44
The time in Norway has taught me a great deal about myself. Mostly that I am atrocious at anything not involving a camera, a saucepan or spiralling in private.
Give me a ray of light across Elias’ chest and I can make art. Give me onions, flour and something dead enough not to object, and I can make a decent dinner.
Give me a snare, a compass or the simple task of remaining upright in the wilderness, and I become a cautionary tale with frizzy hair.
Two months pass after the Hunt that never properly happened, though calling it that still makes my eye twitch. Elias doesn’t say much about it, and he has kept his family at a careful distance since that night. Which makes me wonder if he’d told them anything at all.
Which is very Elias of him.
Nonetheless, a restlessness begins to swell in him. He walks the perimeter at dawn and again before bed. He checks the locks several times, changes the route each morning and keeps making me repeat escape plans until I start reciting them in my dreams.
I’m not entirely sure that the next time he attempts another drill, after despicably keeping me awake half the night, I won’t throw a pillow at his head and tell him to make a bloody appointment.
When I’m not teaching him about touch, tenderness and all the softer things he still approaches like unexploded ordnance, he teaches me where to aim, how to steady my wrist, how to fall without breaking my neck and how to read the behaviour of different animals.
For reasons unfathomable, even after proving how bad I am at survival in the fickle north, he also decides I need to learn to hunt properly. Because feeding chickens and managing not to poison us with stew does not fully qualify for homestead competence.
I disagree on principle, but mostly because I am tired, bruised and developing a peculiar detestation for anything that requires patience.
Still, every day, I follow him – across snow gone soft and mud feasting on my boots, from the smokehouse to the animal shed to the woodpile. I become useful in ways England never required of me.
By the end of this week, I manage to reset two practice traps without catching my own fingers, miss three bottles he makes me use as targets, gut a fish without gagging, and identify enough tracks to know when something bigger than me has passed by and decided not to say hello. This time.
It is progress, he tells me. But the furrow in his brow does not seem to agree.
He’s supposed to finish the chain-room today, but errands have been dragging him into town throughout the past few weeks – and today is no different.
He refuses to explain what he’s buying or collecting, which is irritating but technically not a lie.
I have become very particular about the distinction.
I know he has his eye set on goats, so I reason with myself that he’s doing the rounds on those.
We’ve grown quite a flock of chickens as of late, and I find myself enjoying the work with animals. Even asked Elias to get more – to which he agreed, depending on what he finds.
He made good on his warning about George – off somewhere beyond my knowledge and preferably forever beyond my sight. I still catch myself looking around for that obnoxious beak anyway.
Soon, the sun begins to linger longer and longer, and the yard sits in a sheltered pocket where the mountains blunt the sting of the wind.
In direct light, with snow retreating from the dark soil, spring almost manages an impression of summer.
This kind of warmth is not what I expect, but geography is clearly not my strong suit.
I’ve spent the morning tidying up and dealing with Margaret and her clucking lot. I’m fumbling with the rope holding the shed door open when the sound of an engine carries through the trees.
My body locks up.
Any vehicle loud enough to reach the yard from here is definitely headed for the cabin. The estate is so vast that I’ll hear it before it reaches the clearing.
Since the Hunt, Elias has insisted I carry a small pistol whenever I work outside alone – a weapon I have no lawful business possessing and whose weight burns against my hip more from that knowledge than the metal.
A pick-up noses into view along the track. Not Anders’ bright-red one.
My heart goes to my throat and my hand to the holster at my thigh as I move closer to the cabin and hide behind a corner of the back wall.
Inga doesn’t like trucks, so it’s not her. It’s none of her brothers’ either. Not anyone I know well enough for my gut to unclench.
The car crawls towards the yard with caution, tyres grinding over thaw-softened earth, and every lesson Elias has hammered into me lights up at once.
Do not stand in the open. Do not let them see fear before they see steel. Get behind cover, keep the cabin between you and the road.
My thumb finds the safety of the gun and flicks it off with a small click that seems too loud against the sound of blood rushing in my ears.
Elias’ voice follows right after: if someone comes for the door, aim centre mass and shoot until they stop moving.
My throat works around a knot of panic as my eyes follow the truck until it’s close enough for me—
It stops.
So do my lungs.
Elias jumps out of the driver’s seat.
Relief hits so hard it almost folds my knees.
I stand there with my pulse still trying to break out through my throat.
I cannot keep living like this forever – measuring sounds by threat, sleeping with escape routes and learning when to shoot a human being before they cross the threshold.
I don’t know how to tell Elias that without making it sound like an accusation.
How does one complain about fear to a man who has spent his whole life treating it as part of the forecast?
‘Hey!’ I call as I click the safety back on.
His gaze follows the motions while I holster the weapon.
He gives the gesture a small, approving nod. Then his eyes snag on my shaky fingers, and the nod dissipates.
In quiet recovery, he goes to the back of the truck where a large square shape sits beneath a blanket. And stops.
I eye the black truck properly now.
New.
The covered square in the back sits too solidly beneath the blanket, and something about the way he rests his hand on it makes the hairs at the back of my neck rise.
‘So…’ he starts, ‘there weren’t any goats worth taking,’ he says slowly, easing me towards the edge as he taps against the truck. ‘And sheep are worse up here than people think.’
‘What did you do?’ I ask warily.
‘They need more fencing, more rotation, more protection from predators,’ he continues with vague gestures of his other hand as though I haven’t said anything. ‘More work than I want to put on you while you’re still learning.’
My foreboding sharpens into a point. ‘Elias… what is under there?’
He pulls the blanket away.
A metal travel cage fills the truck bed.
Inside it? Two wolf-grey dogs rise together. The confined crate and dense coats make them appear larger than they are. Curled tails lift, pointed ears turn forwards and dark eyes fix on me with alert suspicion.
One of them gives a low, testing bark that rolls straight through my bones.
The first thought makes me wince: Do Norwegians milk dogs?
I look from the creatures to Elias, my mouth unable to close. ‘I thought you were getting animals for the shed and the pen.’
‘I am. I will,’ he corrects himself, watching the dogs scan the treeline.
‘But we need dogs that’ll warn us before anyone, or anything, reaches the house.
These are Norwegian elkhounds. Trackers, not attack dogs,’ he says.
The distinction does absolutely nothing to unstick my boots from the ground.
‘They’ll sound the alarm, follow a trail and make approaching the cabin quietly almost impossible. ’
The animals stand rigid within the cage, coats bristling at the spine as they take in the cabin, the shed and me. Elias doesn’t open the door immediately, just lets them look around.
‘They need to know what belongs here before they decide what doesn’t,’ he murmurs.
‘Elias, is this really necessary?’ I give the one with the darkest fur an indignant eye before I meet Elias’ eyes again.
His answer comes too carefully. ‘While you learn to live on a homestead, I say it is. These two are brothers. They have hunted together for four years. They were raised around livestock too.’
It’s diplomatic enough to pass for patience, but in the space between those words beats a steady pulse of something else.
The dogs keep watching the trees as if they already know something I don’t.
Great. I’ve now become the least qualified mammal on the property.
I look back towards the cabin and the shed, then the vast dark line of forest beyond the yard.
‘Their owner died. Anders tipped me off. I’ve brought you something else, too.’
A sudden hollow opens inside me before he finishes that sentence. I whip around to look at him.
‘You mean these two menaces are not the main attraction of the day?’ I slant an uneasy glance towards the dogs.
‘This one is called Brute,’ Elias divulges offhandedly, glancing at the one with the brighter fur. ‘The other one is Bolla.’ My mouth remains open as I look at the darker one with the tag that holds that exact word – Norwegian for bun.
‘He looks like Menace to me,’ I mumble to myself.
A sound rolls out of my giant devil so unexpectedly warm that even Menace tilts his head as if offended by it.
I shut my mouth and try to make myself look less appalled than I do.
Still smiling, Elias moves around the front of the truck, opens the driver’s door, and nods towards the seat. ‘Get in.’
I glance between him and the truck, suspicion tangling with confusion. ‘I don’t want to damage someone’s brand new—’
He catches my hand and pulls me closer, then guides me onto the driver’s seat.
‘Whose truck is this?’ I rumble.
As I’m seated, he braces one hand on the roof above me, pale eyes watching my panic with infuriating calm. ‘Yours.’
I stare at him.
Then at the steering wheel. Then back at him, because my mind can’t quite process both the lunatic and the evidence.