Summer Fishing in Lapland E-Book

Juhani Karila

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 389

Beschreibung

'Immediately enticing, endlessly charming, full of wit, magic and deep, moving humanity. It transported me to a world both familiar and utterly unknown, keeping me enthralled on every page' CLAIRE NORTH, AUTHOR OF THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST _____________ When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to the remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond, or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made even more difficult by a host of deadly supernatural creatures and the homicide detective on her trail. Can Elina catch the pike and lay to rest the curse that has been hanging over her head ever since a youthful love affair turned sour? Can Sergeant Janatuinen make it back to civilization in one piece? And just why is Lapland in summer so weird?

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEAN INTRODUCTORY TOURTHE FIRST DAY1234THE SECOND DAY567891011121314THE THIRD DAY151617181920THE FOURTH DAY21THE FIFTH DAY22THE END OF THE TOURACKNOWLEDGMENTSAVAILABLE AND COMING SOON FROM PUSHKIN PRESS ABOUT THE AUTHORSCOPYRIGHT

AN INTRODUCTORY TOUR

We approach the pond from the stratosphere.

First we see Lapland. It has three parts: (1) Exciting Western Lapland. Big ski resorts, meänkieli dialect, great artists like Timo Mukka, Kalervo Palsa, and Reidar Särestöniemi. (2) Exotic Northern Lapland. The Saami people, tundra, migrating reindeer, Lake Inari, Arctic char. (3) Stupid Eastern Lapland. Swampland and mosquitoes. Of no interest to anyone.

Except us.

We’re rushing toward it, even against a headwind. That can’t be true. The earth itself wants us to go west.

But I make up my own rules of nature.

We’re approaching from above so that you’ll understand. Lapland is big. Even as far north as Sodankylä and driving at top speed, it would still take you almost five hours to reach the Arctic Ocean. Forget that—driving is a poor measure. There aren’t many roads. Or buildings. Or people. There’s wilderness. Nondescript stretches of boggy grassland that look leftover, like the debris brushed away and tossed up north by God when he finished putting in the moors and meadows and rain forests everywhere else in the world. God is such a shit! I shouldn’t exaggerate. The highlands are beautiful. But the rest of it! Not that I’m complaining. At least there’s nobody here, so there’s plenty of space. The idea of Lapland is a combination of size and emptiness. A horizon pierced by scruffy spruce, appalling desolation that keeps the people mute and the myths strong. Myths. They feed on fear. They condense into monsters that wander the bogs like machines set in motion long ago that no one knows how to turn off. They swim in dark waters. They crouch in the crawlspaces under attics with round, burning eyes like owls. And far outside the villages, beyond the woods and lakes and fens, are nameless creatures who watch over their kingdom, looking out at the wan lights of the houses from atop the distant fells.

Adjust your focus on that side channel of the Kemijoki River. That’s the Kitinen River. At the village of Vuopio there are two inlets that break off from the Kitinen. They’re called Iso-Uopaja and Pikku-Uopaja—Big Inlet and Little Inlet. Our target is Big Inlet. It’s round and deep. At its stagnant bottom are pikes the size of fallen logs… In the middle of Big Inlet is Manolaissaari, Dead Man’s Island. That’s where Slabber Olli does his business. But we’re not going there. We’re aiming at a spot a little to the left of it. There is a little creek that feeds into the inlet and I thought we might land next to it, prettily, like butterflies. Or crash into it. Splat! The swamp is nice and soft to crash into in June. Here, let me pull you out of the mud. Shmloooomp. And a good smack right in the ear. Thwack!

Welcome to the world! Don’t look at me—look around you. Perfect. A song thrush is cooing in the pines, and just ahead a black cloud of mosquitoes is rising from the swamp.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Annoying, is it not? You’ll get used to it. Don’t wipe the mud off, buddy. It’s good protection.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Let’s follow this creek trickling through the grass. Pesky water bugs… Try to stay on the tussocks as you go. They roll under your boots, I know, but they hold, unlike the spaces between, which can suck your leg under right up to the thigh. Then the bog bogeys come swarming and pull off your boots and take a nibble at the soles of your feet. A nasty feeling. One time in Saukkoaapa… Now the mosquitoes have found us, and they’re crawling all over us. Look at the bloodsuckers, poking at us with their snouts. Do not waver! They can’t get through. The mud’s hardened. It’s like wearing a coat.

Thank your good luck there aren’t any stripefoots around. They’re as big as helicopters. Those vermin can lift a grown person into the air, shove a stinger into their eye, and suck out their insides. Then they drop the dry husk into a willow thicket and it hangs there on the branches, fluttering like laundry.

The house you see on the right bank is the Ylijaakos’ place. Nobody lives there anymore, but there will soon be people coming and going.

Would you believe that a month ago this whole area was under a meter and a half of water? The spring meltwater forms a large lake. That place where we landed was an excellent spot for whitefish just a week ago.

See that narrow indentation, almost like a path? That was made by the hero of our story. And there’s our creek again. Let’s follow it like a rainbow and see what treasure is at the end. But first, more willow thicket. It’s bent over as if someone had made a passageway through it, and something like that is exactly what happened.

In the middle of the thicket is the Back Pond. A shallow puddle saturated with fertilizers, where the fish have a strong taste of silt. Perch as big as oven mitts.

We’d better get a move on! Did you think we had arrived? No, no, no. After this willow thicket there’s still more swamp and sludge. And puddles. Then a hundred meters of flood plain.

It’s just the tussocks squelching…

Sometimes I feel like the world isn’t going to sink into the sea or turn into a desert, it’s just going to become one big swamp. The fields will sink into the swamp. The little villages will sink into the swamp. Road signs, roundabouts, skyscrapers… they’ll all sink into the swamp. Even the ridges and mountains will sink. And the swamp will spread over lakes and oceans like some horrible disease that dims the sun and leaves the fish in darkness, so thick you can walk from Africa to America on a continuous, quaking bog filled with cottongrass, the whole planet one big trickling, chirping, sloshing bog fit only for whining mosquitoes and a new, intelligent being that moves over the damp on long, mechanical legs.

But that won’t happen for some time, and now we have happy news. We’re nearing our destination. Yes, that pond peeping out in front of us has been our goal all along.

Welcome to Pike Pond.

If you think the Back Pond is shallow, you should see this one. Thirty centimeters at its deepest. Though that’s a subjective judgment. The water’s as thick as pea soup, and somewhere in the broth there’s a black pike.

This is the stage for our story, and there on the bottom is the slimy main character. Or one of them.

This is what we came for.

But hey! How did the pike end up living in this wetland? As I said, in May this is a lake. When May turns to June, the water starts to drain away. The water level starts falling right before your eyes, and the fish, slowed down by the freezing conditions, don’t realize that they should start flapping their fins and head to the river. Some of them hang around like dopes, as many of us so often do at life’s turning points, and soon they find themselves trapped in a flood pond. Then a game of attrition begins as the fish start eating one another. There are usually a few pike, a school of perch, and a few roach left stranded in this pond. The roach are eaten first, then the smaller perch. And so on.

In the end, the only fish left is one lone pike. Left in horrible circumstances. There’s no food at all, so the pike has to trawl the surface for scurrying dung beetles, and if all goes well some foolish vole might decide to take a swim now and then… All the pike can do is float, and grow thin, and wait for death.

Did you hear that? A car door slamming. Our hero has arrived. That means we’re ready to begin. She has three days. I don’t have even a second—I’m starting to sink. No thanks, I don’t need any help. The sinking is to be expected. I just came to visit, to guide you a little. To show you. And don’t forget…

THE FIRST DAY

1

Due to a string of regrettable occurrences, Elina Ylijaako had to catch a pike from a certain pond by June 18th every year.

Her life depended on it.

She set out in her car on June 14th, when the floods up north were sure to have receded, so she would be able to reach the pond if she wore rubber boots. She left early and drove all day. The farther she drove, the fewer the towns, service stations, and villages along the road became. The trees got shorter. Eventually, even the villages ran out. Nothing but forest.

Now and then an oncoming car would come around a bend in the road and she would slow down. The drivers in the cars motioned for her to turn back immediately.

A sign along the road said: telecommunications links end in forty kilometers.

Elina came to a strip of clear-cut about fifty meters wide. In the middle of the cut stood a white guard booth. A boom barrier blocked the road. Elina pulled up to the booth.

A bored-looking guard in a gray uniform leaned out of the open window. He had dark perspiration stains under his arms. A table fan hummed in the booth. Elina rolled down her car window and said hello. The guard went straight into his litany. He told her that the nation of Finland did not recommend that she go any farther. If she nevertheless chose to continue, all insurance would cease to be valid and Elina would be held solely responsible for whatever befell her.

“I’m from here,” Elina said.

The guard stretched out his hand. Elina handed over her identification and the guard looked at it. He glanced at Elina, then back at the card. He handed the card back and said, “Haven’t I seen you before?”

“Yeah,” Elina said.

“It’s hot as hell,” he said. He turned to look at the thermometer on the booth wall. “Twenty-eight degrees in the shade,” he almost shouted.

“Whew.”

“Never take a government job,” the guard said.

“OK.”

“Well, you have a safe trip now.”

The guard lifted the boom. Elina raised a hand and drove on. After the clear-cut, the forest returned on both sides. The road was empty. Elina stepped on the gas.

There was a stab of pain in the big toe on her right foot, broken in a fight.

When she’d crossed the Arctic Circle, Elina started glancing in the rearview mirror and scanning the sides of the road. If she saw a dark, low form, she slowed down until she was sure it was just a stump or a root. She turned on the radio. Every station was forecasting heat waves, wildfires, and floods.

Now and then she pulled over at a turnout, faced the woods, and stood silently with her eyes shut. She imagined a bar graph in front of her, two rectangles rising and falling as she breathed. Rising. Falling.

With each stop, the number of mosquitoes increased.

She drove past Loon Spit and didn’t even glance toward the houses on the riverbank. The town appeared from the forest like a dream. Disappeared like a dream. She reached her home village of Vuopio at ten in the evening. The sun was still high in the sky, turning the world the color of an old newspaper, yellowed and used. Elina turned right toward the bridge and drove slowly across. The wide river glistened below. When she reached the other side, she turned left and drove along the bank toward the house where she grew up.

On the left, just before the last curve in the road, was Asko and Efraim’s house, then Hoot’s cabin. The windows were dark. Elina drove the last straight stretch. At the end was a sign: road ends. She turned into the yard. There were four buildings surrounding it. The old sauna, her father’s childhood house—which they called “the old house”—the main house, and the barn. The driveway was lined with tall aspen trees. Elina parked in front of the barn and got out of the car. She could hear the drunken melody of mosquitoes and redwing thrushes. The flat, jaded sulk of a brambling. Near the rise between the barn and the old sauna, a pine tree stood like a sentry on the boundary of two worlds, dry land and the swamp, and leaned toward the swamp, which lay at the bottom of the bank, damp and patient.

Elina awoke the next morning to a loud noise. She got out of bed, looked out the window, and saw a cuckoo. It was sitting in an aspen, calling out the time to anything alive. She had never seen a cuckoo so close before. When she went to the window, the bird fell silent and flew away.

She looked at the empty aspen and thought about her task for the day: to catch the pike.

She had slept in her old room. It had a bed, a bookshelf, and a table and chair. Nothing else. She’d given everything else in the house to Hoot.

Elina sat down on the edge of the bed. She ran her hand over her head, her hair buzz-cut to a three-millimeter stubble.

The haircut was part of the ritual.

She straightened her right leg and examined her toe, black and swollen. It looked worse than it felt. She ought to do something about it.

Elina limped into the hallway. On the left was the living room, with maps of bird habitats and charts of migration routes and drawings of ducks’ feet that Hoot had put on the walls. She turned right, into the kitchen. She found a week-old issue of Lapin Kansa on top of the freezer, tore a strip from a page, and wrapped it around her toe. She found some scissors in the cupboard, cut a length of duct tape, pulled the paper tight, and wrapped it with the tape. A sturdy package.

She put the scissors back in the cabinet. Fixed to the cupboard door was a map with Hoot’s penciled marks on every place where he had encountered raskels.

Elina started the coffee dripping, opened the narrow ventilation window, and looked outside. She hadn’t had anything to eat the night before, but that was normal. Her appetite was always the first thing to go. There were the same birds making a racket as there had been fifteen years ago. Thrushes, wagtails, swallows. Or they looked like the same birds, but they were different birds. They covered the yard, trees, and buildings.

If you looked out and thought just about birds, you saw them everywhere. Swallows zoomed like jet planes in and out of the barn’s loft windows. Thrushes hopped evenly along the ground. Now and then one would freeze in place and you had to really squint to tell if it was a bird or a lump of mud.

Elina drank her coffee and felt like a brittle husk. One time, when her father was sitting in this same spot, doing a crossword puzzle, he heard a scratching of claws on the floor. He looked down and saw a weasel. It looked him right in the eye, as if it were the real owner of the house.

“How does such a creature even know where my eyes are?” he wondered.

At her mother’s funeral, Elina asked her father why they had built the house at the edge of a swamp. He said his family had always lived there, and it was a spot her mother found particularly to her liking.

Her mother had looked the whole place over thoroughly before they were married. She’d made a map of the area and drawn their future house on it, this house, on an east–west axis, so that it would lie across Lapland like a builder’s level. She explained that this way the building would complement the pattern of what was already there in the landscape. The river, the forest, the hills.

He had stared at his wife. A small woman with short, coal-black hair and small, coal-black eyes that reflected no light.

“I see,” he said. “I guess that’s what we’ll do then.”

They’d built the house together. It was a long, one-story house. Quite different from the other houses in the village, which all had a large central room with a wood oven in the middle. This house had no central room at all. The small kitchen, where Elina sat at the table, was off a long passageway that stretched through the house from end to end, with a living room at one end and a mud room at the other.

“Like the engine and the bridge,” her father had told her when she was a child. “We built you a spaceship.”

At night Elina would lie awake in bed and listen to the pounding noise that came from the walls and ceiling. She imagined that it was the sound of the spaceship’s engines propelling the ship through the darkness. But she thought that it was probably the sound of mice running through the hollow walls. Just ten years after the house was built, the mice had already eaten nearly all the insulation, and in the winters her father had to cart load after load of firewood into the mud room from morning to night.

In the summers they killed the mice with poison and caught them in traps. One time, her father set a trap by digging a hole in the ground along one of the mouse trails. He put an old pickle jar in the hole and filled it up halfway with water, so the mice running past would fall into the jar. In the mornings her mother would collect the dead mice from the jars and mousetraps and throw them up onto the mounded shoulders of the root cellar, among the fireweed and the raspberry bushes.

Then, when dusk fell, Elina and her mother and father would sit in the sauna and watch out the window as owls came flying in over the forage field to land on the rounded roof of the cellar.

Everything Elina had done came rushing back.

The birds fell silent.

The clock finished striking.

Guilt squeezed the air out of Elina’s lungs in a familiar, continuous pressure. Fffffffpt.

She laid her head on the table. Banged her head against it. “Shit,” she said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

She sat up straight again.

“Right. Don’t even start.”

She got up and paced back and forth across the kitchen. She spread her fingers and shook her hands in front of her, as if she’d received an electric shock.

She sat down on the floor. Leaned sideways and fell over. Curled up in a fetal position. It didn’t help. She got up. Walked into the living room. Looked out through every window, then went back to the kitchen. Shook her head.

“Shit. God-damn shit.”

She picked up a pencil from the table and wondered whether she could break it in two. She put the pencil down again. She had promised Hoot she wouldn’t break things anymore. She leaned a shoulder against the refrigerator. Its cool, smooth door. Then she lifted her head and rammed it so hard against the refrigerator door that the jars on the shelf inside jingled.

“Ow! Hell,” she said, holding her head. “Hell, hell, hell.”

She laughed, went to the mirror, and said:

“You just need you some grub. Eat something.”

She made some oatmeal and spooned it slowly into her mouth, like coal into a furnace. Then she went back to her room and put on a sturdy pair of cargo pants. She sniffed at yesterday’s shirt. Still smelled like smoke. She tossed it into the laundry basket, found an old, loose, gray shirt in the wardrobe, and put it on. She went to the utility room for some bug repellent and rubbed it on her face, neck, and arms.

She found her rubber boots in the mud room, put them on, took a baseball cap from the rack and put that on, opened the door, and stepped outside.

It was nine o’clock in the morning but the bees and horseflies were already buzzing slowly around the yard, numbed and directionless in the heat. They were chased by dragonflies, which were chased by swallows. Ranks of gleaming, metallic carrion flies sunbathed on the walls of the barn.

Elina went in to look for fishing rods.

It was cool in the barn. There were mosquitoes inside, delighted to be served breakfast in bed. They swarmed excitedly around her and she swatted them dead on her arms and neck. She tried to keep in constant motion. It helped, with the mosquitoes and with the thoughts waiting in her head for any idle moment.

She had decided to get the pike out of the pond first thing. She looked among the skis in the corner but there were no fishing poles there, then she rummaged through the hay poles and bird feeders and mopeds. The whole place was crammed with stuff. When the elk dressing room was moved to another spot, her father had started using the barn to store anything they didn’t need on a daily basis—which was quite a lot of things, because in his later days he didn’t do much except sit on the veranda and drink beer and look out at the swamp.

There were barn swallows’ nests up in the ridge beam. Baby swallows peered out of the holes and chirped at her.

She went to the cow stall and the mosquitoes followed her. There was an old hot-water heater there that had floated in on a spring flood. Her father had cleaned it up and made it into a fish smoker. In the old days, people in the village used to drag their junk onto the ice in the spring and let the river carry it downstream where it could be a nuisance for somebody else. There were tons of stuff at the bottom of that river. Toilet seats, fridges, freezers, cars.

She found a rod with a baitcaster reel under a wad of garden row cover. There was a tackle box, too, no doubt left there by Hoot.

She didn’t see a rod with a spincaster reel. She would have preferred a spincaster, because then she could cast with one hand, and she could use lighter tackle, like ten-gram Doppler spinners and Rapala ultralight crankbait. The baitcaster had a cork handgrip that was crumbling in places. There was a spot in the middle where it had been broken, wrapped in duct tape.

Elina tried bending it. The tape held.

It would do.

There was already a steel leader on the line, bent from pike bites. Elina opened the tackle box, took out a nine-centimeter popper wobbler, and attached it to the leader. She put a few spoons and spinners and another small lure in an old eyeglass case and shoved it in the side of her boot. Then she walked out into the yard and looked up at the white clouds. They moved unhurriedly across the sky like mutant angels. Elina thought: This just might be a very good day.

She was absolutely wrong about that, though.

There were nettles and willowherb growing behind the barn. Hoot had mowed a narrow path through the weeds, and Elina took it. The air lay over the yard thick as oatmeal. Elina whistled an old tune and a song thrush answered her.

Young rosebay mingled with the nettles, pushing their way up out of the ground, pale, straight, and eager. In just two months they would be taller than her, bent over with their red-blossomed heads hanging, surrendered to August. They would gradually turn color from the stem outward, dry up, and die where they stood, and snow would cover them, cover the whole landscape, and nothing would make any sound, just drifts of snow everywhere, and above it all, the moon.

There was a farm road behind the barn that bordered the woods and led from there down the bank and through the fields and bogs and willow thickets between Big Inlet and Little Inlet. Elina followed it down the bank, then turned off the road and trudged across the swamp. She passed the Back Pond where large perch hunted. The Back Pond was edged with thick stands of willow that scratched red and white streaks into her bare arms. It felt good.

She kept walking. Now and then a mosquito caught her scent and made a careful approach and she smacked it. The swamp stank. The ground looked dry but her feet sank several inches with every step and water trickled among the weeds. Each time she picked up her foot there was a sharp smacking sound, as if her feet were sweet lollipops and the swamp was reluctant to surrender them. She was careful of her right foot, but the wrapping seemed to be holding. She walked over sphagnum moss, marsh tea, and cottongrass. She trampled shoots with tough stems that twined over and under one another like electrical cords. The cranberries were blooming. Their pale-pink blossoms hung from the tips of their stems like pearls. Too beautiful for this mire. There were thick mounds of them in places, and she aimed for those; the ground was firmer there. She kept moving. The bog bogeys started moving faster when the weather warmed, but thankfully they were still pretty slow. Everyone knew that moose and reindeer which tried to cross the wide fen islands sometimes stumbled into bog holes and were sucked under and the bog bogeys burrowed into their juicy carcasses.

It was such a lot of work to be alive and perform the senseless tasks of living, like the one she was performing now. It would be so much easier to sleep under the cold bog.

Now the horseflies had smelled her, too, and were flying loop the loops around her. Clouds played and shifted over the woods and it occurred to her that she wasn’t moving. Only time was moving—she and the bog bogeys and even the clouds were just a series of still images. Then she was at the edge of the pond.

It was the same as always—a smelly gap in the bog grass. In the middle grew a dozen sickly looking reeds. The water was filled with brown debris that loomed like towers, stretching toward the surface of the water.

It was late morning and, strictly speaking, very bad weather for fishing. Elina set the brake loose on her reel, pulled the rod back, and swung it in a wide arc. The popper flew and landed with a splash in the middle of the pond a meter from the stand of reeds.

She let the bait just float there. If the pike was alive—and it always was—it had turned toward the sound now, stiff as an old submarine.

The solitary fish’s systems were slow to get going. It hadn’t eaten in many days, just lain half asleep on the muddy bottom, waiting to die, but now its hope was renewed, its senses straining to their utmost. It was analyzing the swirl of water and sludge with fins trembling and eyes wide, wondering whether some food had arrived.

Elina jerked the rod. The popper dashed forward ten centimeters, splashed across the surface, and landed with a plop.

A trail appeared in the water, coming from behind the reeds, and Elina did nothing, because the pike knew where the popper was now. The water churned and the bait sank. Elina jerked the rod. The pike was hooked.

It weighed about a kilo and it did what pikes do—it started to pull. First it pulled left, then it pulled right. Elina turned the rod, keeping it at a ninety-degree angle to the line. She tightened the brake. The pike had to work to fight the full strength of the rod.

The water splashed. The fish grew tired.

Elina held the rod in one hand. With the other she took off her cap and slapped it against her leg. An assortment of insects fell dead into the bog. She put the cap back on and started reeling in.

When the pike was a meter from her, she raised the rod and lifted the fish out of the water. Then her fishing line broke.

Snap.

Clouds slid over the pond.

She grabbed the end of the broken line and examined it. It was transparent and uneven. She let out more line, grabbed a length with both hands, and tugged.

Snap.

She tried to remember the last time she replaced the line on this rod. She couldn’t recall ever doing it.

This was the first real setback she’d had in five years. She’d always caught the pike on the first cast.

Elina felt a little excitement now.

She tied a sixteen-gram Krocodile spoon straight to the line. She slipped the end of the line through the loop of the lure twice and stared at the resulting twists of line, at a loss. How did you tie a lure on again? She started to wrap the line around itself. Her fingers remembered.

She needed both hands now, which gave the horseflies an opening. One tried its blades on Elina’s wrist. Nipped. Elina wet the knot with spit and pulled it tight a with a smooth, gentle tug.

Then she flicked the fly away.

She bit off the excess line, reeled the spoon in to the tip of the pole, lifted the rod back, and cast. The pike immediately bit.

“Haven’t you learned anything?” she said.

She intended to tire the fish out properly this time. To be careful and only give it a little resistance, gentle enough to keep the line from breaking again, but active enough to keep the fish working. She intended to sap all the pike’s remaining strength, guts, and will to live, until it was driven ashore by the sheer force of apathy. Then she could just squat down and pick it up as easily as a dropped grocery receipt.

She loosened the brake. The pike started to pull. It pulled toward the center of the pond and the brake whirred as the line payed out.

Two things worried her. If the pike had swallowed the lure it might bite through the line. And secondly, if it circled the middle of the pond it would wrap the line around the stand of reeds, and then the line would tighten and she would lose contact with the fish. If that happened, one sharp tug could break it again.

That she could do something about.

She kept the line straight between her and the fish and walked around the pond in the direction the fish was swimming so that the clump of reeds was never between them. The pike was swimming clockwise. Elina walked, coaxing the fish like a good idea you can feel coming. She talked to herself to help keep herself patient. Described every step she took, every jerk of the pike on the line.

She didn’t have a second’s peace from the bugs now. Her neck and hands were wet with sweat that had washed off the insect repellent, and mosquitoes were biting. They sat down and felt around for a good spot with their flexible snouts. A mosquito’s snout is a fantastical, six-part instrument. It has two outer piercing tools and next to them two spreaders to keep the puncture open. Between those is a pipe the mosquito uses to pump its saliva into the blood to keep it from coagulating. And then there’s the straw. The mosquito sucks up blood and excretes the water from it in droplets from its rear end.

These cleverly assembled blood-pumping and reproduction devices were assaulting Elina by the hundreds.

Mixed in with the mosquitoes were the flies. Deerflies with startlingly green eyes, swift, nimble, and silent, and swarming around the deerflies were horseflies. Black turds with wings. They made test landings all over her, probing her shirt and trousers and cap. Searching for skin. They burrowed into her hair at the edges of the cap, snipped her scalp open, and ate. They fought for space on her arms and wrists. They had chitin knives in their mouths and sawed at her with them, and when the blood came spurting out they buried their faces in the wound. Horseflies were living Swiss Army knives built by Satan himself, because they had spoons in their mouths, too, for ladling up the blood. Their dark, hairy rear ends pulsed and filled with blood until they were plump and turgid with it, and when they finished they flew heavily off to find a place to lay their eggs, any patch of grass next to the water, never far away in terrain like this.

And around the horseflies sputtered hawker dragonflies, blue and glittering. They snapped up the horseflies, dropping on them from above and wrapping their strong legs around them like iron bands. Dragonflies kill horseflies by biting their heads off, then landing on a branch to eat. The largest dragonflies never land at all. They whir in place, majestic and horrifying, beating their wings and scanning their environment with all-seeing eyes. They eat all of the horsefly except for the wings.

Elina killed mosquitoes and flies with her free hand. She slapped them on her arms, shirt, and trousers. Her left hand turned dark with guts and exoskeletons. She wiped the remains on her trousers, which had become an insect graveyard. She walked undeterred around the pond, intent on the circus of the hunt and of death. Her toe throbbed. She staggered. Every so often she had to put her free hand on the ground for support, and when she did the bugs had free rein to bite and slice and feast and ladle her up.

And all around her in the grass and twigs and branches crawled bugs and beetles of every kind, each one seeking the success prescribed to its own species. They wrestled and some of them fell in the pond and floundered there, at the mercy of an unfamiliar element. Then the water skippers skated onto the scene. They thrust their snouts into their victims and secreted enzymes that dissolved the other insects’ internal organs, then they sucked up their liquefied remains. They were like knick-knacks made of thin sticks glued together and brought to life by a malevolent curse, and they all stuck their straws into their prey and sucked them up, leaving empty shells behind. If a really big bug like a horsefly happened to fall in the water, as many as ten water skippers would come in for the attack, surrounding it and feasting like hyenas.

The large spruce trees on a fen island waved their branches back and forth in the faint breeze, as if they too were trying to lure prey.

Once in a while a bird flew into the trees and was never seen again.

Under the water skippers, the pike moved. It was like a cudgel, its head wide like a crocodile’s, its body tapering toward its tail, long and dark as it made its way through its own murky world, bending its flexible body, then snapping straight again with an impassive flick as it glided onward. How gracefully it swam with just those small movements. And how awkwardly Elina went trudging after it.

She was wet with sweat and blood. Bugs that had wriggled under the edge of her cap crawled through her hair. They had sucked themselves so full of blood that they couldn’t get back out again, so they just droned and buzzed in their overcrowded prison. Bugs had crawled into her ears only to find no future there. They felt trapped and struggled and whined, an unbearable noise coming from inside her own head. Something was constantly pinching or biting her, the pain spread evenly over her entire body. Her feet hurt, too, and being punished this way was satisfying to her.

How wonderfully, how slowly and painfully, the time passed here at the pond. She and the fish were both using up their strength. She slogged over the bog, its dispiriting yieldingness. The pike swam around the pond, its dogged resistance like a cross it bore. The question was whose strength would give out first. Elina focused on just one thing: putting one foot in front of the other.

She realized too late that her line was hanging slack. The pike had stopped circling. It floated motionless in the middle of the pond, which meant that it might be ready to give up. She didn’t give it a rest break. She jerked the line, forcing the fish into motion. It drifted reluctantly near the shore, just two meters away. Elina walked with exaggerated stealth toward it in three wary strides. The last stride was on her right foot. Her toe gave such a throb of pain that she almost yelled. The pike opened its mouth, its gills spread wide, like wings. The line and leader swished from its lower lip. Elina crouched down, hoping that the pike was ready. That the shadow of her outstretched hand wouldn’t frighten it, would on the contrary feel like salvation.

Elina looked into its eye, a murky pearl with the world falling into it in a fog of movement and color. It didn’t register defiance, or desperation. The fish just did what it could, because it could.

It propelled itself to the middle of the pond.

And they started all over again. And again.

Then Elina had an accident. Her right foot, numb and aching, stumbled into an unexpected low spot. She lost her balance and fell on her backside with a splash, into the cold, wet bog. She scrambled upright and yanked her foot out of the muck. Roared in pain. The foot came out, but not the boot. She stood there with nothing but a woolen sock on her right foot. The swamp sucked on the boot, gurgling with pleasure.

The brake on her fishing rod gave a shout and the line started to pay out.

The pike was circling the reeds again.

Elina made a leap. The fish was half a revolution ahead of her. The line was nestled against the reeds, threatening to tangle. The fish tugged. Elina lifted the rod as high in the air as she could. The line cleared the two outermost reeds, and then another, but the plants in the center were taller; they just bent in the middle, then not at all, and the line cinched the whole godforsaken bunch of them into one tight green tuft. Elina lunged. The swamp squelched. The lunge was a mistake. The pike sensed the hurried movement and darted forward, making a complete circle around the ragged reeds. It was all over. Wrapped around the snag, the line wouldn’t give, and the fish couldn’t move. It started to strain against the line. Elina yanked and twitched at the rod. The reeds just waved at her. The pike curled back on itself and sprang, and the line didn’t hold. It broke.

Elina immediately turned her back on the pond. She didn’t even stop to get her boot. She deserved this. All of it. She headed back home in a laborious, lopsided trudge, her right foot on fire, her sock letting out a sickening splat with every step, the constant cloud of insects around her making a nightmarish racket.

When she reached the house she took off her wet clothes, hung them on a nail in the mud room to dry, and threw her sock in the trash. She carefully unwrapped her toe, which was pulsating, black, and numb. She threw the tape in the trash and got in the shower. The water fell rather than showered, the pressure minimal. She looked at her mangled toe and the water swirling around it. Blood, dirt, and dead mosquitoes.

She dried herself and looked in the mirror. Her face was covered in angry red bumps. They would get redder and angrier once the insects’ proteins had done their work.

She spoke to the mirror:

“I’m bent, but not broken.”

Then she let out a loud laugh, because she always hated those old sayings and she was horrified that there was still so much of the day left and she was already dead tired.

This was just the sort of misery she needed. She tried to be grateful for it.

She limped into the kitchen and turned on the radio. It said that the extraordinary heat would continue in Lapland, and that severe storms were expected. Elina taped up her toe again. She searched the cupboards, took out the jars and the bags of flour, and found some cinnamon rusks. Their best-before date was last year. She tested one with her teeth. It was as hard as a rock. She put it in her mouth like a pacifier, to moisten it, sucking the sugar off, and sat down in the same chair where she had sat in the morning and listened to the radio, which recited a catalog of dire weather events in various countries, manifest signs of the end of the world. She thought she should go shopping.

She should go to the bait shop to buy some new fishing line and to the co-op to get some food.

2

Elina drove into Vuopio, past the old houses along the river. They were built after the war, on the same foundations as the older houses, which had been burnt to the ground. In every yard there was a pen with a yapping dog in it. In every yard there was a garage, shed, or sauna with a contraption made of chain-link fencing on the roof for drying elk.

Dazzling early-afternoon light sparkled on the river. She drove over the bridge and turned onto the main road of the village. There was a co-op and a fishing-gear shop. She pulled up in front of the latter. It was called Vuopion Viehe—The Vuopio Lure—and was run by a man named Keijo. One time a man from Somero had come to town and started a competing fishing-supply business, but it was the sort of thing that would never fly because everybody did their shopping at The Lure.

Elina sat in her car and gathered her strength. In one corner of her windshield sat a horsefly with its front legs held imploringly against the glass, ready to surrender. She imagined that her car was on the moon. Surrounded by gray desolation, airlessness.

There was a knock on the side window. Elina jumped.

Simo the Shit was peering into the car. He was holding a wooden mask of an old man. He’d made it by gluing evergreen cones, rocks, and bits of wood and lichen to a disk of wood. She read his lips: Buy. Elina got out of the car, put her hand on the old man’s shoulder, and asked him how he was. “Father Shit,” Simo the Shit said, holding out his woodwork. Elina shook her head and said, “See you later,” before going into the shop.

Keijo was sitting on a stool behind the counter trying to twist a crankbait lip with a pair of pliers and cursing to himself.

Mounted pike and salmon heads decorated the walls and an old fishing net hung from the ceiling. There were tables of reindeer skulls, on one table a stuffed fox stood heavily draped with lures, and on the floor next to it was a shell casing as long as your arm with plastic sunflowers poking out of it.

Elina went to the shop once a year, and every time she went it was crammed with more odds and ends and fewer fishing supplies. It was hot inside. Electric fans were set up on various surfaces, humming full blast. They rotated slowly from side to side like radar devices and made the dangling fishing lures flutter with a tinkling sound.

“Afternoon,” Elina said.

Keijo let his eyes fall on his customer.

“Look who’s here.”

“What’s up.”

“Not much. Not much at all.”

Elina looked at the rotating rack next to the counter. Jigs, hooks, lure rings, and swivels. She spun the rack around. On the other side were shiny forty-centimeter steel leaders and black fifteen-centimeter titanium leaders, three to a box. The titanium ones were more expensive.

She grabbed a box of them and put it on the counter. Keijo glanced at the box, then back at his work. “Anything else?”

“New line.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Got any that’s braided?”

Keijo gave the crankbait lip a twist. “We sell monofilament.”

“I’ll take that.”

“What weight?”

“I guess I’ll do a zero-point-fifteener.”

Keijo set the lure down in his lap and looked at her. “What you fishing for?”

“Pike.”

“Are you insane?”

Elina laughed, but Keijo was serious. The fans hummed.

“Make it twenty, then.”

Keijo went back to twisting the lip. “Tell me something,” he muttered, lifting the lure and staring into its painted eyes, as if he were asking the lure a question and not Elina. “When you take a shit, do you shove your head in the toilet?”

“I can’t remember what all the numbers are. I’m in kind of a hurry.”

Keijo fiddled with the lure a bit as if to say that it wasn’t his problem.

“Make it a thirty,” Elina said.

“When you go after this pike…” Keijo said. Elina groaned. “Are you going to hold onto the hook and throw the rod in the river?”

“Does the weight of the line really matter all that much?”

“A fisherman knows. Or woman.”

“Why don’t you just give me a —”

“And are you sure about those leaders?”

“Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Yes, I’m sure. That line —”

“I got forties, too.”

“What?”