Wolf Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

the lantern and turned to loosen the ropes and fold the canvas aside. Its insides were stained brown, and the smell of decay struck Maija again, filled her mouth with a coppery tang, as if she tasted the man’s blood. The priest covered his face with his arm. Elin tucked the canvas underneath the edges of the body. Holding together. She was trying to hold together what had once been a husband and a father, a life.
    A wave of nausea or sorrow flooded Maija, and she had to open her mouth wide. She handed the lantern back to Elin, took off her kerchief, and tied it around her nose and mouth. The skin on the dead man’s face hung loose. There was a bundled-up rag under his chin to keep his mouth closed, a stone on each eyelid. Death came in many shapes. Though bad, this was not the worst Maija had seen it.
    She sensed the woman on the other side of the table. I don’t know what you want me to do, she thought. Wolf attacked and … she stopped. Elin nodded. Maija stepped closer. With her finger, she picked Eriksson’s frayed shirt out of the wound and bent to look.
    “Do you have water?” she asked. “And a cloth.”
    Elin put the lantern on the table and disappeared from its circle of light. She came back with a bowl and a rag. Maija washed the dry blood off the skin on both sides of the open cavity. She paused. She lifted Eriksson’s heavy hands, first one and then the other, looked in the coarse palms. There was a small red mark, like a burn, on the side of his right index finger; otherwise nothing. She pushed what was left of his shirt up to see his shoulders and his throat. She removed the stones from his eyelids, signaled to Elin, and they pushed the body onto its side. The back of his neck was black from the blood that had settled there. But the shirt on his back was whole.
    They lowered the body down. Maija lifted his right hand again to see the mark on his finger. She looked at Elin. Elin shook her head; she didn’t know. No, it was an everyday wound. The kind that normally wasn’t noticed. Some seeds had caught on Eriksson’s shirtsleeve. Maija scraped them down into her hand. They looked almost like dry pine needles, but denser and with a grayish tint. She smelled them, and even amidst the odor of death, these managed a scent fragrant enough to prickle her nose. Herbs? She took one between her front teeth and bit it. Its taste was sharp, bitter.
    Elin bent to see. She took a couple of the seeds, rubbed them, and smelled her fingers, then shook her head again. “Not from here around,” she said.
    Over Elin’s shoulder Maija’s eyes met the priest’s blue ones. She nodded to Elin and stepped away. Elin handed her the lantern and folded the canvas back over the body.
    Once, back in Ostrobothnia, Maija had seen gray-legs attack. It was winter, in the middle of the day. She’d been fishing for pike through a hole in the lake ice. She tugged at the fishing line with small jerks, willed the fish to bite. There was sun. It was quiet. On the other side of the lake a deer skipped across the ice. Maija dropped the line and stepped on it before it slipped down the hole. When she squatted to pick it up, they came. Five of them, a leaden streak over snow. Yellow teeth, footsteps within footsteps, total silence. Then one of them dived in, head low. The deer staggered. The others leapt in. She remembered her surprise when the sound of flesh being torn was no louder than that of cloth being ripped.
    And as for bear …
    Elin bound the ropes around the remains of her husband, and Maija stood there and knew that although she had never seen a man dead from a bear attack before, she wasn’t looking at one now either. This body lacked the marks of a man protecting himself. There were no tears from claws or teeth, only this clean, vertical rip. Even to her untrained eye, this was not a bear’s kill.
    They were sitting on the porch. The priest had gone to wash his hands. Elin’s face was pale. Maija could not see the