The Year of the Hare (13 page)

Once up, he disappeared inside the canvas cover and stayed there a good quarter of an hour. Finally, he came out again, knocked the bucket against the edge of the roof to shake out the remains of the mortar, and came down.

The reindeer men said, “Morning.” They took off their skis and went inside.

In the middle of the floor stood Vatanen’s mortar-mixing trough, some boards, and various other building materials. These showed the reindeer men that nothing more remarkable was going on than repair of a chimney and a fireplace.

There was a fire burning in the fireplace, not interfering with the repair work, since the mortar dried better in the warmth. The reindeer men made some coffee on the fire. They were rounding up the remaining reindeer into the pound, they said: many herds had scattered in the forest. The construction of the Lokka artificial lake had meant less pasturage for the deer. It had messed the system up: now herding reindeer was much more difficult than before.

They had come via the cabin at Vittumainen Ghyll. Kaartinen, they said, had been living there.

They spent the night with Vatanen. After they’d gone, Vatanen was hard at work on the roof for a couple of days before the chimney was sturdy enough to last a few decades. When the mortar was dry, he removed the chimney’s tent. Then he swept the snow off the roof and began nailing new asphalt felt on top of the old, worn-out stuff. The subzero frost made the felt stiff and difficult to handle without cracking it. Vatanen had to carry boiling water onto the roof and pour it over the felt veneer, standing on the ridge. The hot water softened the asphalt, and, working quickly, he was able to spread the felt out smooth and nail it firmly to the roof.

It was a conspicuous activity: the boiling water steamed into the frosty air, enveloping everything, and floating high off in the clear sky. From a distance the site looked like a steam-driven power station or the kind of old-fashioned railroad engine that swallowed water and puffed out steam. Vatanen resembled some engineer trying to get a huge engine going under freezing conditions. The blows of his hammer were like the knockings of an engine cranking up. But the bunkhouse was no machine, nor was it going anywhere. Once, as Vatanen straightened his back and waited for the clouds of vapor to disperse, his eye fell on the far slope of the gorge below. There were tracks leading up to the tangled thickets on its far side. Something had been walking there.

Vatanen got down from the roof, took his rifle, and climbed back up. Now the steam had dispersed and he could see clearly through the telescopic sight. He pressed the gun to his cheek and took a long look at the opposite slope, occasionally giving his eye a rest. Finally, when his eyes were beginning to water, he lowered the weapon.

“It can’t be anything but a bear.”

He went down into the cabin, ushered in the hare, and started cooking. He pondered: Now I’ve got a hibernating bear as a neighbor.

The hare fidgeted around the room. It always did that when it noticed its master had something on his mind.

At first light, Vatanen skied across the gorge to look at the tracks more closely. The hare sniffed them and began to tremble with fear. No question, a bear had been there, and a big one. Vatanen followed the tracks to a treeless slope and, farther on, to a dense thicket of pines and fire. He skied a wide circle around the thicket but didn’t see any emerging tracks. So the bear was in the thicket, and now he’d skied all the way, around it. Quite clearly, the bear had made a den for itself in the thicket and was sleeping heavily.

Vatanen skied into the thicket. The hare didn’t dare follow him, even though Vatanen tried to coax it in a low voice. It remained on the open slope, looking insecure.

The bear had wandered around in the thicket, searching, no doubt, for a suitable lair. Difficult to know where it was. Vatanen had to ski deeper among the trees. Then he saw a tree that had been felled by the wind; the bear had crept under it. Not much snow had fallen on the lair as yet, and a little vapor was trailing up from under the tree trunk. So that was where it was lying.

Vatanen silently turned his skis and glided out of the thicket onto the treeless slope, where the hare hopped up joyously to greet him.

Back at the bunkhouse, Vatanen realized he had a visitor. Factory-made cross-country skis were leaning against the cabin wall. Inside sat an athletic-looking young man in skiing clothes. He offered his hand in greeting—a somewhat odd custom in Lapland. It was Kaartinen, whom Vatanen had heard so much about.

Kaartinen was entranced with the hare. He tried to stroke it and pat it, and Vatanen had to ask him to stop because the hare didn’t like being petted. It was apparently shy with the man, though it didn’t usually fear visitors if Vatanen was present.

Kaartinen said he was setting up a six-mile ski trail from the cabin at Vittumainen Ghyll to here at Läähkimä Gorge. He produced two rolls of plastic tape from the inside pocket of his ski jacket, one red, one yellow, which he was going to use to mark out a trail for tourists. A group of official visitors was coming for a backwoods holiday even before Christmas: that was the work of the minister for foreign affairs. Several dozen VIP guests were coming, and the press, too.

Kaartinen offered to buy the hare: first he offered twenty-five dollars, then fifty, and finally a hundred. Vatanen was certainly not going to sell; he was almost incensed at the ski instructor’s offer.

Kaartinen stayed the night. Vatanen’s thoughts were occupied with the bear, and it was quite a while before he got to sleep. When he did drop off, his sleep was all the sounder.

In the morning, Vatanen woke to find himself alone. There was no sign of either the hare or Kaartinen. Kaartinen’s skis were not outside, and there were no fresh hare tracks.

How? Why? In a rage, Vatanen leaped onto his skis, pushed off along Kaartinen’s tracks, but came back almost at once, lifted the gun off its nail, and started out again. What the reindeer men had said about sacrificing was going through his head. Vatanen went like the wind.

He swept up to Vittumainen Ghyll, puffing and blowing. He was in a sweat, steaming, his eyes smarting with sweat, and black rage was burning in his breast. By the Ghyll stood what was, in effect, a handsome country hostel, a log house big enough for a hundred people at least.

Vatanen kicked off his skis and wrenched open the door. Kaartinen was at a table by the window, just having coffee.

“Where’s the hare?”

Kaartinen backed to the wall, staring in a funk at Vatanen, who was gripping a rifle. Terrified, Kaartinen stammered out that he knew nothing about the hare. He’d left so early, he hadn’t had the heart to awaken his host, who was sleeping so soundly. That was all.

“You’re lying! Give me that hare, and quick!”

Kaartinen fled into a corner. “What would I be doing with it?” he protested.

“The hare!” Vatanen roared. When Kaartinen still refused to admit anything, Vatanen lost control. He flung his weapon on the table, strode across to Kaartinen, grabbed him by the lapels, and lifted him against the wall.

“Kill me if you like,” Kaartinen spluttered. “You won’t get the hare.”

Vatanen became so enraged, he dropped the man from the wall, flung him into the middle of the room, and gave him a cracking blow on the chin. The luckless ski instructor went flying full-length across the cabin floor. There was silence, broken only by Vatanen’s panting.

Another sound became audible. A faint scratching and quiet thumping was coming through the kitchen safety vent. Vatanen ran outside, then in through the kitchen door, and wrenched open a cupboard door. Onto the floor rolled a hare, its feet tied together—Vatanen’s hare!

Vatanen cut the strings with his sheath knife and returned to the other room with the hare in his arms. Kaartinen was just coming to.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Vatanen demanded threateningly.

Then Kaartinen told his story. It was long, and not a little bizarre.

He had grown up, he said, in a very devout atmosphere: his pious parents were determined to bring up their son as a priest. When he passed his university entrance exam, he was sent to the University of Helsinki, in the theological faculty. But his studies there didn’t chime with his sensitive youthful scrupulousness: he was not as convinced by the Lutheran doctrine as he ought to have been. Doubt gnawed at him; his theological studies seemed alien. It alarmed him to think that one day, himself troubled by skepticism, he’d nevertheless have to preach the word of God to the faithful. Thus, disregarding his parents’ religious sentiments, he broke off his theological studies and enrolled at the Kemijärvi Teachers’ Training College. There, too, he tangled with Lutheranism, but the presence of Jesus was not as overpowering. Kaartinen qualified as an elementary school teacher.

While still at the teachers’ college, in a muddle of shifting notions about what was real, he hunted for his true identity in literature. He was fascinated by Tolstoyism, but the charm of that faded with time. Then he turned to Oriental religions, particularly Buddhism, whose study went deepest with him. He was even planning a trip to Asia, to visit the centers of the faith, but his parents, who certainly weren’t going to countenance pagan notions, refused travel money, and Kaartinen’s Oriental leanings gradually diminished through force of circumstance.

In his first and only teaching post, Kaartinen became interested in anarchism. He ordered anarchistic French works for the school library in Liminka and, with the help of a dictionary, pored over them. He put the ideas sufficiently into practice so the school authorities relieved him of his duties at the end of the spring term. The following summer, no longer a teacher, he renounced his disastrous anarchistic ideology and enthusiastically immersed himself in ancient Finnish culture, in his own roots. He waded through dozens of works inspired by the exalted ideal of promoting Finnishness. That summer of study led him, as autumn drew on, into a deep insight into the prehistory of the Finnish people. The more he immersed himself in the thought world of his forefathers, the more convinced he became that he’d finally found what he’d been feverishly searching for all those years: he’d hit upon the faith of his ancestors, the true religion of a true Finn.

Now he’d been practicing his faith for years. In rapture, he expounded it for Vatanen. He told of forest spirits, earth spirits, the god of thunder, stone idols, the primal forest’s shaman-seers, spells, sacrificial offerings. He introduced Vatanen to ancient religious rites and rituals and revealed that he himself had adopted the thousand-year-old sacrificial practices of his ancestors. Since becoming a northern ski instructor, Kaartinen had enriched his Finno-Ugrian religious ideas with Lappish notions, and when alone in the wild, he celebrated all those rites. Urban life, he said, made the practice of religion impossible.

Near the headwaters of Vittumainen Ghyll, at the edge of a little pond, he had carved his own fish god, using a mechanical saw. It was a stone idol, resembling those of the Lapps. Outside the tourist seasons he worshipped it. At the center of the god’s sacred circle he had set up a sacrificial stone for burnt offerings. There it was his practice to immolate living creatures—sometimes a Siberian jay trapped in a net, sometimes a snared willow grouse, even a puppy bought in Ivalo. This time he had wanted to make an offering of a true wild animal from the forest—Vatanen’s hare—and when Vatanen hadn’t agreed to sell it, Kaartinen was left with a single way of propitiating his gods: he had to steal it from its master.

In his new life, he claimed, he was living a very rich, balanced, and full existence. He felt that the old gods were pleased with him, and that there were no other gods. He wished this same wonderful peace of mind for Vatanen; they should join forces, and, communing together, sacrifice the hare to the gods.

After this long account of Kaartinen’s religious pilgrimage, Vatanen consented to overlook the incident; but he also insisted Kaartinen swear to stay well away from the hare in the future, and particularly where his religious concerns were in mind.

That evening, when Vatanen slowly skied back from Vittumainen Ghyll to Läähkimä Gorge, accompanied by his hare, he ceased to think about Kaartinen’s strange world. There was a half moon, and the stars were glimmering faintly in the frozen evening. He had his own world, this one, and it was fine to be here, living alone, in his own way. The hare ambled silently along the trail ahead of the skier, like a pathfinder. Vatanen sang to it.

V
atanen felled several stout pines near the corner of the bunkhouse, sawed them to the right length, whittled them into building logs with his ax, hoisted the substructure of the cabin with a long lever, knocked out rotten logs, and fitted the new ones in their place. A handsome wall resulted.

For the hare, he felled several aspens from a pondside and hauled them into the yard. The simple creature busied itself with them all day, as if it, too, had its building work to get on with. At any rate, the aspens turned white as the hare ate the bark.