Free Stallo by Stefan Spjut

proudly on a mountain, with jutting chest, a nimbus of hoar frost around his raised antlers, the northern lights radiating behind him? Or is it a howling wolf, or the muffled sound of troll drums? I know. Perhaps I know better than anyone how that image has been formed, and that is because I come into contact with the hordes of tourists. The airport buses deposit their cargo literally outside my shop door, and the mine tours start and finish here. Naturally I’m grateful for that: if the shop had not been quite so central and located next to the tourist information office, lending it an unmerited official status, I would have frozen to death in seconds.
In winter the northern lights are our foremost attraction, and naturally enough the capriciousness with which they choose to reveal themselves increases their appeal. Many who come here like to think of the northern lights as some sort of compensation for the stolen daylight, that they appear every night in the same way that the moonlight is switched on. They stand with their faces turned skywards, waiting patiently. Then the next day they come into my shop and complain: ‘No aurora last night.’
But it isn’t the deep, solemn winter that brings the tourists here, it’s the midnight sun. The light that never fades. People come from all over the world to see it. The majority are Germans, of course, then the French and the Spanish. They think it’s amazing, seeing the sun hanging on the horizon. Odd, in fact. As if there must be something wrong.
That’s our high season, when the shop is most crowded, the backpacks colliding between the shelves. And that is the time I think about Dad the most. He stands with me behind the counter, which is strange because he certainly never did that in real life.
The shop is named after him: Gunnar Myrén Ltd. Here, among all the other things, are his photos, reduced to postcard size or enlarged as posters. And books of photographs that are so large they have to be laid flat to fit on the shelves. Folios, they are called.
Like Dad I make a living from the landscape. My business is the exotic shimmering image of Lapland which Dad, in a not inconsiderable way, has helped to shape. The shop window says Photographs Books Cards Handicrafts , underlined with the billowing line of the familiar silhouette of the Lapland Gate, in far northern Sweden.
We stock what were previously called Lapland handicraftsbut are now known as duodji . There are knives with handles and sheaths made of reindeer horn. Cups, boxes and figurines carved from mottled masur birch, and Sami ceremonial drums.
We also stock a lot of random knick-knacks, because you have to: key rings and bottle openers; small round badges you can pin onto your lapel which say Kiruna , but also Sverige or Sweden ; and sweatshirts with prints of wolf heads, the northern lights, reindeer herds and magic inscriptions. We have fridge magnets, and even Dala horses: it would never occur to a Swede to buy a horse from Dalarna while visiting Kiruna, but people from Spain are not so fussy and we get a lot of Spanish people here. So they sell well.
We also have trolls, naturally. The artist Rolf Lidberg, from Sundsvall, has made picture books about kindly, large-nosed trolls who live on the banks of the Indals River and fish for salmon, and we stock his books. These trolls are also pictured on napkins and paper cups and plates.
But the real troll – the family’s troll, if you like – is not something we have tried to make a profit from. We keep that to ourselves.
At least, we did for many years.
It was my daughter Susso who changed everything.
*
Dad was a pilot. He flew a single-engine amphibious Piper. In fact, he owned three aircraft through the years, all Pipers, so in my mind they are one and the same plane. In this fragile but heroically reliable mode of transport he floated above the most northerly regions of Sweden. He was a genuine pioneer. No one had flown there before him. Not like that,