Free Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck Page B

known the rot of July—the smell of death that hovered over everything. You couldn’t finish your dinner; you thought you’d save it for breakfast, and in the morning it was unrecognizable. Made your stomach quiver to think you had ever eaten that. Yes, month of rot, harvest, and then winter.
    “Be careful,” Lisbet said when Maija left, her eyes large. “Don’t let your children out on their own.”
    As she came home, Mirkka was there, although it was only afternoon. Maija walked close to her. She hung her arms across the back of the cow, felt the soft hair and warm skin against her cheek, smelled grass and animal, a trace of manure.
    “There was a hearing for sorcery here too,” she told the cow. “Would you have believed it?”
    Perhaps that was why the others had said it was wolf that killed Eriksson. Wise people were afraid of fear. Maija thought of Lisbet’s warning and felt her heart shrink. It was hard not to get caught in the webs of other people’s fears, especially if it concerned your children. But that’s when you had to remain level-headed and remind yourself you knew otherwise. Protect and preserve, she thought, as always when something concerning her children was too difficult even to contemplate. She sent the thought, perhaps to a God. Protect my children and preserve them the way they are now, unspoiled by the rest of us.
    “Lucky, lucky we found you,” she said and patted the cow’s flank. “Little Mirkka.”
    And she thought of milk and butter all winter long.

Sometimes when you had a thought, it refused to leave. You rejected it, disowned it, sent it away, to find, moments later, that you were still spending time with it. It might have a different shape or use different words, but there was no mistaking: it was the same one. It happened to her mother all the time, and her mother grew distracted and ill-tempered. Then her father noticed, and worry lines grew deep on his face. Now Frederika knew how her mother must feel. As soon as she relaxed the slightest, Eriksson’s body was before her, the image jolting her like a penknife prick in her chest.
    Frederika was standing by the edge of their homestead. Her mother had said they now needed bark to make their flour go further. She’d asked her to get it. Above Frederika the spruce trees pointed into blue sky, thirty, forty, fifty meters—she didn’t know—enough to dwarf everything else. She had a feeling the trees had both thinned and blackened. Their massive branches drooped almost vertically. The spaces between made them seem lost, although they stood together. She turned. Their cottage was a light-brown block between the tree trunks. There was still time to go home. She didn’t have to say she was frightened—oh no, she could see her mother’s brows stitch up. She could say that she’d forgotten.
    Use the speed of the wind, she thought, you’ll be back here in no time. A memory skidded through her mind. It had been autumn. Hiding with Jutta in the forest. Fear making her ears pulsate, her mouth dry. Soldiers so near they had to feel them—how could they not? Insane impulse to stand up and scream: “I’m here,” unable to bear the tension. Meanwhile Jutta, clasping her, whispering litanies. “The shrewdness of the fox, the wisdom of the owl, the strength of the bear …”
    And then, on the ground, behind the squatting Jutta, dead Eriksson again.
    Frederika sighed.
    Bark. Birch bark. She liked it better. The bread tasted more of bread and less of tree. She had seen birch by the river. She began to run.
    Frederika reached the river at a spot not far from where they had washed their clothes. The river moved fast. Further downstream pale trunks leaned over the water, small green hands twirled in the air. Red-veined grass grew in a pinkish fog.
    Once, when she was small, Frederika had been allowed onto water. It had been back home, when her father still went fishing. He had showed her how to angle for grayling from the edge of