The Howling Miller

by Arto Paasilinna

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part One: The madman’s mill

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Two: The hermit at bay

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Translator’s Note

  Other Books By

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  The madman’s mill

  CHAPTER 1

  Soon after the wars, a tall fellow appeared in the canton who said his name was Gunnar Huttunen. Unlike most of the drifters who came up from the south, he didn’t go to the forestry department looking for work digging ditches, but bought the old mill on the Suukoski rapids of the Kemijoki River. This was judged to be a harebrained scheme, since, having stood idle since the 1930s, the mill had fallen into a state of extreme dilapidation.

  Be that as it may, Huttunen paid the asking price and moved into the mill house. The local farmers and, in particular, the members of the Suukoski Millers’ Cooperative laughed until tears filled their eyes at the news of the sale. Apparently the world’s not short of fools, they observed to one another, even though the wars killed off a good few.

  That first summer Huttunen repaired the shingle saw at the mill. He put an advertisement in the Northern News offering a reliable splitting service, and from then on, all the canton’s barns were roofed with wooden tiles split at the Suukoski mill. Huttunen’s shingles worked out six times cheaper than the factory-made asphalted felt, which, anyway, had been hard to come by since the Germans had burnt Lapland to the ground and building materials of all kinds had grown terribly scarce. Sometimes you had to hand over anything up to twelve pounds of butter at the village shop before you could load a single roll of roofing felt onto your cart. The shopkeeper Tervola knew better than anyone the going rate of his wares.

  Gunnar Huttunen was almost six feet three inches tall. He had straight brown hair and bony features: a jutting chin, long nose, and deep-set eyes under a flat, high forehead. His cheekbones were prominent, his face narrow. His ears, although big, did not stick out, but lay flush against his skull. It was obvious that, as a baby, a careful eye had been kept on the sleeping Gunnar Huttunen. If a child has big ears, you must never allow it to roll over by itself in its cot; mothers must turn little boys over from time to time if they don’t want them growing up to be lop-eared men.

  As lean as he was tall, Gunnar Huttunen carried himself very erect. When he walked, he took a stride at least one and a half times that of most men’s; in the snow, his footprints looked like those of an average-sized person running. At the first snowfall, he split himself a pair of skis that were long enough to touch the eaves of an ordinary house. In these, he laid broad, pretty much straight tracks and, being light, he tended to plant the poles to the same steady rhythm. You always knew immediately from the pole marks if Huttunen had been by.

  No one was ever too sure exactly where he was from originally. Some said Ilmajoki, whereas others happened to know for a fact that he had come to Lapland from Satakunta. Or Laitila. Or Kiikoiset. When someone asked him once why he had moved up north, the miller had said his mill in southern Finland had burnt down. He had lost his wife in the same fire. His insurance hadn’t compensated him for either.

  ‘They went up in flames together,’ Gunnar Huttunen said, giving his questioner a strangely chilling look. After raking up his wife’s bones from the blackened wreckage of the mill and laying them to rest in the churchyard, Huttunen had sold the rubble and land that was now abhorrent to him, relinquished his water rights, and left the area for good. He said it had been his good fortune to find a decent mill up here in the north and, although it wasn’t working yet, the income from the shingle saw was enough for a single man to live on.

  The one problem, however, as the municipal clerk made sure everyone knew, was that according to the parish records the miller Gunnar Huttunen was a bachelor. So how could he have lost a wife in a fire? This proved the subject of much debate. But no one ever discovered the truth about the miller’s past and in the end people lost interest. They simply figured that it can’t have been the first time someone’s wife had burnt, or been burnt, to death down there in the south, and they didn’t seem to be in noticeably short supply.

  Gunnar Huttunen periodically suffered long bouts of depression. He would break off in the middle of whatever he was doing and stare into the distance, apparently aimlessly. Anguish glinted in the depths of his dark eyes; they became probing and caustic, and yet full of melancholy. If he caught your eye, the brilliant glitter of his stare would make you shudder, and anyone talking to Huttunen during one of his black moods would be hit by a wave of sadness and dismay.

  But the miller wasn’t always low, by any stretch of the imagination. He often kicked up a tremendous ruckus for no obvious reason. He’d get up to all sorts of high jinks, joking and laughing, and sometimes cast aside all restraint to caper about on his long legs in the most comical fashion. Holding forth on this or that, he’d gesticulate wildly, cracking his knuckles, waving his arms and craning his neck as he held forth on this or that. He’d come out with incredible cock and bull stories, blithely getting people worked up just for the fun of it, or he’d slap a farmer on the back, shower him with unwarranted praise, laugh in his face, and then wink at the fellow and clap his hands.

  When Huttunen was having one of these good spells, all the young people in the village would gather at Suukoski to watch the miller’s exuberant performances. They’d crowd into the ground floor of the mill, just like in the old days, and tell each other jokes and stories. In the peaceful, cheery gloom, amid the dark, heady smells of the old mill, everyone would be happy and full of high spirits. Sometimes Gunnar – or Kunnari, as they called him in the Finnish way – would light a big fire outside, and they’d feed it with dry shingles and grill whitefish from the Kemijoki.

  The miller had a great gift for imitating the animals of the forest. He would make a game of it, and the youngsters would compete to see who could be the first to guess which animal he was mimicking. One minute he would become a hare, and then the next a lemming or a bear. Sometimes he would flap his long arms like a night owl, or start howling like a wolf, pointing his nose at the sky and letting out such a heart-rending wail that the terrified youngsters would huddle together for comfort.

  He often did impressions of the canton’s farmers and farmwives as well, which his audiences would be equally quick to guess. When the miller transformed himself into a short, stout character which required a great deal
of concentration on his part, everyone would know without a moment’s hesitation that he was imitating his nearest neighbour, fat Vittavaara.

  Those were extraordinary summer evenings and nights, but people sometimes had to look forward to them for weeks on end while Gunnar Huttunen remained sunk in silent gloom. If that were the case, then no one from the village would dare go to the mill unless they had business there and everyone would try to conclude their transactions as quickly as possible, with the minimum of conversation, so daunted were they by the miller’s misery.

  As time passed, Huttunen’s attacks of depression seemed to grow more acute. He was abrasive, shouting at people for no reason, and seemed permanently on edge. Occasionally he would be so overwrought and furious that he would refuse to give farmers the shingles they had ordered, and just snarl, ‘Can’t help. They’re not ready.’ Then there was nothing for the buyer to do but leave empty-handed, even if several steres of freshly cut shingle were there for all to see, neatly piled up next to the bridge.

  When his mood lifted, however, Huttunen was even more peerless than ever. He performed like a circus ringmaster, his wit as sharp as the gleaming blade of the shingle saw. His movements were so quick and supple, his impressions so ebullient and startling that his audiences were utterly bewitched. Until the inevitable moment when, at the peak of his merrymaking, the miller would suddenly freeze; a harsh cry would burst from his lips and then he would be off, running out of sight behind the mill, along the rotten millrace, across the river and into the forest. He would plunge blindly through the trees, branches snapping and whistling behind him, and when he arrived back at the mill an hour or two later, tired and out of breath, the youngsters of the village would slip away home and announce in frightened voices that Kunnari’s bad days had returned.

  People began to think Gunnar Huttunen was mad.

  His neighbours told stories in the village of the way Kunnari had of howling like a wild animal, especially on clear winter nights when there was a hard frost. He would howl from dusk until the early hours and, if it were carried on the wind, every dog for miles around would answer his desolate outcry. All the villages along the great river lay awake on those nights and people would say that poor Kunnari really must be wrong in the head to think of getting the dogs worked up at such a godforsaken hour.

  ‘Someone should go and tell him to stop howling, a man his age. A human being can’t just start baying like a bloody wolf.’

  But no one dared bring up the matter with Huttunen. His neighbours told themselves that maybe he would come to his senses at some point and stop of his own accord.

  ‘Let him howl, you get used to it in the long run,’ declared the farmers, who needed shingles. ‘He’s crazy, but he splits good tiles and they’re reasonably priced.’

  ‘He’s promised to get the mill working, so we’d best not upset him, otherwise he might move back down south,’ said other farmers, who planned to plant wheat on the banks of the Kemijoki.

  CHAPTER 2

  One spring when the thaw came, the river rose so high that Gunnar Huttunen almost lost his mill. Under the weight of floodwater, the dam at the head of the millrace gave way across a two-yard stretch. Thick sheets of ice surged through the gap. They smashed up fifteen yards of the dilapidated channel, broke the wheel of the shingle saw, and would have brought down the whole mill if Huttunen hadn’t rushed to its rescue. He ran to the saw’s sluice gate and wrenched it open, steering the mass of water out through the broken wheel into the lower reaches of the river. But all the while floodwater continued to pour through the broken dam, driving huge drifts of ice before it that piled up against the mill wall, until the old wooden building began to tremble under their weight. Huttunen was afraid the mill would break apart and the heavy millstones fall through the floor onto the turbine and smash that too. At this point he had no choice but to jump on his bicycle and pedal to the village shop nearly one and a half miles away.

  Breathless and pouring with sweat, Huttunen yelled at the shopkeeper Tervola, who was measuring grain, ‘Give me some stump bombs! Now!’

  The sudden appearance of the miller, drenched in sweat and demanding explosives, scared the life out of a handful of village gossips who were doing their shopping. From behind his scales, Tervola began to ask Huttunen for his licence for the purchase and possession of explosives but when the miller bellowed that the ice would destroy the whole Suukoski mill if it weren’t blasted, in a panic the shopkeeper sold him a case of stump bombs, a spool of fuse and a handful of detonators. These were packed up in a cardboard box, which Huttunen strapped to his bicycle rack, and then he leapt into the saddle and rode at top speed back to the Suukoski rapids where the river was still rising and the ice smashing into the rickety pilings of the old mill. Tervola instantly shut up shop and, with the old biddies in tow, hurried off to see how Huttunen would manage. But not before taking time to call the entire village. ‘Come out to Suukoski if you want to see Huttunen’s mill fall into the river,’ he shouted down the telephone.

  An explosion could soon be heard echoing up from Suukoski. As the people from the shop and the rest of the village came rushing up to take their places on the bank, another blast followed. Shattered ice and chunks of wood flew into the air. The children were forbidden to go too near the water. A few farmers who’d just arrived called out to Huttunen asking him what they should do; they wanted to help.

  But Huttunen was so frantic and busy that he didn’t have time to give instructions. Grabbing a saw and an axe, he ran along the edge of the millrace to the dam, jumped over the banked-up ice into the river, waded through the thigh-deep water and, like a woodcutter, began sizing up a dense stand of spruce on the opposite bank.

  ‘Kunnari’s in such a hurry, he hasn’t even got time to howl,’ said the fat-bellied Vittavaara.

  ‘No time for elk or bear imitations, though he’s got the audience for it,’ someone else said, to general laughter.

  But Constable Portimo, a peaceable old man, told them to be quiet.

  ‘You don’t make fun of a man when he’s in trouble.’

  Huttunen chose a tall spruce by the water’s edge. Striking it a few firm blows with his axe, he lined up its fall with a point directly across the river. Then he bent down and began sawing. The crowd of spectators on the other bank wondered why on earth the miller had suddenly started tree felling. Was there something more important than saving the mill? A farmhand called Launola who had hurried up from the village said, ‘He’s completely forgotten about the mill and just thought he’d cut a nice bit of timber!’

  Huttunen heard this comment from the other bank. He flushed angrily, the blood pounding in his temples, and almost stood up and shouted something back at the farmhand, but in the end simply kept on sawing at furious speed.

  The giant spruce soon began to teeter. Pulling his saw out of the split, Huttunen jemmied the massive trunk with the blade of his axe until it gave, and, with its great canopy of spreading branches, the tree plunged into the flooded river, smashing through the ice piled up against the dam. A murmur ran through the crowd of villagers. Now they understood. The tree glided downstream and docked alongside the dam, forming a barrier to the drift ice swept along by the rapids: the floodwaters could still skirl freely between its tangle of branches into the broken millrace, but the ice could no longer get through and so the danger had been averted.

  Gunnar Huttunen wiped the sweat from his face, crossed the river by the bridge, walked into the mill and emerged the other side before his waiting audience. ‘There, just thought I’d cut a nice bit of timber,’ he growled at Launola, the farmhand.

  The crowd stirred irritably. The men said they were sorry not to have had time to help the miller. ‘That was good thinking, Kunnari,’ they said, congratulating him on felling the tree into the river.

  The excitement was over, but the villagers didn’t seem able to leave. The opposite, in fact: others were still trickling in from the village, with the corpulent Mrs Siponen brin
ging up the rear, breathlessly asking if she had missed much.

  Huttunen primed another stump bomb and demanded loudly, ‘Did the show seem too short? Well, let’s give you some more, then. We wouldn’t want such a big crowd to have come all this way for nothing, would we.’

  The miller began to do an imitation of a crane. He hopped up onto the edge of the millrace, gave a loud trumpet, and then bent down and stretched out his neck as if he were looking for frogs in the water.

  Disgruntled, Huttunen’s audience prepared to leave the riverbank. People tried to calm the miller down. ‘He’s really crazy,’ someone groaned. Amid the to-ing and froing, Huttunen lit the stump bomb; its fuse began hissing viciously. There was a general stampede. The villagers took to their heels, but many had still only gone a few paces when Huttunen threw the charge into the river, where it instantly exploded. With a dull boom, the bomb showered the bank with water and shards of ice, soaking the crowd. They fled screaming and did not stop until they had reached the road, from where they hurled a stream of furious abuse back at the Suukoski mill.

  CHAPTER 3

  When the river subsided, Gunnar Huttunen set about repairing the damage to the mill. He ordered three cartloads of timber from the sawmill: beams, planks and boards. He bought two cases of nails from Tervola, one of hobnails, the other of four-inch nails. He hired three out-of-work farmhands from the village to drive new piles for the broken dam. Within a few days, the dam was repaired and the sluice gate could once again harness the river’s power. Huttunen sent the farmhands home and turned his attention to the millrace. He completely rebuilt the section between the dam and the wheel of the shingle saw; this alone required one and a half cartloads of five-inch planks.

  Those were beautiful summer days, with a perfect, mild breeze, and the miller was in excellent spirits. Huttunen was good with his hands and liked this sort of carpenter’s work. He got so caught up in the repairs that he barely took the time to sleep. He would hurry out to the millrace at four or five in the morning, cut planks and beams until daybreak, go inside to brew some coffee and then go straight back out to work. In the hottest part of the day, he would lie down for an hour or two in the mill house, and often falling asleep and waking up refreshed and full of energy in the late afternoon. Then he would have something to eat and rush back out to the millrace. You could hear the heavy thud of axe and hammer from the Suukoski mill until late into the night.