Free The Blood Spilt by Åsa Larsson Page A

rubbish.
    Mimmi went into the kitchen.
    “Okay,” she said, “it’s definitely wacko-warning time.”
    She told him that their overnight guest had gone to bed, not in her bed in the cottage, but on the ground outside.
    “It does make you wonder,” said Micke.
    Mimmi rolled her eyes.
    “Any minute now she’ll decide she’s a shaman or a witch, move out into the forest, start brewing up herbs over an open fire and dancing around an ancient Sami monolith.”
    YELLOW LEGS
    It is Easter time. The she-wolf is three years old when a human being sees her for the first time. It’s in northern Karelia by the river Vodla. She herself has seen people many times. She recognizes their suffocating smell. And she understands what these men are doing. They’re fishing. When she was a gangly one-year-old she often crept down to the river at dusk and devoured whatever the two-legged creatures had left behind, fish guts, dace and ide.
    Volodja is laying ice nets with his brother. His brother has made four holes in the ice and they are going to lay three nets. Volodja is kneeling by the second hole ready to catch the cane his brother sends beneath the ice. His hands are wet, aching with the cold. And he doesn’t trust the ice. All the time he makes sure his skis are close by. If the ice gives way he can lie on his stomach on the skis and pull himself ashore. Alexander wants to lay nets here because it’s such a good spot. This is where the fish are. The water is fast flowing and Alexander has struck with his ice pick exactly where the bottom plunges down into the deep river channel.
    But it’s a dangerous place. If the water rises, the river eats up the ice from below. Volodja knows. The ice can be the thickness of three hand breadths one day and two fingers the next.
    He has no choice. He’s visiting his brother’s family over Easter. Alexander, his wife and two daughters are crammed together on the ground floor. Alexander and Volodja’s mother lives on the upper floor. Alexander is stuck with the responsibility for the women. Volodja himself travels all the time working for Transneft, the oil company. Last winter he was in Siberia. In the autumn in the gulf of Viborg. In recent months he’s been stuck out in the forest on the Karelian isthmus. When his brother suggested they should go out and lay nets, he couldn’t say no. If he’d refused Alexander would have gone out alone. And tomorrow evening Volodja would have been sitting at the dinner table eating fish he hadn’t bothered to help catch.
    Such is Alexander’s rage, it makes him force himself and his younger brother out onto the perilous ice. Now they’re here, the weight pressing down on Alexander’s heart seems to have eased slightly. He is almost smiling as he kneels there with his hands in the water, blue with cold. Maybe that buttoned-up fury would lessen if he had a son, thinks Volodja.
    And at that very moment, with a fleeting prayer to the Virgin that the child in the belly of his brother’s wife shall be a son, he catches sight of the wolf. She is standing on the edge of the forest on the opposite side, watching them. Not far away at all. Slant-eyed and long-legged. Her coat is curly, thick for the winter. Long coarse silver strands sticking up among the curls. It feels as if their eyes meet. His brother sees nothing. He has his back to her. Her legs are really extremely long. And yellow. She looks like a queen. And Volodja is on his knees on the ice before her like the village boy he is, with wet gloves and his fur cap with the earflaps sitting askew on top of his sweat drenched hair.
    Zjoltye nogi, he says. Yellow legs.
    But only inside his head. His lips don’t move.
    He says nothing to his brother. Alexander might grab the rifle resting against his rucksack and fire off a shot.
    So he is forced to release her from his gaze and take the net line off the pole. And when he looks up again she is gone.
    By the time Yellow Legs has gone three hundred meters