Little Ukko

Anders had them on the water at a quarter to six, in a dark with no stars in it.

The wind had lain down at twenty past three. Ukonvesi was heaving in long slow swells with nothing on top of them, and the air was so cold it hurt his teeth. He kept a thermometer on a cord for his log. He trailed it for half a mile and drew it up by the light of his cupped hand.

“Forty-four,” he said to the bow.

“How long does a boy have in that?”

“A quarter of an hour before his hands stop working. Less, if he’s thin.”

She nodded and went on paddling.

He set a pace that the blue canoe could hold and kept it for two hours. The snow began with the first grey light. It was fine and dry, and it lay on the dog’s back and on Kaisa’s cap without melting. A little before eight the tall red pines of Ukko Island came up out of it. Among them, straight as a string in the dead air, stood a thread of smoke.

“He’s under the roof,” Kaisa said softly. “Take me to the cove. No talking from here.”

They were a hundred yards off the notch when a man came down through the pines to the water with a pail in his hand.

He wore wool trousers and an undershirt. He bent to dip the pail, and then he looked up and saw two canoes in the snow. Anders was near enough to see his face. Stefan looked at the alpha in the stern, and at the tracker he had sent to Ely. In the blue canoe he saw a boy’s mother, and a man who should have been under a hasp. The pail dropped and rolled.

“Stefan!” Anders shouted. “It’s finished. Bring them out.”

Stefan ran. He went up the forty steps faster than Anders had ever seen him move, and his voice came down through the trees, high and cracked. “Oskar! Mikko! Up, both of you. The boat. It’s the last of the Run.”

Something small broke from under the eave of the cabin and went east along the shore rock, low and fast. It was a pup, so thin that Anders could see the hip bones working. The snow had lain on its brown coat until it was grey. It did not look once at the canoes.

“That’s Pia,” Kaisa said. The red bow touched the cove. She was out on the rock before it stopped, and she gave her orders quickly and plainly.

“His boat isn’t here, so it’s on the north side, facing the border. Britta, get into my seat. The two of you go round the west end. Don’t crowd him, and don’t shout at him. He’s frightened enough to do something stupid. Isä, I want a fire in front of that door, the biggest you ever built, and the stove full. Keep the dog with you. I’m going east.”

“Alone?” Anders said.

“Alone.”

“He may double back. Take me, or take your father.”

“No. She left the pile three weeks ago. To her, two wolves coming along that shore are a hunt.” Her eyes were on his, grey and steady. “And that’s your nephew going onto the water. Go.”

It went against everything in him. He backed the canoe off the rock.

Britta was already in the bow. He swung them west and drove. The island was no more than a quarter mile round, and they cleared the west point in two minutes. As they did, the first breath of the front hit him in the left cheek, out of the northwest. The snow thickened and slanted.

The aluminum canoe was two hundred yards off the north shore. Stefan knelt in the stern, digging at the water. In front of him were two shapes hunched in blankets.

“Mikko!” Britta screamed.

Anders had no time to stop her. The smaller shape twisted round at the sound and half stood. The gust caught the canoe on its side at the same moment. The near gunwale went under. The boat filled and settled as he watched, and all three of them were in the lake.

He had won four races on this water and had never paddled as he did then.

It took him under a minute. Oskar had both arms over the swamped hull. Stefan had one hand on the gunwale and the other knotted in Mikko’s hair, holding the boy’s face out of the chop. His own mouth was at the waterline.

“Take him,” Stefan gasped. “Take him first.”

“Brace right,” Anders said. Britta threw her weight out over the far side. He got his nephew under both arms and hauled him in over the gunwale like a netted fish. The boy was bare and blue and coughing. Oskar came next, heavier, with his teeth knocking. Britta dragged them both flat on the bottom boards and lay over them with Jari’s coat open.

That left the man in the water.

Stefan’s face was grey. He looked at the two boys in the red canoe and then at Anders. “Go on. Get them to a fire. I’ll hold on here.”

Anders knew he would not hold on. It was four hundred yards to the shore and back, in water that stopped a man’s hands, and Stefan was fifty-seven and dressed in wet wool. He could have left him. Nobody would have asked a question about it at any fire. The lake would have judged him before the council sat.

He thought of the grey shoulder that had stood below the stones at every creek. He thought too of a hundred and eighteen adults who had a right to hear this man say why.

“Get to your stern and push it down,” he said. “Now, Stefan.”

Stefan went hand over hand along the hull and put his weight on the end. The bow came up streaming. Anders caught it and dragged the canoe upside down across his own gunwales. Somewhere under the aluminum, canvas tore, and he did not look. Water poured out of the hull on both sides. He rolled it upright, slid it back into the lake, and pinned it against the red canoe with his forearm.

“In. Over the far side. I’ve got it.”

It took Stefan three tries. On the third he came over the gunwale and lay in the bottom with his knees drawn up.

Anders made the bow line fast to his own stern seat and towed. The chop was building, and the snow came sideways. On the north shelf a lean figure stood waiting with a blanket over each arm. Behind him, through the pines, there was a tall yellow blaze.

“Is that Tansy?” Mikko said from under the coat, in a very small voice. The dog was barking on the rock.

“That’s Tansy,” Britta said, and began to cry.

Anders ran the bow onto the stone. He looked east. Beyond the point the snow was coming down on the channel like a curtain, and he could see nothing across it. She had told him to stay off that shore, and he stayed off it.
***
The first snow of the year was a quarter of an inch deep, and Pia’s tracks lay in it as clearly as ink.

Kaisa ran beside them through the pines. They were small prints, close together, and they went straight for the east end of the island without a check. At the point they ran down a tongue of ledge into the lake. Three hundred yards out a hump of rock showed through the snow, with a dozen spruce on its back. Little Ukko lay as far from the pile as the ground went.

She took off her clothes and folded them under a pine with a stone on top. The cold bit her all over. She had kept this shape to one night a month for six years, and she was about to put it on to follow a child who had gone under. She was afraid, and she noted it and went on.

Ten breaths later she went into the water on four legs.

It was colder than Hirvi had been. She swam with her nose high and the chop slapping her ears. Halfway over, the wolf in her remarked how simple this was. There was a rock ahead of her and nothing behind that needed words. She kept swimming.

Pia was on the east side, under the last spruce. She was curled tight with her tail over her nose. When Kaisa came round the rock she was on her feet at once, with her lip lifted and her ribs showing through her wet coat.

Kaisa stopped ten feet off and lay down. She put her chin on her forefeet and looked out at the lake.

The pup growled for a long time. Then the growl ran down, and she stood with her head low, unsure. She smelled of grouse and lake water. There was no fear in the scent, and there was nothing of a house left in it either. Kaisa did not move. The snow built up along her back. After a while the pup lay down again where she was, and watched.

Kaisa knew she could not do the rest on four legs. She took one breath and let the other shape come.

It came in ten, as the law said it should. She had not been sure that it would.

She sat up bare in the snow with her arms round her knees and her wet braid on her spine. The cold was beyond anything. The pup had sprung back at the change and stood staring.

“Hello, Pia,” Kaisa said. Her teeth chattered on it. “I’m Kaisa. You were five when I went away. You used to follow the big girls down to the dock.”

One ear turned.

“I’m going to tell you something I’ve only told one other person. When I was twenty-two I drove to some mountains in Montana and went up into them like this. I meant to stay one night. I stayed until April.” She had to stop and breathe. “So I know what you’ve got. I know it’s the best you’ve ever felt. Nothing hurts, because everything that hurts is made of words, and the words go first. I lost my father’s name by Christmas. By February I’d lost my mother’s, and I didn’t miss it. Nobody told me that part. The old women say it’s like drowning, and it’s nothing like that. It feels like going home.”

The pup had sunk down onto her belly.

“Your mother’s name is Elsa. She’s a nurse. Every morning since the sixth of September she’s stood in front of a board in the lodge hall with her car keys in her fist. There’s a jar of lake glass on your windowsill, and swim ribbons on your wall. Mikko says you can hold your breath longer than anybody, and it makes him wild that you’re four months older.” She was shaking so hard now that the words came in pieces. “Nobody chose you for a rite. A man told you a story because he wanted something. It’s over. You don’t have to be good at it any more.”

Snow hissed on the water.

“I won’t grab you. I couldn’t carry you across that channel anyway. I had to come back by myself, and it took me a whole night in the snow, and I was more frightened than I’ve ever been. So I’m going to sit here until you try. I can’t feel my feet. I’d be glad if you didn’t take all night.”

For a long moment nothing happened. Then the pup crept forward on her elbows, an inch at a time, and laid her cold nose on Kaisa’s bare instep.

It took a great deal longer than ten breaths. Kaisa talked the whole way through it. She said the name Elsa, and the name Pia, and Otter Rock, and the cardamom rolls in the lodge kitchen. The small body under her hands stretched and stuck and stretched again. Once it stopped altogether, half one thing and half the other, and she said “Keep coming,” very quietly, a dozen times.

Then a girl was there, all ribs and elbows, with her hair in mats. She crawled into Kaisa’s arms and shook.

“It’s cold,” Pia said. Her voice was a croak. She sounded astonished.

“That’s the first thing you get back. I’m sorry about it.”

“Is my mom mad?”

“She’s a nurse. She’ll check every inch of you first and be mad afterward.”

Kaisa wrapped herself round the child as far as she would go. Then she put her head back and howled, once, from her own throat, as she had on the nights she led the young ones home.

She did not wait long. A paddle knocked in the snow, and the red bow came round the rock.

He was alone, and soaked to the shoulders. He stepped out into the shallows and saw the two of them, and for a second he could not speak. Then he was all hands and good sense. He had brought a blanket, and Elsa’s sweatshirt, which went over Pia’s head and down to her knees. He had her own clothes with him, from under the pine. From the bottom of the pack he took a red-and-black wool shirt and put it round Kaisa’s shoulders himself.

“You left this on a peg.”

“I meant to leave it.” She pushed her arms into the sleeves. “The boys?”

“At your father’s fire. They’re breathing, and Mikko’s complaining.”

“And Stefan?”

“He’s there too.”

She looked up at him. “You pulled him out.”

“Yes.”

He lifted Pia into the canoe, and Kaisa climbed in after her.
***
Reino had built the fire in front of the cabin door, in a ring of stones, and it stood as high as his chest. The snow turned to steam a yard above it. Britta sat on the sill with Mikko inside her coat, and the dog lay across the boy’s feet. Oskar was hunched in two blankets with a tin cup. Kaisa sat down on a log with Pia in her lap, and the girl hid her face in the wool.

Stefan Zalar sat on the chopping block. Somebody had put a blanket round him. His silver hair was plastered flat, and his hands would not keep still.

Oskar spoke first.

“Mr. Zalar. Did we finish it? You said until the Hunter’s Moon.”

Stefan looked at him. His broad face seemed to come apart.

“There is no Long Run, son,” he said. “There never was one. I made it up in August, the week after Pia’s moon. I told each of you that you’d been chosen, and that you were to stay hidden and tell no one, and I made it sound old. You did everything I asked and you did it well. None of it was for anything. That’s mine.”

“Why?” Britta said.

“I wanted the howl called on your brother. An alpha who can’t keep the pups.” He kept his eyes on the fire. “I’d have stood in his place on the twenty-fifth. I’d have gone out that same night and found three children before the moon cleared the pines. The next day I’d have read the members Greenstone’s number, and they would have signed. Nine point two million. Nobody would have had to count fives on a kitchen table again.”

“She was sleeping apart by the first of October,” Kaisa said. “You brought her a pasty on Tern Rock, and she left it.”

“I saw it. I told myself I had three weeks. Then I told myself two.” His voice shook. “I couldn’t bring her in without bringing all of it in.”

“Sixty thousand dollars,” Anders said.

“September of 2019. They wanted an option and somebody to walk their surveyors over the ridge. I signed as treasurer. I took them up Reino’s winter line, because it was the only way over that I knew nobody used. I put the money in Duluth for the next tax notice. Then a guide walked into the stakes.” He turned his head at last, to the lean man standing by the woodpile. “You’d have gone up that ridge in the morning and read whose boots had led them. You were the one man on the lake who could find me. So I made you the man nobody would believe. While Tauno was up there counting stakes, I took twenty out of the sixty and paddled to your bay. You were out lifting whitefish nets.”

“And the glove,” Kaisa said.

“The glove too. I took it out of the storeroom with my own key.”

“Did my father know any of it?” Anders asked.

“He never knew. He believed me, because I had never given him cause to doubt me.” Stefan pulled the blanket closer. “The forty is still in that account. I never bought myself a pair of boots out of it. I don’t say so to be thought well of.”

Nobody answered him. The fire cracked. Pia’s fingers had closed in the front of Kaisa’s shirt.

Reino Rautio came round the stones. He had his thermos in his hand. He unscrewed the cup, filled it, and stood looking down at the man who had carried his wife’s coffin.

“Seven years,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

He held out the tea. Stefan stared at it, and then he took it in both shaking hands.
***