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in its familiar spot under the shed stairs. The shed had been painted, and the new layer of brown had completely hidden Frida’s scratch marks. She never existed for the Hakkarainens—only my uncle and I ever knew that we had been hosts to a female lynx for a couple of years. There was that one time when Matti had commented on the strong smell of urine in our yard, but Uncle Jari had convincingly blamed it on the dogs who were allowed to run off-leash in the area.
    I was eight when Frida came into our lives, in July of 1984. I remember that evening vividly. It began with Uncle Jari getting a phone call that obviously made him upset.
    “Goddamned Kauppinen,” he cursed under his breath while looking for his coat. “You’ll need to tuck yourself in tonight. You can manage, right? I’ll be back as soon as I take care of something.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing children should worry about. Get the macaroni casserole leftovers and heat them up in a pan. Remember to add enough butter so that it doesn’t burn, and don’t forget to turn off the gas,” Uncle Jari instructed. He packed up a couple sandwiches and some blueberry juice from concentrate to take with him. He touched my cheek quickly, grabbed both his hunting rifle and a shotgun, and was out the door.
    The account of how he found Frida was one of my favorite bedtime stories, although Uncle Jari was ashamed for having played a role in it. There was a chicken farm several miles from us, and its owner, Kauppinen, had long suspected that a lynx had been casually snacking on his free-range chickens right from his yard. He’d even seen a lynx nearby. Kauppinen had a devilish dog—a spitz/Karelian bear dog mix—that he usually kept in the yard on a leash, but today he’d let the dog roam free. It had picked up the lynx’s scent and chased it to its hole, and Kauppinen had called Uncle Jari and a couple of other men who weren’t too concerned about shooting an animal outside of the official hunting season, which for lynx was between December and February. The chicken thief needed to go now.
    The lynx had a den in some woods an hour away in Maarianvaara. When Uncle Jari finally made it there, the other men had taken the dog back home, and my uncle saw Kauppinen, Hakkarainen, and Seppo Holopainen lying in wait for the lynx right at the hole. Uncle Jari didn’t get along with Seppo. The men stuck around waiting for the lynx. It must have been starving—why else would it be on the move while it was still daylight? The animal would eventually have to peek out of the hole, and when it did, it was Uncle Jari’s task to prevent it from going back in.
    Around three in the morning, the lynx finally appeared. It was a female, thin and small; although Uncle Jari hesitated when he saw her, he still jumped to block her way. She panicked and ran toward the forest, then came to a sudden halt when she smelled Holopainen, who had been fortifying himself with booze. He aimed and hit a tree stump. The lynx turned back toward the hole. Uncle Jari got a good look into her terrified eyes.
    “I couldn’t shoot, even if just one shot would have ended it there. She was so beautiful,” my uncle would recollect later.
    Kauppinen screamed and cursed, and Holopainen shot again and missed. Kauppinen landed the first hit: he shot the lynx in the hip. She tried to run away, but collapsed at Hakkarainen’s feet. He killed her.
    After binding the lynx’s feet and hanging her from a tree branch, the other men started to fight about whose wife would be the lucky recipient of a nice lynx stole. They were ready to go home and celebrate with a drink. But Uncle Jari had dropped his compass, and he stayed behind to look for it.
    “I had no desire to go to Kauppinen’s place to party. I felt as if I had murdered someone, and I regretted even going out there to help them. When I found my compass near the lynx, I heard the most pathetic sound. A tiny lynx cub, probably the runt of the litter, peeked out