Free Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Anne Born

the car if it gets really cold. It is six kilometres to the district Co-op. And enough wood for the stove is important. There are two panel heaters in the house, but they are old and probably eat up more electricity than they give out heat. I could have bought a couple of modern oil-filled radiators on wheels, the type you can plug straight into the power point and pull around as required, but my idea is that the heat I cannot produce myself, I will have to do without. Luckily there was a large pile of old birchwood in the outhouse when I came here, but that is not nearly enough, and it's so dry that it will burn up fast, so a few days ago I cut down a dead spruce with the chainsaw I bought, and my current project is to cut up the spruce and split it into usable logs and stack them all on top of the old wood before it is too late. I have already dug deep into that birchwood pile.
    The chainsaw is a Jonsered. Not that I think Jonsered is the best brand, but they only use Jonsereds round here, and the man I bought it from at the machine workshop in the village said they wouldn't touch any other make if I brought him a broken chain and wanted it repaired. It's not a new saw, but it has been overhauled recently and has a brand new chain, and the man seemed quite determined. So Jonsered rules here. And Volvo. I have never seen so many Volvos in one place; from the latest luxury models to old Amazons, more of the latter than the former, and I saw an old PV model too, in front of the post office, in 1999. That ought to tell me something about this place, but I'm not sure what, except that we are quite close to Sweden, and to inexpensive spare parts. Maybe it's as simple as that.

    I get into the car and drive off. Down the road and across the river, past Lars' cottage and out onto the main road through the forest, and I see the lake sparkling through the trees on the right until suddenly it is behind me, and then it's across an open plain of yellow, long-since harvested fields on both sides. There are large flocks of crows flying over the fields. They make no sound in the sunlight. At the other end of the plain a sawmill lies beside a river, wider than the one I can see from my house but flowing into the same lake. Formerly it was used for rafting, which is why the sawmill is situated where it is, but that is long ago, and the sawmill could have been anywhere, because timber is all transported by road nowadays, and it's no joke to meet one of the heavily laden trucks with trailers on a bend in a narrow country road. They drive like the Greeks do and use the horn instead of braking. Only a few weeks ago I had to drive into the ditch, the colossal brute thundered past me well into my lane, and I just wrenched the wheel over, and maybe I closed my eyes for a second for I thought my hour had come, but only the glass of my right indicator was smashed on a tree-stump. I sat there a long time, though, with my forehead against the wheel. It was almost dark, the engine had stopped, but my lights were on, and when I lifted my head from the wheel, I saw the lynx brightly outlined only fifteen metres in front of the car. I had never seen a lynx before, but I knew what it was that I was looking at. The evening was perfectly still around us, and the lynx turned neither to right nor left. It just walked. Softly, not wasting energy, filled with itself. I can't recall when I last felt so alive as when I got the car onto the road again and drove on. Everything that was me lay taut and quivering just beneath my skin.
    Next day at the shop I told them about the lynx. It was most likely a dog, they said. No-one believed me. No-one I saw that day had ever seen the lynx, so why should I, who had lived there barely a month, be blessed with such a thing? If I had been one of them I might have thought the same, but I saw what I saw, I have the image of the big cat somewhere inside me and can call upon it whenever I like, and I hope that one day, or just as