The Howling Miller

by Arto Paasilinna

  ‘And flowers too, for goodness sake! It’s obscene giving flowers to lunatics in the woods!’

  Portimo put the provisions back in the basket.

  ‘Listen, Vittavaara … the adviser just wanted to make Kunnari happy. Why don’t we go? Huttunen isn’t going to come now.’

  Vittavaara broke a big piece off the lattice of coffee bread and stuffed it in his mouth. After swallowing a few fragrant mouthfuls, he managed to say, ‘Taste that! It’s unbelievable the delicacies people bring criminals in the woods! Taste it, Portimo!’

  Rather than taste it, Portimo wrapped the bun back up in its paper. He put the basket on a tree stump and started to leave. But Vittavaara hooked his arm through the basket handle and, to Portimo’s look of disgust, said, ‘I don’t care if he dies of hunger, I’m not leaving Kunnari this feast.’

  To mark his words, he crushed the marigolds he was holding against the trunk of a nearby tree. Portimo looked away – in Huttunen’s direction, as chance would have it. The police constable’s and hermit’s eyes met. Portimo froze, staring fixedly into the forest, then with an awkward cough, looked away and set off for the road from where he called Vittavaara.

  With his mouth full, the farmer caught up with Portimo. He put down the basket to sling his rifle over his shoulder, then grabbed the handle and the two of them set off back to the village. Huttunen heard Vittavaara chatting away noisily between mouthfuls of coffee bread. Portimo barely responded, sunk in thoughts of his own.

  When Huttunen returned to his camp, weary and ravenous, another inauspicious surprise awaited him. He saw that the raft wasn’t in its place by the fire anymore. Someone had taken it to cross the Sivakka and tied it up on the other bank. Who? Why? Remote and secure though it was, had his hideout been discovered? Did the villagers know the whereabouts of his secret camp?

  Huttunen forded the rapids upstream, and collected his raft. He found fish remains on the slats: innards and glinting scales. He felt reassured: it must have been just a passing fisherman. The man probably hadn’t even noticed the camp through the undergrowth on the bank.

  Huttunen moored the raft a hundred yards downstream. Then he went back to his camp and prepared a frugal supper, which he finished off with a bowl of blueberries and a pleasant sprinkling of sugar. But there was nothing pleasant about his thoughts. He was consumed with impotent rage at the farmers of the canton. They had become his persecutors, his hunters, his jailers. If he could only fight them on equal terms, man to man, things would work themselves out. But the law had turned Huttunen into an inferior being, a hermit deprived of all material possessions, even food, to whom love was forbidden. He was hunted like a criminal, the bread was taken out of his mouth; now even the woman he loved was followed like a spy.

  Once he had rested, the hermit decided to go and fish at the source of the Sivakka for a day or two. Pike was practically all he caught in the nets by the camp now. He reckoned the waters upstream would be better stocked. He took a supply of reddish flies and a few glittering spinners, some salt and bread as well, figuring he could eat fish all the way up the river, and tucked his axe into his belt.

  He left the pretty Home Point with a sense of regret, but while the summer lasted, he had to devote all his time to fishing to prepare for the imminent future, when he would be even more destitute. Setting off along the Sivakka, Huttunen cursed Vittavaara, ‘Filthy cake thief.’

  CHAPTER 24

  The cards had come out at the police chief’s. Jaatila had invited Dr Ervinen and the shopkeeper Tervola round for a quiet evening at the games table. They had started with several not particularly exciting board games, but after Dr Ervinen had charged their sherry glasses with a few healthy rounds of his special schnapps, they had decided to continue under the amiable auspices of poker.

  The maid, or ‘my chambermaid’, as Jaatila’s wife called her, appeared in the doorway, bobbed in a vague curtsey, and announced that that there was a man to see the police chief. Not wanting to interrupt the game, rather than go into his study the police chief told the maid to show him in. He had three queens, two down on the table, and one still in reserve in his hand. There was one card left to deal. He was already sure of beating the shopkeeper, but Ervinen – Christ almighty, Ervinen might easily have three of a kind. Jaatila raised nonetheless. Ervinen blanched. But he could just have been pretending to be unnerved. Damn you, you old crook, thought the police chief.

  It was at this juncture that a man reeking of smoke and fish guts entered the room. The police chief asked him what he wanted at this time of the night. The man explained that he had been fishing by Mount Reutu, on public land, of course.

  ‘Was it good, the fishing?’ the police chief asked distractedly, drawing his last card. It was a six of diamonds, not the missing queen, but there was no point letting his opponents know that. His was still the best hand on the table, with two queens showing. The shopkeeper folded, but Ervinen, who looked as if he was working up a straight flush, saw him and raised him again. He pushed the price of a nice rifle into the kitty.

  ‘The fishing was good, yes,’ said the man in the doorway, craning his neck to follow the game. He could see Ervinen’s cards over his shoulder but nothing in his face showed what sort of hand the doctor might have. The police chief looked him in the eye and raised his eyebrows, but the fellow just looked away.

  ‘So, the fishing was good, was it?’ said the police chief, seeing Ervinen. The cards went down on the table; Ervinen had been bluffing. His first card was a paltry two of spades. The police chief scooped the pot: that was the cold, hard truth of the matter. He poured everyone a drink, apart from the visiting fisherman, who he asked in an official tone, ‘So what brings you here?’

  The man said that he had found a brand new raft on the banks of the Sivakka.

  ‘Who could have made that, I asked myself? And when I nosed around, guess what I found? An entire camp, also just made. That’s what I’ve come to tell you, Chief of Police, there’s a wild man living by the river.’

  The police chief couldn’t see what concern some camp in the woods was of his.

  ‘The forest is full of rafts and huts. I’m hanged if that’s got anything to do with the police.’

  Taken aback, the fishermen retreated to the door, from where he said apologetically, ‘I just thought that it might be Gunnar Huttunen, the crazy miller, who’d made the camp. Because I heard in the village that he’d escaped from the asylum and that he was hiding in the woods.’

  Ervinen’s ears pricked up immediately and he called the man back. He asked him what the camp looked like.

  ‘It was brand new and looked well made. There was a hut with a simple pitched roof. And a woodpile with enough wood for a few weeks. And then there was a little stillroom on a tree trunk. I even found a shithole in the woods, and the raft by the bank, as I told you at the start.’

  ‘What sort of workmanship was it, the raft and all the rest?’ asked the police chief.

  ‘It looked like a carpenter had done it. Even the seat for the privy was planed off properly. There were stakes on the bank to dry a couple of nets as well.’

  ‘It’s Huttunen,’ Ervinen said. ‘The miller is good with his hands, even if the rest of his motor skills are completely haywire. Let’s go and catch him in his hideout.’

  The police chief telephoned Constable Portimo, telling him to collect a few men and meet him at his office. Armed. They’d go in two cars.

  Half an hour later, a group of men stood outside the police station: Portimo, Siponen, Vittavaara, the school-teacher Tanhumäki – even the farmhand Launola had been enlisted. Siponen, Vittavaara and Launola got into the doctor’s car; the others went with the police chief. They took the informer, stinking of fish, as a guide. The men drove at high speed to the Reutu Marsh crossroads, where they got out of the car. Night had fallen, but it wasn’t yet too dark.

  The police chief briefly gave his orders. They were going to take Huttunen by surprise. They would surround the camp, de
stroy it and take its occupant prisoner. The fisherman would show them the way. They must observe complete silence to ensure their quarry didn’t take fright and make a run for it.

  ‘Can we shoot if he runs off into the woods?’ Siponen asked the police chief, flourishing his punt gun.

  ‘We’re going to try and surprise him, but if he attacks, you can shoot. That’s a case of legitimate self-defence. At the legs first, though, and only the stomach or head after that.’

  The search party reached the Sivakka just before midnight. The men fanned out into a loose line and squelched upriver towards the place where the informer said he’d found the camp. They soon reached the raft. The guide reported that it had been moved downstream.

  In a low voice, the police chief ordered some of the men to work their way round the camp, while the others stayed put. The riverbank was left unguarded, they thought that even Huttunen wasn’t mad enough to throw himself into a stream bordering that sort of bog. The siege party silently surrounded the camp; at the police chief’s signal, a hazel grouse call, they began to move in. They crawled over the damp ground on their hands and knees, getting soaked in the process, but they were so excited no one thought of complaining.

  In half an hour the camp was encircled. The police chief gave the signal to charge. Yelling and thundering, nine armed men burst out of the dark forest.

  But the camp was deserted. No one was asleep in the hut. The trap had snapped shut on thin air … The storm troops crowded round the fisherman to give their respective opinions of the reliability of his tip-off. The man said he was going home and disappeared into the woods.

  Vittavaara took the rucksack out of the storeroom and emptied its contents onto the ground. He examined each object meticulously, as if it would reveal whether it belonged to Huttunen. Portimo glanced at the rucksack and tersely declared it was Kunnari’s.

  ‘He had the same rucksack when we went capercaillie shooting at Puukko Hill last winter, two Sundays in a row. We got half a dozen each time, and we didn’t have a dog between us. Amazing, eh?’

  ‘As a representative of law and order, you’ve got pretty poor taste in your hunting friends,’ the police chief muttered.

  ‘Kunnari hadn’t escaped from the hospital back then,’ Portimo protested.

  The police chief ordered the men to mount guard over the camp. They retreated into the wood, where they were told not to smoke or speak but to lie in the dark undergrowth without making a noise and wait for Huttunen to return to the camp. Everyone thought he would only be gone for a while, and that, if they kept a lookout, they’d easily catch him by surprise.

  But the men remained in the thicket without moving a muscle all night, and still no sign of Huttunen. Stiff with cold and damp, they gathered in the early morning in the middle of the camp for a conference.

  ‘It’s pointless keeping watch any longer,’ Ervinen burst out, infuriated. ‘He’s smelled the trap … Perhaps he’s watching us now from behind a tree, and having a good laugh at our expense. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, I’m not lying in a soaking bog because of a madman any longer.’

  Launola eagerly agreed with the doctor, prompting Siponen to snap at his hired man, ‘You’ll lie in wait for Huttunen until Christmas if I tell you to. I am the one who you pays you, you good-for-nothing.’

  ‘Just because I happen to work for you doesn’t mean I have to do any old thing. This isn’t a bit like haymaking or tree-felling; this is like being at the front.’

  The police chief put a stop to the argument by declaring that there seemed to be no sense continuing the surveillance. The hermit had got wind of something and was hiding; they should destroy the camp, that was all they could do. The men set to work with a will.

  Vittavaara shouldered Huttunen’s rucksack. Siponen pulled down the hut and chucked the branches into the river. Ervinen and the schoolteacher dismantled the larder, which was also consigned to the Sivakka. Launola’s responsibility was the seat on the hillside; he took it upon himself to fill in the cesspit as well, after the police chief had counted Huttunen’s faeces and worked out from them how long the camp had been occupied. On the riverbank, the hearthstones were rolled into the water, the frame cut and the stakes for drying the nets snapped. As a final touch, they unmoored Huttunen’s raft, which was duly carried off by the current. The one thing they didn’t wreck was the calendar the hermit had carved into the trunk of the dead tree. By comparing it with his diary, the police chief established that the last mark had been made two days earlier.

  ‘Now he’s lost all his gear, Huttunen will have to show himself in the village,’ Police Chief Jaatila said. ‘I’d advise everyone here to be on the alert over the coming days. For the safety of the village, we have to arrest this dangerous lunatic as quickly as possible and get him proper medical care.’

  Their work of destruction complete, the men set off home just as Huttunen was approaching his camp. He was walking along the riverbank, carrying over twenty pounds of fish on a stick. He was in excellent spirits, and thought the first thing he’d do when he got to Home Point was to make himself a nice cup of coffee.

  CHAPTER 25

  The devastation of Home Point was a bitter blow. Everything the hermit had put up had been systematically torn apart. All his belongings had been taken; nothing had been spared. Huttunen went over every inch of his former camp without finding anything he could use. His raft had been pushed out into the current; even his privy’s wooden seat had been sawed through and the hole beneath stopped up.

  Terrible curses fell from Huttunen’s lips.

  Once again his life was at a total impasse. He knew it would be impossible to hide in the forest for long without the right gear or any protection against the rigours of the wild. All he had were the clothes he stood up in, a few flies and spinners, a knife and an axe.

  The hermit guessed that the police chief and the local farmers had discovered his camp and levelled it. Gripping the handle of his axe until his knuckles turned white, he fixed the gleaming blade with a murderous stare.

  Huttunen grilled some fish on a stick over a fire. It was paltry fare, especially since they’d taken the salt in the rucksack. He washed it down with river water.

  Afterwards he buried the remains of the fish in the embers of the fire and abandoned Home Point. He spent the following night at the top of Mount Reutu, sleeping on a carpet of pine needles. Woken by the cold in the early hours of the morning, he climbed onto the highest rock on the hill and looked furiously towards the village.

  The little place was sleeping peacefully. The men who had destroyed the hermit’s camp were snug in their warm beds. Huttunen set up a menacing howl, muffled at first, and then at the top of his voice, a thunderous, demented bellow. Carrying in the clear summer night, the crazed wail reached the village. The dogs woke up and started barking, their manes bristling. Soon all of them were giving voice, even the smallest runt, yapping and barking with all their might in reply to Huttunen’s howling as it rang out, clear as day, from the rocks of Mount Reutu. In the distance the barking could be heard spreading from place to place and the dogs for miles around did not quieten down until the early morning, by which time Huttunen himself had gone back to sleep on the pine needles of Mount Reutu.

  No one slept that night in the village. Farmers went out in their socks onto their front porches to listen to the howling, and then came back and said to their wives, ‘That’s Kunnari howling out there.’

  The wives sighed anxiously and said, ‘You should have left him in peace. He’s complaining because all his belongings have been stolen, poor soul.’

  In the morning, Police Chief Jaatila telephoned the Siponens and requested Sanelma Käyrämö come to his office; he had some questions he wanted to ask her.

  But the police chief couldn’t get anything conclusive out of Käyrämö. The horticulture adviser didn’t know where Gunnar Huttunen could be at that moment. Jaatila officially cautioned her that it was against the law to help the hermit. Huttun
en needed medical care and order had to be restored in the village. Throughout the interview, the police chief yawned and drank strong coffee. With all the racket Huttunen and the village dogs had made last night, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink either.

  Later that day, Police Chief Jaatila and Constable Portimo went with dogs to Mount Reutu to track Huttunen. But the mutts didn’t seem to realise they were meant to follow the hermit’s trail. Despite being given his clothes to smell, they hared off up the hill after a squirrel. In a fit of pique, Police Chief Jaatila blazed away at the animal with his pistol, although a rodent’s pelt is hardly a prize. Small game is not easy to hit with a handgun. The police chief fired a full round at the bundle of red fur fleeing from tree to tree with the dogs at its heels. Mount Reutu echoed with gunfire as he furiously stalked the bushy-tailed runaway, but to no avail. His prey escaped when he ran out of ammunition, and it was eventually Constable Portimo, to the dogs’ rapturous delight, who picked off the squirrel with his rifle. He handed the bloody little corpse to the police chief, but his superior spurned the gift and chucked the creature savagely into the bushes.

  The dogs then refused to leave the woods, so the police chief left Portimo on Mount Reutu with the job of rounding up the rampaging pack. On his way back to the village, he had to explain to everyone he met what all the shooting had been about. He was in a foul temper by the time he shut himself away in his office.

  Appropriately enough, the telephone rang just at that moment. It was Oulu mental hospital asking if the police had found one of their neurasthenic patients, a certain Huttunen. Jaatila grunted into the receiver that the man had not been caught yet, although it was not for want of trying.