Wolf Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself.”
    Her story or not, Jutta told it anyway.
    “It’s the Ranta great-great-great grandfather,” Jutta said. “He visits.”
    Jutta and Frederika were sitting on a fallen birch by the lake, mending fishing nets. Nature around them was a flouncy green, but she gave nothing. The earth remained black no matter what they put into it. Their fingers working the nets were thin, like birds’ bones.
    “Oh,” Frederika said. “But he is dead?”
    Jutta looked as if she were sucking on something. “Not really,” she said. “Not enough,” she corrected herself.
    Jutta picked at the net. “Poor people … forced to provide for the King’s men, though they hadn’t enough for themselves. When peace came, they still fed the soldiers, still clothed them and housed them. Then they rebelled. Fought with what they had: clubs and iron rods. Lost, of course.”
    “What happened?”
    “The army set fire to their farms and killed them. Men they had cared for in their own homes, attacking them.” She threw her head, and the tiny white braid on her back skipped. “As for Ranta’s great-great-great grandfather, they made his sons cut a hole in the ice. Then they bundled him together with other farmers and drowned them in the hole. And ever since he haunts the adult Ranta men, generation after generation.
    “Happens close to water. They see this thin man, long hair like a horse’s mane. Eyes bluer than the sky in summer. He is tied at the waist with thick ropes to other men, and he wrestles to break out. The noises are the worst, they say. The same as by the rubble fields in the forest where the ice forced rocks and stones together. Grating. Screaming.
    “Mustn’t try to free him.” The braid skipped again. “Must let him be. He can’t hear them—that’s how scared he is. Whoever tries to help gets dragged down with him.”
    Frederika thought of her mother’s cool eyes, the way she stepped past her father, her movements brisk.
    “Does my mother know this?” she asked.
    Jutta nodded.
    “It doesn’t seem that way.”
    “Your mother knows.”
    Jutta had looked as if she might say more, but then she pressed her lips together and bent her head over the nets.
    A house-martin flew in and out from under a roof ridge above her. Sirr, Sirr, it cried. From far away on the mountain came the lone chiming of a bell. Perhaps Mirkka’s, their cow.
    “Frederika,” Dorotea called from beside the barn.
    “Yes?”
    “Does Lapland have snakes?”
    “Yes,” she called back. “Be careful.”
    “Careful, careful. Always careful,” Dorotea muttered.
    Did Lapland have snakes? Of course it did. It wasn’t far from Ostrobothnia. Yet it was worlds apart. When they arrived in Sweden, they had stayed by the coast for three long months awaiting spring. It was so close to their old home that if Frederika climbed the stone outside the cottage where they had stayed, if the weather was clear, she saw their past life across the empty white: another Frederika walking down to the pen to collect eggs, a Dorotea swinging the door open and yelling that she wanted to come, a father on the porch, wringing his hands, a mother passing with her back toward him, milk steaming in her pail. Then too sometimes the fires lit up—one, one, one—until the coast was a necklace of burning pearls. And if the wind held its breath, there it was— thump, thump, thump —the stomping of a thousand feet, growing stronger, making the earth spasm. Then the eggs were on the ground, broken, precious yellows on soil. Blue milk dripped from one stair down onto the next. She saw the family flee.
    Her mother said it was no good, fantasizing. Her father didn’t want to talk. He worked cutting logs, left before dawn and returned after nightfall. Said they needed that money to buy seeds and goats.Was certain they wouldn’t have enough to buy a cow. Lucky then that her mother convinced a merchant to give them one in exchange for their reindeer skins.
    “Barren.” The