Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Lars Haug paused, raised the torch and shone it on Poker, who had not moved from his place just behind me. I did not turn, but I heard the dog’s low growl. It was a disturbing sound, and the man in front of me bit his lip and ran the fingers of his left hand over his forehead with an uncertain movement before he went on.
‘Thirty metres after them came the Alsatian. It was a huge beast. I fired immediately. I am sure I hit it, but it did not change speed or direction, a shudder might have run through its body, I really don’t know, so I fired again, and it went down on its knees and got up again and kept on running. I was quite desperate and let off a third round, it was just a few metres from me, and it somersaulted and fell with its legs in the air and slid right up to the toes of my boots. But it was not dead. It lay there paralysed, looking straight up at me, and I felt sorry for it then, I must say, so I bent down to give it a last pat on the head, and it growled and snapped at my hand. I jumped back. It made me furious and I gave it two more rounds right through the head.’
Lars Haug stood there with his face barely visible, the torch hanging tiredly from his hand, throwing only a small yellow disc of light on the ground. Pine needles. Pebbles. Two fir-cones. Poker stood dead still without a sound, and I wondered whether dogs can hold their breath.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said.
‘I was just eighteen,’ he said. ‘It’s long ago, but I shall never forget it.’
‘Then I can well understand why you will never shoot a dog again,’ I said.
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Lars Haug. ‘But now I’d better take this one inside. It is late. Come, Poker,’ he said, his voice sharp now, and started to walk down the road. Poker followed him obediently, some metres behind. When they came to the little bridge, Lars Haug stopped and waved his torch.
‘Thank you for the company,’ he said through the darkness. I waved my torch and turned to walk up the gentle slope to the house and opened the door and went into the lighted hall. For some reason I locked the door behind me, something I have not done since I moved out here. I did not like doing it, but all the same I did. I undressed and lay down in bed under the duvet staring at the ceiling waiting for the warmth to come. I felt a bit foolish. Then I closed my eyes. At some point while I was asleep it started to snow, and I am sure I was aware of it, in my sleep, that the weather changed and grew colder, and I knew I feared the winter, and I feared the snow if there was too much of it, and the fact that I had put myself in an impossible position, moving here. So then I dreamt fiercely about summer and it was still in my head when I woke up. I could have dreamt of any summer at all, but I did not, it turned out to be a very special summer, and I still think of it now when I sit at the kitchen table watching the light spread above the trees by the lake. Nothing looks as it did last night, and I cannot think of a single reason for locking the door. I am tired, but not as tired as I expected to be. I will last until evening, I know I will. I get up from the table, a little stiff, that back is not what it used to be, and Lyra, by the stove, raises her head and looks at me. Are we going out again? We are not, not yet. I have enough to do, thinking about this summer, which begins to trouble me. And that it has not done for many years.
2
We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and one of the first days of July. Three years earlier the Germans had left, but I can’t remember that we talked about them any longer. At least my father did not. He never said anything about the war.
Jon came often to our door, at all hours, wanting me to go out with him: shooting hares, walking through the forest in the pale moonlight right up to the top of the ridge when it was perfectly quiet, fishing for trout in the river, balancing on the shining yellow logs that still sailed the current close to our cabin long after the clearing of the river was done. It was risky, but I never said no and never said anything to my father about what we were up to. We could see a stretch of the river from the kitchen window, but it was not there that we did our balancing acts. We always started further down, nearly a kilometre, and sometimes we went so far and so fast on the logs that it took us an hour to walk back through the forest when at last we had scrambled onto the bank, soaking wet and shivering.
Jon wanted no company but mine. He had two younger brothers, the twins Lars and Odd, but he and I were the same age. I do not know who he was with for the rest of the year, when I was in Oslo. He never talked about that, and I never told him what I did in the city.
He never knocked, just came quietly up the path from the river where his little boat was tied up, and waited at the door until I became aware that he was there. It never took long. Even in the morning early when I was still asleep, I might feel a restlessness far into my dream, as if I needed to pee and struggled to wake up before it was too late, and then when I opened my eyes and knew it wasn’t that, I went directly to the door and opened it, and there he was. He smiled his little smile and squinted as he always did.
‘Are you coming?’ he said. ‘We’re going out stealing horses.’
It turned out that we meant only him and me as usual, and if I had not gone with him he would have gone alone, and that would have been no fun. Besides, it was hard to steal horses alone. Impossible, in fact.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ I said.
‘I just got here.’
That’s what he always said, and I never knew if it was true. I stood on the doorstep in only my underpants and looked over his shoulder. It was already light. There were wisps of mist on the river, and it was a little cold. It would soon warm up, but now I felt goose pimples spread over my thighs and stomach. Yet I stood there looking down to the river, watching it coming from round the bend a little further up, shining and soft from under the mist, and flow past. I knew it by heart. I had dreamt about it all winter.
‘Which horses?’ I said.
‘Barkald’s horses. He keeps them in the paddock in the forest, behind the farm.’
‘I know. Come inside while I get dressed.’
‘I’ll wait here,’ he said.
He never would come inside, maybe because of my father. He never spoke to my father. Never said hello to him. Just looked down when they passed each other on the way to the shop. Then my father would stop and turn round to look at him and say:
‘Wasn’t that Jon?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ said my father every time, as if embarrassed, and each time I said:
‘I don’t know.’
And in fact I did not, and I never thought to ask. Now Jon stood on the doorstep that was only a flagstone, gazing down at the river while I fetched my clothes from the back of one of the tree-trunk chairs, and pulled them on as quickly as I could. I did not like him having to stand there waiting, even though the door was open so he could see me the whole time.
Clearly I ought to have understood there was something special about that July morning, something to do with the fog on the river and the mist over the ridge perhaps, something about the white light in the sky, something in the way Jon said what he had to say or the way he moved or stood there stock still at the door. But I was only fifteen, and the only thing I noticed was that he did not carry the gun he always had with him in case a hare should cross our path, and that was not so strange, it would only have been in the way rustling horses. We weren’t going to shoot the horses, after all. As far as I could see, he was the same as he always was: calm and intense at one and the same time with his eyes squinting, concentrating on what we were going to do, with no sign of impatience. That suited me well, for it was no secret that compared with him I was a slowcoach in most of our exploits. He had years of training behind him. The only thing I was good at was riding logs down the river, I had a built-in balance, a natural talent, Jon thought, though that was not how he would have put it.
What he had taught me was to be reckless, taught me that if I le
‘OK. Ready, steady, go,’ I said.
We set off together down the path to the river. It was very early. The sun came gliding over the ridge with its fan of light and gave to everything a brand-new colour, and what was left of the fog above the water melted and disappeared. I felt the instant warmth through my sweater and closed my eyes and walked on without once missing my footing until I knew we had got to the bank. Then I opened my eyes and clambered down the stream-washed boulders and into the stern of the little boat. Jon pushed off and jumped in, picked up the oars and rowed with short, hard strokes straight into the stream, let the boat drift a stretch and rowed again until we reached the opposite shore about fifty metres further down. Far enough for the boat not to be seen from the cottage.
Then we climbed up the slope, Jon first with me at his heels, and walked along the barbed wire fence by the meadow where the grass stood tall under a light veil of mist, and would soon be mowed and hung on racks to dry in the sun. It was like walking up to your hips in water, with no resistance, as in a dream. I often dreamt about water then, I was friends with water.
It was Barkald’s field, and we had come this way many times, up between the fields to the road that led to the shop, to buy magazines or sweets or other things we had the money for; one øre, two øre and sometimes five øre coins jingling in our pockets every step we took, or we went to Jon’s house in the other direction where his mother greeted us so enthusiastically when we walked in you would have thought I was the Crown Prince or something, and his father dived into the local paper or vanished out to the barn on some errand that just could not wait. There was something there I did not understand. But it did not worry me. He could stay in the barn as far as I was concerned. I didn’t give a damn. Whatever happened, I was going home at summer’s end.
Barkald’s farm was on the far side of the road behind some fields where he grew oats and barley every other year, close up to the forest with the barn at an angle, and in the forest he kept four horses in a large area he had fenced in with barbed wire, from tree to tree at two heights. It was his forest, and there was a lot of it. He was the biggest landowner in the district. Neither of us could stand the man, but I am not sure why. He had never done anything to us or uttered an unfriendly word that I had ever heard. But he had a big farm, and Jon was the son of a smallholder. Almost everyone was a smallholder alongside the river in this valley only a few kilometres from the Swedish border, and most of them still lived off the produce of their farms and the milk they delivered to the dairy, and as lumberjacks in the logging season, for Barkald in his forest, or elsewhere, and in the one owned by a rich bastard from Bærum; thousands and thousands of parcels of land to the north and the west. There wasn’t much money about, as far as I could make out. Maybe Barkald had some, but Jon’s father had none, and my father certainly did not have any, not that I knew about, anyhow. So how he had scraped together enough to buy the cabin where we stayed that summer is still a mystery. Frankly, I never had a clear idea what my father did to earn a living; to keep his life going, and mine, among others, because it often seemed to change from one thing to another, but there were always numerous tools involved, and small machines, and sometimes a great deal of planning and thinking with pencil in hand and journeys to all kinds of places around the country, places where I had never been and never knew what they looked like, but he was no longer on any other man’s payroll. Often he had a great deal to do, at other times less, but still, he had managed to save enough money, and when we went there for the first time the year before, he walked round looking things over and smiling a secret smile and patting the trees, and sitting on a big stone on the river bank, his chin in his hand, looking out over the water as if he were among old friends. But of course it could not have been so: could it?
Jon and I left the meadow path and walked down the road, and although we had been this way many times before it was different now. We were out stealing horses and we knew it showed. We were criminals. That changes people, it changes something in their faces and gives them a particular way of walking no-one can do anything about. And stealing horses, that was the worst thing of all. We knew about the law west of Pecos, we had read the cowboy magazines, and although maybe we could say that we were east of Pecos, it was so far east that you might just as well say it the other way round, as it depended on which way you chose to look at the world, but with that law there was no mercy. If you were caught, it was straight up in a tree with a rope round your neck; rough hemp against the tender flesh, someone whacked the horse on its rump and it flew out from under your legs, and then you ran for your life in bottomless air while that very life flashed past in review with fainter and fainter images until they were empty of your own self and of all you had seen, and then filled with fog, and finally turned black. Just fifteen, was your last thought, that wasn’t much, and all for a horse, and then everything was too late. Barkald’s house sat heavy and grey at the edge of the forest, and it seemed more threatening than ever. The windows were dark so early in the morning, but maybe he was standing there looking down the road and could see the way we were walking and knew.
But it was too late to turn round now. We walked stiff-legged a couple of hundred metres down the gravel road, until the house disappeared round a bend, then up another path across another field that was Barkald’s too, and into the forest. At first the wood was thick and dark among the spruce trunks with no underbrush at all, only deep green moss like a huge carpet that was soft to walk on, for the light never wholly found its way in here, and we walked along the path one in front of the other and felt it yield each time we put a foot down. Jon first with me at his heels on worn gym shoes. Then we turned off in a curve, still to the right, the space and the light above us gradually expanding until suddenly we saw the two strands of barbed wire glinting, and we were there. We looked in at a clearing where all the spruce had been felled and the sapling pine and birch trees were standing strangely tall and solitary with no shelter at their backs, and some of them had not survived the wind from the north and had fallen full length with their roots in the air. Between the spruce stumps the grass was growing lush and thick, and behind some bushes further on we saw the horses, only their rumps visible, tails swishing horse flies. We smelled the horse droppings and the wet boggy moss and the sweet, sharp, all-pervading odour of something greater than ourselves and beyond our comprehension; of the forest, which just went on and on to the north and into Sweden and over to Finland and further on the whole way to Siberia, and you could get lost in this forest and a hundred people go searching for weeks without a chance of finding you, and why should that be so bad, I wondered, to get lost here? But I did not know then how serious that thought was.
Jon bent down and crawled between the two rows of barbed wire with his hand pressing down on the lower one, and I lay on the ground and rolled underneath the lower one, and we came through without a tear in either trousers or sweaters. We got warily to our feet and walked through the grass towards the horses.
‘That birch over there,’ said Jon, pointing. ‘Climb into it.’ A big birch tree stood apart, not far from the horses, with strong branches, the lowest of them three metres off the ground. Without hesitation I walked softly over to the tree. The horses raised their heads and turned them towards me as I approached, but they stayed where they were, still munching, without shifting. Jon walked around them in a semicircle from the other side. I kicked off my shoes, put both hands behind the birch and found a firm foothold in a crack in the bark, then placed my other foot flat against the trunk, and so climbed up monkey-wise until I could get my left hand around the branch, and I leaned over and took hold with my right hand and let my feet slide off the rough trunk, and then I hung by my hands for a moment before hoisting myself up, and sat there with feet dangling. I could do things like that in those days.
‘OK,’ I called
Jon squatted in front of the horses and talked to them in a low voice, and they stood quite still with their heads towards him and their ears pushed forward, listening to what was almost a whisper. Anyway, I could not hear what he said from where I sat on the branch, but when I had called ‘OK’ he sprang up, shouting:
‘Hoi!’ and stretched out his arms, and the horses wheeled round and started to run. Not very fast, but not very slow either, and two stampeded to the left and two came straight for my tree.
‘Be prepared,’ Jon called and shot three fingers up in the air in a boy scout salute.
‘Always prepared,’ I called back, twisted around with my stomach against the branch, kept my balance with my hands and opened my legs in the air like a pair of scissors. I felt a faint drumming in my chest from the hooves on the ground and up through the tree and a trembling from a quite different place, from inside myself, and it started in the stomach and settled in my hips. But it couldn’t be helped so I did not think about it. I was ready.
And then the horses were there. I heard their hard breathing, and the vibration in the tree grew stronger, and the sound of the hooves filled my head, and when I could just about see the muzzle of the nearest one beneath me, I slid off the branch with my legs stiffly to the sides, and I let go and landed on the horse’s back a bit too close to its neck, and its shoulder bones hit me in the crotch and sent a jet of nausea up into my throat. It looked so simple when Zorro did it in the film, but now tears began to flow, and I had to be sick and at the same time keep a firm hold of the mane with both hands, and I bent forwards and pressed my lips tight shut. The horse tossed its head wildly and its back beat against my crotch, and it accelerated into a full gallop, and the other horse followed suit, and together we thundered off among the tree trunks. I heard Jon yell ‘Yahoo!’ behind me and I felt like yelling too, but I couldn’t do it, my mouth was so full of sick that I could not breathe, and then I let it pour onto the neck under me. Now there was a faint smell of sick and a lot of horse, and I could not hear Jon’s voice any more. There was a rushing sound, and the hoof beats died down, and the horse’s back drummed through my body like the beating of my heart, and then there was a sudden silence around me that spread over everything, and through that silence I heard the birds. I distinctly heard the blackbird from the top of a spruce tree, and clear as glass I heard the lark high up and several other birds whose song I did not know, and it was so weird, it was like a film without sound with another sound added, I was in two places at once, and nothing hurt.