Troll: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF

boulders in the summers, looking for prey. It was at most a second cousin twice removed—a gnome, the little friendly creature found in fairy stories.

ANGEL
    I lower the children’s book I’ve been reading here in the library reading-room. From his description it’s clear that Yrjö Kokko had never seen a photograph of a real troll. But the pile of books on my library table, which I’ve been scouring under the heading TROLL, show that it’s no wonder: sightings of trolls were extremely rare, and photographs rarer still, until the 1970s, when automatic cameras, hides, and weeks-long watches over carcasses became the fashion. Before that, trolls were rarely hunted: the flesh was uneatable, the carcass nauseatingly smelly. There was known to be some small market for trolls’ winter coats: in a small way the Russians went in for trapping trolls in the autumn, but it was a rather unprofitable business. The trolls very rarely fell into traps, and it was almost impossible to hunt them down with guns, for they were silent and swift night-creatures. Hunting dogs were tried but with hopeless results: either the trolls put the dogs totally off the scent, or, if they were cornered, mauled the dogs with murderous fury. A dog with a bull-terrier type temperament, the rollikoira or troll hound, much prized in Russia, does still exist. It’s a variant of the Karelian bearhunter and is said to have more than a little strain of the wolf and the husky in it. But the troll hound (its real name, I hear, is the Ladoga bloodhound) has not been used for hunting for a long time.
Also, it was no use looking for trolls, like bears, in their winter dens, for the cavities the troll seeks out for hibernation are so inaccessible that there was almost no point in looking for their breathing holes. And there was no reason to cull them for competing with human hunters on game preserves, for in winter they were completely out of the running and in summertime they were more interested in lemmings than elks. For a few years a bounty was offered for killing them because the Lapps wailed that the wolverines and staalos were rampaging among the reindeer herds, costing more than tax inspectors. But then the environmentalists and animal-rights people put an end to the hunting.
I dive even deeper into the lore. Certain Hanseatic traders were familiar with the term Spukenfell —literally “spookskin”—which referred to a rare and expensive item, as mythical as mummified mermaids and unicorns. In Russia in the early twentieth century a few trolls were successfully caught in traps, and the thick silky-black spookskin flayed from a full-sized male in its winter coat was apparently an imposing sight. One Politburo official had a spookskin hanging over the fireplace in the guest room of his dacha, with the head still attached. I’m revolted.
I again read Kokko’s description of a troll. Leaving out the size, it’s not so wide of the mark. The brown coat of fur, though, is actually pitch-black, the ears are not tufty at all, and the “funny little stumpy tail”—oh, so cute—is a lashing, tuft-ended snake, a trembling mood-antenna. A rather large nose—hmmm—perhaps it will be later when the face elongates into more of a muzzle. The mouth is not particularly big either. When it “draws back into a happy smile,” pearly-white rows of teeth are, indeed, revealed, but, however beautiful, they’re saw-edged and sharp, the canines like Turkish daggers. Its hands—the forepaws—and feet are large; in fact, considering the size of the body, rather like a lynx’s paws.And, while its fur coat has from time to time looked tangled, its head is not crowned with dangling hair. It has a huge black brush, just as if the hair-stylist who created Tina Turner’s image had a salon in the forest.
I leaf through more of Pessi and Illusia . The animals and the plants chat away like anything, and then a cutesy little girl appears, whose eyes are big and blue and