‘No ski parties from across the river even?’
‘You’re our first visitors since New Year. Why, we might as well hibernate, like — you know what.’ He’d jerked a thumb in the direction of the river and the Finnish forests. ‘Same that side, we’re told. Not a soul!’
*
There was so little of Jorgastak that if they hadn’t been looking for it they could have passed it without knowing they’d come this far. Snow was falling, dimming out the last of the daylight, driving on the northerly wind from astern and sucking-in in front to plaster the screen and give the wipers all the work they could handle. Tyres hissed in the new, soft overlay: a few hundred yards behind the van its tracks would already have been covered. A road led off to the right, a curve west into the Finnmark interior, marked by fence-posts and felled trees; despite the divergence it looked more like a continuance of this route than did the narrowing, near-invisible track southward, parallel to the river. But this was the approach to the fishermen’s pub. The woman in the grill-kok had described its location, and Isak had told them he’d been here himself, years ago, would know it when he saw it.
Yellow light gleaming from an upper window provided a beacon, made the last few hundred metres easy. Oil lamp — unless they had a generator. Snow was banked high where space had been cleared around the timber building. Stenberg said as he backed the Volkswagen up close to its shelter, ‘May be hard work tomorrow, skiing in this stuff.’
It would be less cold, though, in fact the difference was already noticeable. It was always warmer when snow was falling; usually you’d reckon on temperatures of between plus one and minus five. Plus wind-chill factor, if any. He made a mental note that first thing in the morning he’d check on the feel and consistency of the snow, and check the temperature, so as to choose the best wax for their skis. Also to ask the people here to run the VW’s engine every day.
Inside, the first impression was of warmth and the odours of heating-oil and cooking. Stewpot kept permanently simmering, no doubt. Or soup pot. If it was stew you could bet the meat in it would be reindeer. The house was kept warm by one big, wood-burning stove. Reindeer hides, virtually hairless from age an wear, covered the wood-plank floors. The woman came lurching down the stairs, having shown Sophie up to a room; a lot of Lappish and Norwegian was being yelled to and fro as the men carried the gear in — Arctic gear only, of course, their other stuff having been left in the hotel in Karasjok. Ollie hauled his bergen up the rickety stairs and into a fair-sized room with four bunk-beds in it. Fishermen’s dormitory; and a night’s lodging here for the five of them wouldn’t much deplete the US budget this year, he guessed.
Supper was served within minutes. Reindeer stew: and it wasn’t bad, but he had a suspicion that after this trip he wouldn’t ever think of venison as a luxury food again. At Sutherland’s request they’d unearthed a bottle of red wine, and then a second one appeared as the meal wore on rather slowly, but Isak had his own liquor, a colourless liquid from an unlabelled bottle which the proprietor had brought in. It smelt like methylated spirit, but Sophie said they called it brandy — brennevin. Ollie tried some, and decided it was meths.
‘I’ll stick to the plonk, thanks.’ Stenberg reacted similarly, after he’d tasted it. Isak, waving his mug, shouted what sounded like some sort of challenge at them, in Lappish; Sophie murmured, ‘He is becoming drunk.’
Hardly surprising. And maybe slightly more advanced in the process, Ollie thought, than the word ‘becoming’ suggested. But he seemed to be waiting for an answer — peering at them, his face looking squashed as if it had been trodden on. Sutherland said, ‘He was quoting a sort of proverb — “In Lappland one does not get a wife without spirits”.’
Ollie looked at Sophie. ‘He‘s after you. He can sense how fond you are of him.’
‘Comes from their courting routine.’ The professor explained, ‘Traditionally the suitor appoints some prominent member of the community to be what they call “Chief of the Wooing”. This guy leads a deputation to visit the bride’s parents and argue the suitability of the match, what a marvellous deal the girl’s getting, and so forth, and they have to bring presents with them, amongst which quantities of hard liquor is an essential. Hence “no wife without spirits” ’
Isak was giving himself a refill, the neck of the bottle rattling on the edge of the mug as he poured with shaking hands.
‘Will he be fit for skiing tomorrow?‘
Gus was swilling wine as a mouthwash, trying to get rid of the taste of that gut-rot. He suggested, ‘Could be what he needs for it, like anti-freeze.’
‘I’d guess he can take it.’ Sutherland asked Sophie, ‘Your room OK?’
‘Oh, it’s — all right.’
‘Is there a lock on the door?’
‘No.’ She’d glanced fleetingly at Isak. ‘If I scream, please come quickly.’
Stenberg said, ‘Ollie’s liable to do that even if you don’t scream.’
‘Is he in our room?’ Changing the subject, primarily, since Sophie had seemed embarrassed by Gus’s silly comment. Sutherland said, sure, he thought Isak would have to be sharing with them, there were only the two dormitory rooms up there. Which made it seem unlikely that they’d be getting the early night they all felt they should have, in preparation for tomorrow’s trek.
But Isak was getting more boisterous and noisy at this stage. He’d eaten only about half the food he’d been given, although everyone else had finished; the Lapp woman had collected the empty dishes, and it was her idea now that Isak should entertain them all with a performance of yoik. She’d been leaning behind his chair with her short, thick arms round his neck, talking loudly into his ear; Ollie had been talking to Sutherland — telling him he’d had to leave the professor’s book, the copy he’d lent him, at the hotel, but that he was looking forward to finishing it when they got back. And as he said it — he was to remember this later, although at the time he dismissed it as part of the peculiar atmosphere of the evening and the environment and Isak’s outlandish behaviour — he became aware, surprisingly, of a doubt, presentiment, a shadow of uncertainty in connection with that phrase ‘when we get back’.
As far as the professor’s book was concerned, the truth was he hadn’t got into the second chapter yet, and rather doubted if he ever would. But then he’d lost Sutherland’s attention anyway: there was an upheaval at the end of the table, Isak struggling to rise and the woman hanging on to him. It looked as if they might be going to dance, but in fact Isak slumped down near the stove; he was helped into a squatting position, one hand grasping the leg of a chair for support, and his face began to darken, suffusing with blood before his mouth opened to emit the first strangulated moans of what Ollie realised had to be a yoik. He felt slightly under the weather himself, having drunk a certain amount of wine and the taste of meths still lingering; the weird sounds deadened his awareness of the surroundings, gave him a sense of detachment, unreality, and Sophie was on her way out of the room before he’d realised that she was leaving them. She’d muttered as she left the table, ‘I would like so much to hear this, but I cannot remain awake another minute. Good night, please excuse me.’ She’d rattled it off, then disappeared, getting away before anyone could try to detain her, and he hadn’t had a chance to say good night. Then he was wondering how Gus Stenberg had the bloody gall to be following her up the stairs, until he heard him calling to her, ‘Don’t worry, Sophie dear, I’ll get it on tape and you can hear it some other time.’
He came back with the recorder, cleared a space for it on the rough-surfaced table and switched it on. It was battery-powered, had to be so he could use it outside and in the wilds of nowhere, which was where they’d be as from tomorrow.
The yoiking noise was continuing spasmodically, indescribable except that no one could be surprised at this art-form never having caught on anywhere except in the remoter areas of Lappland, the Lapp woman was rocking to and fro like a trained bear, and Sutherland had his eyes shut. Ollie had
to leave them, temporarily; the loo was on the ground floor and was really an outside one which had been linked to the back of the house so you didn’t have to wade through snow to get to it. An iron bar was provided though, obviously for the essential purpose of smashing ice.
When he got back the yoik was finished, and at first glance he thought the reason for this was Isak having passed out. In fact he hadn’t, technically, but he was slumped against the side of the stove and he looked ill. Drunken euphoria had evaporated and his complexion had changed from mahogany to the colour of dirty snow. His eyes were slitted, weepy, moisture glistening in sparse stubble on his cheeks. Gus was rewinding his tape; he murmured to Ollie, ‘The artiste is distinctly stoned… Oh, God, no…’ Because the Lapp woman was pressing the refilled mug into one of Isak’s hands. The fingers closed round it slowly: then he’d opened his eyes wider and he was lifting the mug, trying to focus on it and not finding that too easy, slopping liquor everywhere. Sutherland stirred, getting to his feet and muttering that this had gone far enough; generally speaking it wasn’t a good idea to mess around with Sami when they were smashed but he couldn’t be allowed to poison himself, best get him upstairs… Isak spoke then, a kin of moaning cry in Lappish, and squinting up at the professor.
Stenberg asked, ‘What‘d he say?’
He‘d said — Sutherland interpreted — Please God, help me!
More mumbling. He was drunk all right, but it was more than that too, Ollie thought, more like some emotional crisis. His voice rose again: slurry Lappish, loud then dying into a sort of growling, dribble running down his chin. The words Sutherland had been able to hear had been a quote from the New Testament: Take this cup from me… Sutherland had been going to him, but the proprietor was already there, crouching beside him and prising the mug out of his fingers, taking that request literally. Sutherland looked round at Gus and Ollie, told them, ‘He wasn’t talking about the booze, then. He’s in a blue funk, if you ask me.’
‘Scared of taking us down there…’
‘Maybe. Something like that.’
*
In the morning Isak was pale and shaky, but told Sutherland he was OK. He’d only drunk that much brennevin, he said, because it was the best cure for stomach trouble, from which he’d suffered on the way down here.
He’d slept on the floor beside the stove. It wouldn’t have been easy to haul him up the stairs, and nobody had had any burning desire to have him up there, so they’d just covered him with a reindeer hide. He ate a large breakfast — pickled fish and cold reindeer meat — not, as Gus commented, every lush’s idea of a good start to the day — his only problem being the difficulty of lifting a coffee-cup to his mouth without shaking all the coffee out of it on the way up.
Sophie questioned whether they should start today. Stenberg pointed out that if they hung around he’d only tie on another one, and the other two agreed.
Snow showers were intermittent, and there was a lot of new snow on the ground. Wind still northwest, ground temperature minus two. Ollie looked through his set of ski waxes and decided to use purple, which was prescribed for fresh snow at temperatures around zero. Sophie said she’d take a chance on that — they had a long discussion about the various waxes and their use in different combinations, a subject on which cross-country skiers tend to have conflicting views — and he offered to wax her planks for her. The Americans had their own waxes.
Sutherland and Sophie were with Isak when the proprietor asked him casually, ‘Will you be going on south along the river now?’
Isak pointed west. ‘That way.’
Sutherland thought he’d got his sense of direction confused. ‘You surely don’t mean west — into Finnmark — do you?’
‘West.’ Isak nodded, without meeting his eyes. ‘It’s where the siida was last seen.’
Isak wasn’t only hungover, Ollie thought, he was withdrawn, locked into thoughts that weren’t for sharing. It seemed strange, too, that he hadn’t mentioned the change of route until he’d actually been asked about it. Ollie got the news from Sophie when he was applying wax to her skis. She said, ‘The only person who could have told him was where we stopped yesterday, the man there. They were talking together outside, you know.’
‘So why did he have to keep it secret until now?’
She shrugged. ‘He says he was ill yesterday. Something was wrong with him.’
‘You’d think he’d have mentioned it.’ He’d nearly finished the waxing. ‘Even that road doesn’t go far, though. It stops dead, having got nowhere.’
‘Then we will be on the vidda. You will see how wonderful—’
‘You’re quite a girl, Sophie.’
‘What else should I be?’
‘It was a way of saying you’re fantastic.’
‘I think we should — save it, Ollie.’
‘Yes.’ He’d straightened and his arms were round her, waxy hands carefully out of contact. ‘Yes, I know. But — when this trip’s finished?’
‘Do you think I would just let you say goodbye?’
Kissing. Look, no hands… None the worse for that, however, or for being the first time; except it was so hard to stop he didn’t know afterwards how he’d managed it.
Half an hour later they were set to go. Ollie pulled on his headover — a wool tube worn round the neck like a bulky collar, but there to be pulled up over the lower part of the face when you needed it — and zipped up his jacket. Oiled-wool ski hat, Dachstein mittens. Seeing Gus adjusting the position of Sophie’s back-pack for her, he wondered how on earth the young American — who appeared to be entirely normal, male, virile, etcetera — could stand back as he was doing, not at least try to compete for her interest.
There were three tow-lines on the pulk, as was necessary to control it on gradients. Isak took the centre, leading, with Ollie and Gus right and left; on downhill slopes they’d drop back to restrain it, and so on. Sophie followed behind the pulk, with Carl behind her at some distance. The snow was deep, on top of a hard underlay, and more of it was driving intermittently on the northerly wind, straight into their faces as they started back to the place where the road curved westward.
*
They’d been on the move for nearly three hours, making steady progress, Isak seemingly having no health problems. By the end of the first hour the snow had stopped falling, and also they’d come to where the road ended. The only difference this made, effectively, was that they didn’t have the lines of cleared trees to steer by now. Ollie was wearing a wrist compass — he also had a Silva compass for map work, in a zipped pocket — and he was keeping an eye on where Isak was leading them. Slightly south of due west, so far, following the general line of a river. Other frozen streams led into it, coming down steeply from high ground to the north; they’d crossed four, clambering over ice, and now as they came to a fifth their own river was bending away southward. Ahead, in a depression which in summer would surely be a bog, lay a frozen lake, with the land rising again beyond it.
Isak stopped, staring southward where the river lay fairly level, curving back a little to the right after that bend and with unbroken snowfields rising on both sides above a scattering of small trees. Ollie and Sutherland stopped too: then Sophie, as the pulk came to a halt in front of her. Stenberg was rearguard at this stage: he, Ollie and the professor were changing positions at each hour.
Sutherland shouted, ‘Snow-scooter!’
Ollie had just heard it too. The sound was getting louder rapidly and it was a harsh intrusion, seemed not to have any rightful place in these surroundings, the silence and emptiness of the snowbound land. Sophie was right, he thought, it was an ‘out-of-this-world’ sensation that hit you. He’d experienced it before, here in Norway on long-range ski patrols years ago; it was akin to the kind of thrill men sought when they climbed mountains or travelled to the Poles. He’d forgotten, hadn’t linked this to her enthusiasm for the high plains, this sense of removal, timelessness. Glancing back, he saw her and Gus coming towards
him. Sutherland and Isak were both looking around at the apparently empty snowscape out of which the noise was rising — a jarring, unpleasant racket… Sophie called, ‘There it is!’ Pointing with one ski-pole: her poles had unusually long tips to them, he noticed. The scooter was up beyond the lake, had just lifted into view over the rounded skyline. Sound dropping as it slowed, then stopped, a swirl of snow settling around it, engine only muttering now and the rider just sitting there, staring down in this direction. Isak shouted to Sutherland in Lappish. Sophie said, ‘He’s going over to talk with him. I suppose to ask if he knows where are these people.’
Isak had a downhill run, then some flat and a stream to cross. After that he’d be climbing. Gus said, ‘That’ll sweat some of the poison out of his flab.’
Kill or cure… But Isak had to be tougher than he looked. Heavy bones, and probably more muscle on that short, thick body than flab, Ollie guessed. Plus a remarkable tolerance for strong drink… The scooter rider still sat and watched him struggling over. Ollie muttered, ‘Why doesn’t the lazy sod go down to him?’
‘Has his own work to do, maybe.’ Stenberg suggested, ‘Rounding up stray deer, or whatever… Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if he’s from the crowd we’re looking for?’
‘It’s not impossible.’ Sutherland had ski’d over to them. He was all right on the level, trekking, but downhill he was no skier. In any case these skis and the loose-heeled bindings, ideal for cross-country work, weren’t suited to downhill running. Sutherland added, ‘Let’s all cross fingers, now.’
Isak had given up. He’d stopped — arms spread, his ski-poles dangling from their extremities. They heard fragments of an exchange of shouts; then the scooter engine snarled, shattering the surrounding peace again as the stranger began to glide down towards him.
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