Crossing of the Tornealv, The

The Crossing of the Tornealv

D James Brown
david.brown@iname.com
Words: 5,854

For Lauri 1884 was the same year as 1883 had been, and the
ten years before that. He was too old to age from one year to
the next and his calendar was the same every year. The years'
numbers were just labels associated with a migration around
Lapland. Although the people in the Saame troop had changed
- newborns arrived every few years and the oldest members
died, like some cruel crop rotation - the twice-yearly crossing
had been unchanged for Lauri didn't know how many years.
He had been born the third son of a fisherman who had
worked on the Norwegian coast. His education had been that
of a fisherman, arrested when his parents died one after the
other of tuberculosis. They had been given a proper Christian
burial by missionaries and were well-remembered by their
friends. Even so, Lauri had wanted to leave the community
and start anew.
He had worked for a time trading reindeer skins and hemp,
with contacts within the troop of travelling herdsmen. He had
married and, finding the nomads' life appealing, had joined
them.
In his earlier years Lauri had spent a day every Spring and
every Autumn wrapping his possessions in skins and, when
the weather told him to, he would strike camp on the River
Tornealv where the troop would have spent a time waiting for
a suitable day, and he would help the other men drive the
reindeer through the river, before floating across his
belongings on rafts made from the spruce trees along the river
bank. The rafts would be left on the bank for the next
crossing.
Lauri had crossed the Tornealv twice a year for nearly
forty years. Recently, the crossing had become more
demanding than old hands could cope with. He now watched
while others filled his rafts for him and rounded the reindeer,
while he could only wander around after the men murmuring
obvious advice and staring dolefully at the six-month-night
sky for signs of weather.
The alternative to crossing the Tornealv was to watch the
troop cross without you and continue their migration, leaving
you to die of cold or hunger. This was the order of the Lapps'
lives. The crossing of the Tornealv turned boys into men, and
men into leaders, but it marked the time for the elderly to end
their lifelong wandering and stand still for long enough for
death to smite them goodnight. And after the troop had
crossed, no-one would spare even a reminiscent glance at the
lonely figure huddled in the shingle on the far bank.
Lapland has no political boundaries. It covers the
northernmost areas of Norway, Sweden and Finland,
stretching to the Tundra on the north-western skirts of Russia.
The Lapp troops follow the reindeer's clockwise migration
between the Norwegian mountains in the west, where they are
herded and culled in the Winter, and the lowlands to the east,
where the troop join the reindeer in eating the blackberries and
scented yellow cloudberries which turn fingers scarlet with
their juice.
For Lauri's troop, the reindeer were an irreplaceable
resource. The vast, barren snowscape contained only sparse
trees and some few edible fungi towards Winter and the
reindeer provided valuable meat, skins and horns, supplying
the troop with food, clothes, tents, tools, needles and bobbins.
The little of a reindeer's body not used by the troop was given
to the dogs or left behind at each campsite for the shy arctic
foxes. As Lauri watched the last of the rafts being hauled up
the bank from the water's edge, and avoided the unbearable
sight of the year's throwaway on the opposite bank, he would
sometimes see a drowned fawn lodged on a silt bed farther
down stream, but no other animal would be wasted until the
Tornealv was next crossed.
For a few days following each Autumn crossing, the troop
would trek downstream until they reached one of several paths
that could take them through the thin woods up to the
mountains in the west. They would construct their kotas -
tepees made from birch-poles and hides - and spend the cold
nights in them, rising early in the ever-twilight to continue
south along the river.
One August evening, when Lauri was dozing in the
entrance to his kota with a smouldering fire in front of him, a
man called Lars came and sat beside him and offered him a
smoke of his pipe.
"Not tonight, I'm too drowsy," Lauri said, "Thank you."
Lars gave the pipe a puff, and as he let the smoke trickle
out of his mouth and wash his face, he held the pipe sideways
and admired it.
"I got this from a skolt," he said, "He worked at the apatite
mine at Onari. Said the last thing his dusty lungs wanted in the
evening was a smoke." He smiled to himself. He was a little
younger than Lauri and a little smaller.
"I hear you're going to have a grandchild," exclaimed Lars.
"Congratulations! Ellen told me only this morning, I could
hardly believe it."
"Yes," muttered Lauri, "Ellen's expecting my grandchild.
She's making me even older, you know."
"Nonsense! Watching a childhood begin brings your own
closer to mind. It'll make you younger."
"Does that always work ?" asked Lauri. "Will I grow older
and even feebler with every wretch I see abandoned on that
river bank?"
This was one aspect of a Lapp's life which was found
offensive to talk about, especially so soon after the crossing of
the river, and Lars couldn't help feel the silence watch him
shift and scratch and suck on his pipe.
"You wait until it's born. You'll see," he said at length.
Lauri pulled the skins closer under his chin and squinted
into the embers.
"You don't grow older with years, Lars. You grow older
with events. When you first cut a hole in the ice and pull in a
catch of fish, you grow. The first time you help the men with
the crossing, you grow. Then, when you first round and cull
the herds in the mountains, you grow up a little more. You
age when you begin to haggle over meat prices with southern
butchers, and when you marry, and when you become a father.
Becoming a grandfather is the penultimate step."
"What is the final one?"
"The final step is giving in to the Tornealv. Once you've
decided never again to cross the Tornealv, you are as dead as
the frozen skeletons we could find if we didn't keep strictly to
the path when we approached the river each year."
Again, he had mentioned the subject and had pulled Lars'
conversation off balance. Lauri found that he couldn't help
himself. Did the other members of the troop mourn the dead
as he did? No. They showed no remorse at all. It was a
necessary way of life, perhaps, but there were better ways. In
the south, in Norway and Sweden, a person was buried in the
ground and was publicly praised and mourned for days after
their death. The troop was different. They didn't bury their
dead, only their grief.
Lars poked the embers with a stick, trying to say
something, but could only say it with a prompt from Lauri.
"I was thinking," murmured Lars, "at least, some of the
troop thought that... Well, it won't be very many years before
one of us dies. Don't you think?"
"I know I'm old," answered Lauri. He had been expecting
this. "But I can still keep up with the migration."
"But it is getting harder for you, the crossing is."
"It's not," said Lauri, "because I don't help. You know
that." he was suddenly full of self-sorrow. "I'm loaded onto the
rafts with the skins and birches and towed across. When we
come to a difficult pass I am sat on a sled and a reindeer pulls
me along." He had been sensitive of this since hearing some of
the children mock him over it.
"Lauri, you should know that people are talking about
you. They say you should not have crossed this time."
"I am afraid," Lauri admitted, "not so much of death but
of premature death. When I first joined the troop I spent a deal
of time with a man called Ingmar. One Autumn, once I had
crossed the Tornealv a few times, he told me - " Lauri paused
to reconstruct the words. "'I'll let the troop cross without me
this time.' I was surprised because he didn't appear to be very
old. We drove the herds through the river while he stood on
the western bank, then, when we had drawn in the last raft and
were ready to leave, he began wailing and crying across the
water to us. I didn't know what to do, it made me feel sick, but
I followed the actions of the rest of the troop, who ignored
him. Over the next few days, as we followed the river south,
he followed us down on his side. He was growing weaker and
more ill each day. I didn't see why we couldn't leave the river
and begin the journey west, but it seemed that the troop's
leaders were so concerned not to acknowledge that Ingmar
was following us that they refused to alter our normal path. I
wanted to leave Ingmar only so that he could die as soon as
possible.
"Finally, the night before we were to head west, I built a
raft and secretly crossed the river on my own. I nearly
drowned. When I found Ingmar he was dead and cold."
Lars waited for a moment, remembering Ingmar's face.
Then he said, "I have seen people make the wrong decision,
but I've also lived with very old men and women who are
gossiped over and who lose people's respect. They eat the
same food as the others but can do no work to earn it. I don't
want to see the troop lose pride in you."
Lars felt it was time he left Lauri to his own thoughts and
he stood up. He left the dying fire and returned to his own
kota.
Lauri sat for a while raking the ashes of the logs that had
been blazing earlier, like memories of previous life. When the
cold chilled him, he crept into his kota and slept. A pale,
furtive figure fastened shut his kota from outside and silently
shrank into the icy ground.
_

Lapps call themselves Sameks or Saames - the words are
different because there are several dialects. The Saames are
short and dark, with an inherently Slavic bone-structure to
their faces. For hundreds of years they have had the sole rights
to breed and keep reindeer and, since a seventeenth century
decree that all residential Saames must pay taxes to the
Norwegian Crown, many have led nomadic lives, migrating
with the reindeer which shamble from one lichen patch to
another, scraping at the snow and ice with their large hooves
to uncover fungi.
As the troop treks west into the rising mountains, it is
difficult even for the Saames not to sense the immensity and
white desolation of Lapland. Although lush, green pine forests
can be discerned on the southern horizon, the only trees here
are weather-beaten spruces clinging to scree slopes. The air is
silent, save for the trample of hooves and calls of Saame
conversation. Occasionally a phalarope or a gyrfalcon will be
seen in the night overhead, only to emphasise the colossal
volume of air over the barren landscape. This was how Lauri
saw the scene every year, only as the years lengthened, so too
did the rocky path into the mountains.
When the troop lived in the lowlands in the Summer, he
would sit beside his kota and doze. He would pick a spot to
the north-west of his kota, just within its shadow, so that as
the sun moved along the southern horizon its light would fall
on him in the evening and the orange warmth on his eyelids
would wake him in time to see the thick red band of cloud
stretching from his left eye's corner to his right's, dripping
cloudberry juice down onto the crimson-stained snow in the
distance. It had been five months since Lauri had felt the sun's
comfort on his skin, but the passing of a generation now
dimmed his memory of a warmth that had warmed him right
through to his heart.
The route out of the foothills had been chosen by a man
called Eivind. He was short and muscular, with a thick crop of
black hair, and the stern look on his eyebrows suited him to
the position of troop leader. Lauri found it a long trek up into
the mountains and once or twice he asked Eivind if he was
sure that they hadn't come too far west, as it seemed that the
troop had walked farther than they normally did.
"You've asked me that each day since the plains," Eivind
replied. "We always come this far, often farther."
"We usually camp lower down in the mountains," Lauri
protested. "Why have you brought us up such a difficult
climb?" To this Eivind answered variously in sighs or tuts, or
by slowing the troop down to an uncomfortable plod.
Early in December, Eivind led the troop through a gully
into a shallow valley within the mountains. The Saames
mounted their tents, dug trenches to divert heavy rain, built
pens for firewood, constructed hearths for cooking, and fixed
posts to tie reindeer to, for in the following weeks they would
be culling the older animals.
At its far end, the gorge widened into a sparkling platinum
lake lined with delicate spruces. The lake was locked in by
monstrous peaks with pitted sides plated with ice. If you
looked between them to the south and stood on pointed toes
you'd be sure you could almost see the mid-afternoon sun over
the tops of the evergreen forests.
Although it was sheltered, Lauri found it a cold place to
live, and as Winter froze the camp he felt last year's stiffness
returning to his skeleton. He spent little time outside his kota
and relied on his daughter Ellen and later, as her baby grew,
Lars to prepare his food for him.
Lauri was sitting one morning in the kota of an old woman
called Marketta. She had been old when Lauri's wife had
borne Ellen and she had been the midwife. It had taken Lauri
and his wife several years to have a child and they had been
unable to have one afterwards. She had died a year later of a
disease the Shaman knew nothing about. It had been the one
time since joining the troop that Lauri had wished he'd been
living in a town with hospitals and competent doctors. When
he spoke to Marketta he felt that she understood him
completely.
"How soon will the baby be born?" asked Lauri.
"She could start any day now."
"Start?" Lauri didn't quite understand, he had never paid
great attention to such matters. When a child was born into the
troop, Lauri and several of the other men would go for a walk
out of earshot of the camp. They preferred it that way.
"How long will it take once it starts?" he asked nervously,
to the amusement of Marketta. She shrugged.
"You'll be out walking, will you?"
"I thought I'd walk down to the lake." Detecting an
inoffensive touch of condescension he added, "I'm sure I'll be
overtaken by several others before I reach it." He felt the need
for a new topic.
"I was christened when I was born."
"By missionaries," Marketta assumed.
"Yes."
"So was I," she replied. "My parents hadn't wanted it, and
they were backed by the rest of the troop. The missionary we
had here didn't fit in. To be fair, he found the life difficult."
"I can understand," Lauri mused.
"He left shortly before you joined us." She smiled at the
memory.
"My parents wanted me christened," said Lauri. "The
missionaries had settled quickly into the community years
before they had spread east. The fishing villages never moved
around. My great-grandparents' generation resisted
Christianity. Some of them couldn't apply a foreign way to
their lives and were sadly put to death for what was seen as
stubbornness. By my parents' time, Christianity was seen as
being less alien."
"Were your parents Christians?"
"No. But they were buried as Christians. They were laid in
coffins, with palls and orisons, and the church prayed for them
and lit candles."
He fell into thought and Marketta let him. It had been such
a very long time since he had been kneeling in the church,
gazing at the rack of candles that had been lit for his parents.
Their light had lived in his head for all these years and now for
a second it gleamed through his pupils.
"Father!" There was a howl.
"Ellen?"
"Now just you calm yourself," Marketta told Lauri as he
jumped up. They left the kota and hurried through the sudden
cold to Ellen's. One or two others were emerging from their
kotas in curiosity. Marketta ducked through the entrance of
Ellen's kota while Lauri stood outside, half trying to catch a
glimpse of her past Marketta and half wanting to leave
Marketta to her task.
"Come on," said Lars, appearing at Lauri's side. "Let's go
for a walk."
_

The baby, a boy, was born very quickly and named Nils.
Lauri felt wonderful. For a few weeks he seemed to slough a
few of his older years, but the Winter's cold soon brought
them back to him. He was very little help in the reindeer's cull,
and when the day came to break camp and leave the pleasant
valley he found it very difficult to make his way over the stony
ground through the gully. He spent much of his journey down
to the foothills on a sled behind two reindeer.
Lauri knew that he had only a few months to make his
decision. Would he ever cross the Tornealv again? When he
nursed Nils he had no doubts that he should cross, but when
he lay in his kota at night he felt that it would be difficult
ever
to see the pretty lowlands again. His joints seemed to ache
more and more, the skies seemed to darken, and his few
possessions seemed to be getting heavier each time the troop
moved camp.
When the Christian missionary had left the troop he had
removed the shamanism from the Saames, but the seeds of
Christianity had been choked by the weeds of the Saames'
migration. They were left a people very much without a
religion, but certain shamanistic traits remained. The troop's
Shaman still spent his nights leading the juingo - the frantic
singing and lashing of drums enjoyed by the Saames and by
Lauri as he sat beside his only daughter and her husband at the
fireside. The troop were camped beneath Tornudd Hills but
the Saames were still unsure how far they were from the River
Tornealv.
On a cloudy evening in April, as the Shaman stamped a
path around the fire and bright sparks from the fire flew like
fire-flies above the heads of the choir, Lauri fancied that if
the
smoke rose half as high into the night as the singing then they
could have been espied from the Finnish Lowlands.
Lars sat a little way around the circle from Lauri, so that
when he rose to come across to speak to him the Shaman
danced around him and drew smiling shouts of laughter from
the circle. Lars came and sat beside Lauri, holding his pipe in
his right hand and a drink in his left.
"How's the family then?" he said, deliberately making
Lauri's chin rise a little with pride.
"Ellen's in high spirits, of course. She's still a little tired.
Nils is with her now."
"He's got forearms like you."
"Yes," said Lauri without doubt, "Fisherman's arms, they
are."
"You'll have to cut him a hole and see what he can catch."
Lauri agreed. Then he realised something that made his
stomach turn to tar and his face pale. If he died that year, he'd
never teach Nils to fish. The thought stunned him for a
moment. Someone else could teach him, but it wouldn't be
Lauri. Nils would be taught to catch fish through a hole in the
ice on a lake, sitting on a skin. That wasn't real fishing. Lauri
would never be able to tell tales of vast salty nets of fish
being
heaved in over the side of a creaking ship by a line of men, all
singing in time to their hauling. Nils would never hear of
barnacled sea-dragons or shy, pearly mermaidens. These tales
were to have been the link between Lauri's father and Nils,
and now the bond would have to be broken. Very clearly,
Lauri saw the sad moment coming when a relation becomes an
ancestor.
Before he had to pull himself back to the conversation,
Lauri saw Lars turn away to joke with Eivind, making them
both laugh loudly. Lauri stood to his feet and sowed a path
through the singing bodies to Ellen's kota. He lifted the flap
and, closing it behind him, saw in the dim, dark brown of the
kota's insides his beautiful daughter Ellen lying asleep under
furs, whilst Marketta hushed and nursed Nils, holding him to
her face, the one as wrinkled as the other. She and Lauri
smiled together and he settled himself beside her. As they both
whispered their thoughts to each other, the singing around the
campfire continued into the night and, unknown to the troop,
the fire-lit silhouette of the camp could just be made-out from
the frosty banks of the River Tornealv.
The river coursed between its banks, black like oil. If you
had been a member of the troop, Lauri could have told you
that if you stood on the silt under the Tornealv's banks and
peered across the snowy mounds alongside the river, you
could sometimes see the moon's image reflected on the
ground. He couldn't have told you that if you stood their on an
April night like this one, days before the crossing of the
Tornealv, you might feel a curious warmth over your feet,
rising slowly up to your calves. Looking around yourself you
might see bales of blue-white mist stealing up the bank and
spreading out over the meadows.
The dark water's surface would be spitting and crackling
as the smoke rose from it, creeping over the shingle and
flowing thickly over the bank. The arctic strawberries would
be whispering "Hush!" as the mists rolled towards the nearby
hammering of drums and cries of song, the swathes parting
around trees and hurrying through ditches, turning sea-blue
and black in the shadows and halo-white where it caught the
starts' shine.
Within a few minutes, the mists would have gathered
secretly on the feet of the Tornudd Hills and would be eyeing
the cluster of kotas and the oblivious chanting Saames from
above the camp.
While Ellen and her midwife slept and Nils slept with
them, Lauri sat on his own outside their tent with a fire in
front of him, and he knocked juingo on the hearth-stones with
his knuckles. Within the ice a yard beneath him a small crack
twitched open and bubbles frothed through it in the darkness.
As he hugged his reindeer skins Lauri guessed at the troop's
distance from the Tornealv. How many days were left? When
would his decision have to be made? In truth, the decision had
already been made, but when would come the day when he
could no longer change his mind?
As the worry and the weariness pulled on his eyelids his
head started to nod, but he quickly straightened when there
was a shiver in the ice beneath him. Just beyond the ring of
stones keeping the fire's embers together, he saw a line of ice
rise from the ground like a welt. It lengthened and heightened
until one end, followed by the other, broke away from the
snow and stuck to the air a hand's span above the ground.
Lauri rocked slowly, his eyes flickering and his hand reaching
up silently in front of him in a trivial attempt to catch the
attention of somebody else to come and see.
He heard the heavy breathing of someone asleep. It was
his own breath. The sky became heavy. The constellations
linked themselves into chains, then mazes, then they formed a
matted veil of yellow blood vessels within Lauri's eyes. He
realised he had stopped blinking. Was this sleep? So close
Lauri was to death, so few days adrift, and yet so easily he
found that life could still amaze him.
The bar of ice before him rose and its ends curled around
and fused with each other to form a ring, which began to glide
towards Lauri. It dripped droplets onto the hissing embers as
it passed into the heat above them. The ring hovered an arm's
length in front of Lauri, with the hot ashes causing steam to
rise from it into the night air.
Lauri's eyes started to itch and at last he blinked. His eyes
opened to see that the ice had taken the mould of Ellen's face.
The eyes opened and the lips parted. Then the face focused on
Lauri's and smiled comfortingly.
"Father," it said in a voice that sounded like the crunch of
snow, "You'll soon have to make your choice." The following
silence invited him to reply.
"The river may be very near, I appreciate that, and I'll be
sure to have made my decision before we reach it and my
judgement fails me."
"Perhaps you should leave the decision until you see the
Tornealv itself. You'll not have seen it from the same aspect
as when you see it this time and I think you'll need another
look at it before you choose."
"I won't be so sober as I am now, not when I start to hear
the river's water."
Ellen's image paused as if it were sketching out a line of
thought. "Father, there are almost thirty people in the troop
and not one of them is in a position to appreciate the difficulty
of your decision. You have been all your life of sound
judgement, knowing that only when you are upset or angry
that your judgement is different - not wrong, just different. It
is easy for you now to assume that when the Tornealv
confronts you it will render you too frightened to make a true
decision. But all a Saame's life, he sees the river as simply a
body of water or, when camping in the lowlands or mountains,
it is merely a concept of a body of water. The only time he can
make a man's last decision is when he sees it before him in the
light of a cemetery."
Lauri's hope snagged on the last word, but it faded
quickly. "You don't mean to call it a cemetery. I won't be
buried or given a tombstone."
"That's what you would like?" asked Ellen's face with
empathy.
"Yes," murmured Lauri. "More than my desire to live is
my desire to have a respectful death. I'm thankful that I
haven't died before I should. That is good. Now what I want is
for it to be a handsome end."
After a pause the voice whispered "Mark time for now,
and try not to worry. You have still to see where your time will
end."
Lauri looked mournfully at the hearth. The voice carried
across the embers to him.
"Why don't you spend more time with your grandson?"
Lauri didn't hear the words, "You may only have a day or two
left," but he felt their chill.
He looked up at the face in time to see it recede, then melt
and dribble through the air onto the snow, and then he was
alone.
When his attention was again brought into focus, Lauri
did not know whether he was being woken from sleep or from
thought. He heard a bird's cry. A greenshank swung through
the night and landed on one of the kota's a little way away.
Lauri saw it and shivered. For a few moments his breathing
and the twitching of his fingers had to become conscious
efforts else he would have frozen. Lauri had never seen a
greenshank more than a mile or two from running water. The
Tornealv must have been near.
For a part of the night, Lauri and the greenshank regarded
each other. While they did so Time hurried forward, and when
finally the greenshank fell into the blackness of the night,
when Lauri's thoughts had thawed again, and when Time had
resumed its sly, innocent creep, Lauri had only two days left to
live. While the mists conferred on the hillsides, Lauri's fears
settled and his fatigue nursed him to sleep.
Lauri was woken the next morning by Eivind, who said
that he had scouted east to the riverside and that the troop was
now preparing to move camp to within sight of the river so
that they'd be ready to cross as soon as the clouds moved
away. Eivind had been a little abrupt as he had woken Lauri
and he now rushed past to organise the troop's activities,
leaving Lauri rubbing his face up and down. As he blinked the
night out of his eyes, he heard Eivind's words. Then he
remembered the greenshank.
As Lauri stood up, it could be seen that his neck and back
were stiff, and that he was a little cold, but only he knew what
it felt like to know that he had perhaps only a day left before
he died forever.
A few minutes later, as he collapsed his kota, he thought
of how he could leave the troop most unobtrusively. Perhaps
he should stay where he was and not follow the troop to the
riverside. But no, it might be a few days yet before the
weather was right for the crossing, and the temptation to re-
join the troop while they camped at the riverside would be
very strong.
Perhaps he would slip away during the business of
packing up the camp for the crossing. He could walk a little
way west from the river, leave the path and find some secret
hollow amongst the snow-dunes. For a moment of
forgetfulness Lauri considered that he'd need his kota and
food and clothes, but that would be pointless.
That afternoon, once the troop had established camp at the
riverside, Lauri found that his plans would have to
accommodate somebody else. The weather was fine for a
crossing and Eivind had said that the troop could cross the
following morning, and that he'd like to show Lauri something
before they did.
That night, then, was Lauri's last with the troop. He had
gone to Ellen's kota as the troop had fallen asleep and, without
a word being spoken, they had embraced each other and hadn't
moved for an hour or more. The only sound had been Ellen's
sobbing. When finally she was sleeping, Lauri gently released
her and laid her on her bed. He covered her with a skin and
kissed her, then he left the tent and stood for a moment,
listening to the Tornealv only a hundred yards away. There
were no clouds in the sky and he easily made his way through
the campsite and walked until he stood on the river bank. His
emotions felt frozen and he was glad of the numbness.
He lost himself in his thought, thoughts of Ellen and Nils,
thoughts of his father, thoughts of the Tornealv. If he'd been
able, he would have been very comforted to see that around
him, lining the river bank and standing waist-high in the water
in front of him, all watching him pitifully, were scores of blue-
white Saame figures, some he'd once met, some old friends,
some who'd lived before his birth, all of whom had died beside
the Tornealv when their troop had left them behind. Some of
them patted his shoulders as they remembered how it felt to
have used up your time and have none left.
When Lauri was woken up the next morning by Eivind
opening his kota, he could hear the troop packing for the
crossing. It was unmistakable. On no other date on their
calendar was there the same excitement and sense of action in
the voices of the people talking to each other.
"Are you awake?" asked Eivind.
"Yes," said Lauri, shuffling to his feet. He came outside
and stood up.
Eivind said, "I'd like you to come and see something."
He led Lauri onto the path and took him a short distance
along it, then he turned off and waded through the snow into a
recess between two knolls.
When Lauri caught up he saw what was before him. It was
a grave, an empty one, and on its headstone was written
Lauri's name. Eivind looked at Lauri and showed him a timid
smile.
"I dug it for you. I knew how you wanted one."
Lauri couldn't find the right thoughts for the situation.
"How did you know I'd decided to stay? I didn't tell you."
"I've seen plenty of people make the decision and I know
the signs. Yours were unmistakable."
Lauri felt a sparkle of relief shine through him.
"How did you dig it? We've only been here a day."
Eivind looked away, then at his boots, then met Lauri's
eyes. "I did it three years ago. I've had it ready."
The answer might have been wrongly taken as an insult,
but Eivind's apologetic smile said that it wasn't meant that
way. "I just wanted it to be ready for you," he said.
"And me for it," added Lauri.
Eivind rubbed the back of his neck and again he looked
awkward. "I've left," he said, pointing to the grave, "I've left
a
shovel in it for you," and it made them both smile.
"The troop's packed," Eivind said. "The weather's good.
We'll be crossing now." They both smiled again and Lauri's
hand shook as he pressed it to his own cheek. "So I'll be re-
joining them."
As Eivind turned to leave, Lauri's tears fell. He began to
rub his sweating hands on his clothes as he watched Eivind
disappear, and his lips trembled uncontrollably as he knelt at
his own graveside and wept.
The rest of the troop had a successful crossing. No
reindeer were drowned and nobody met with difficulty in
towing their rafts across safe and dry. Lauri barely survived
the night without food, fire or a kota, and he died the next day.
In the darkness, four ancient men came from the River
Tornealv to bury him and make a speech over his grave.