's farm where now the windows were brightly lit against the dark sky above, and I wondered if he was standing inside watching us and knowing where we had been. I looked up in the air hoping that the few drops I had felt would be just that, but then there was another flash above the hills and a crash at the same moment. I had never been afraid of thunder, and I wasn't afraid now, but I knew that when lightning and thunder came so close together it