When the sun was at its peak Gunnar began to be delirious. His face was more swollen than ever and he was speaking in tongues. It sounded like Swedish or Nynorsk. He said something about a Young Farmer and a girl with long, blonde hair. We went out and let him rave in peace. Seb hadn’t been to the toilet since we had left. His belly felt heavy and he sat in the shade of the tent snoozing. Ola dived into his sleeping bag head first. I tried to do some fishing, but perhaps the gnome had been right. There was no life in the water.
Later that evening I discovered some strange tracks around the tent. One foot was a normal boot, the other an elk hoof. They led into the forest.
I said nothing to the others.
Next morning we woke up to some even worse noises. We jumped up out of our bags, Seb, Ola and I, and stared at the tent where Gunnar was asleep. That wasn’t where the din was coming from. We rubbed the sleep out of our eyes. Trumpets. We could hear trumpets. Ola was pointing, his mouth wide open. Over on the other side there was a swarm of scouts. The lake was full of canoes. A brown-clad dumpling with pink knees was blowing a trumpet.
We looked at each other. No more needed to be said. We woke Gunnar, his face had gone down a bit. He had scratched his forehead in a couple of places.
‘We have to move on,’ I said.
‘Don’t feel like it,’ he whinged.
‘Lot of scouts about,’ I said.
‘Let’s go,’ Gunnar said.
We rolled up the tent and were off. It was just a question of following the forest path all the way to Katnosa. Ola determined that it was nine o’clock. Could see it from the flowers, he said. Wow, we were impressed. Ola was a wandering cuckoo clock.
And then we were there. We threw our rods in the air and ran the last bit. We could smell cows and coffee. On the doorstep stood a large woman, smiling. She was wearing a blue and white dress, just like the sky.
‘Have you come far?’ she asked.
We had indeed.
We went into the room and sat round a table.
‘Waffles,’ we ordered. ‘And eight Cokes, please.’
Seb disappeared into the toilet and Grandma took a closer look at Gunnar.
‘You’ve fallen out with some mosquitoes,’ she laughed.
Gunnar nodded, would have been stupid to deny it. She fetched a tube of something or other. Rose glycerine, she explained, smothering his face with it. He sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded. Strange smell, had smelt it somewhere before, at Fred’s place, on his mother’s hands.
‘Leave it for a couple of hours,’ she said.
She brought over the Cokes and then came the smell of the waffle iron and a little after that came Seb, grinning like Johannesen after his record-breaking run in Squaw Valley, looking ten kilos lighter.
He looked at Gunnar.
‘Goin’ skiin’?’
‘Skiin’?’
‘Covered yourself in wax, haven’t you.’
We laughed at that until the waffles arrived. She sat with us and we told her about the pike and the duck, Daltjuven and all the fish we had caught, but not about the crazy gnome, don’t quite know why not, actually.
‘Where are you going now?’ she asked.
‘Down to the river mouth,’ I said. ‘Goin’ to try the river.’
‘You can use the cabin there,’ she said.
‘Great!’ we said in unison and the waffles melted on our tongues and the taste of the strawberry jam lay there for a whole summer and half a childhood. And we changed the soil for the worms. As we left we were given waffles and a loaf of bread so fresh it burned our hands. She stood on the doorstep waving, in a blue and white dress just like the sky, and we followed the path along the lake until we were out of sight.
We edged our way across the dam. Cold water streamed into the river and breathed cold air over us. A host of rainbows arced down to the river flowing into Storløken, where it tarried a while before rushing on to Sandungen.
The cabin was not big, but it was better than the tent. It didn’t smell of vomit, more of hay and horse. Gunnar found some shade and fell asleep. Seb, Ola and I tried the worms in the river, didn’t get a bite, though. We lit the pipe instead, mixed the dried milk, but it went lumpy. Ola tried it as bait, thought he had a huge bite, but it must have been the riverbed he had hooked. And then the dark rolled in from behind us, thick, over our heads, a bit like in a cinema. We tried the spinners, not a nibble. And then came the midges. They were worse than mosquitoes. They got into your ears and nose and mouth en masse. We puffed on the pipe like demented Indians, but it didn’t help. We fled into the cabin, where Gunnar was babbling in his sleep. So we, too, went to sleep and dreamt about horses and waterfalls.
I was up before the others. I was wide awake and starving. I crept out. The weather was clear although I couldn’t see the sun. Only now could I hear the roar of the river, a rough, heavy drone. It couldn’t have been more than six o’clock.
I took my rod and the tin of worms and wandered down to the bank, found a suitable place where I could wade out barefoot. I stuck on a good clump of worms and cast into the current. The hook floated down, I gave line, reeled it in and cast again. In the meantime the sun had appeared behind me and was warming my back. Birds began to twitter and flowers opened and the rainbows in the river danced and shimmered.
On the fourth throw I had a bite. It hurt my wrist. The rod stood in the air like a paper clip. I let the line run and the fish pulled it along. It had to be a trout. Or a salmon. Several kilos. At least. I started sweating. The reel held a hundred metres and there wasn’t much line left. I waded backwards to the bank and eased my way along it, the rod wedged firmly behind my belt buckle. Then the line went even tauter, it sang in the air. I stopped, waited for a few seconds then tried to reel in. Stuck. Nothing doing. Against the current. I waited. I had plenty of time. But then I caught sight of a movement down by Storløken. I couldn’t believe my eyes. A naked woman was sitting on a rock, absolutely naked with huge tits and light brown skin. I let the rod slip, the line ran. I stood staring in amazement. She didn’t see me. Then she glided into the black water and swam across. At that moment I heard a dog barking.
I ran back to the cabin. They were asleep. I shook them awake.
‘Naked woman in the river!’ I shouted.
They were out of their bags like bats out of hell and sprinted after me. We found two bushes to hide behind.
‘There!’ I said, pointing to the rock in the water.
No one there. The river was smooth, without a ripple.
‘Where?’ they hissed.
I took a few steps forward.
‘She was there,’ I said lamely. ‘Right there. A few minutes ago. Sitting on the rock, without a stitch on.’
The others exchanged glances and rolled their eyes.
‘It’s true!’ I shouted. ‘Huge tits she had!
‘It’s only s-s-seven o’clock,’ Ola divined from a flower he had picked.
‘Don’t you believe me?’
They didn’t answer, just shuffled back to the cabin. I went for my rod. Seb was making tea when I returned. Ola was slicing wedges off the fresh loaf. Gunnar looked fine apart from a couple of bumps on his forehead.
‘Been up long, have you?’ he grinned.
‘I did see her. I saw her! Dead cert!’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Seb sighed.
‘Hooked an enormous trout,’ I said in desperation. ‘Five kilos it must have weighed. I was just gonna land it against the current. And that was when I saw the woman and the line ran!’
Gunnar patted me on the back.
‘Sure you hadn’t hooked her?’
They had a good, long laugh about that.
I walked up to the dam and sat there. Naked woman, I could hear them saying in the cabin. Naked woman in Katnose river! Then there was lots of laughter and whistling.
In the forest I heard a dog barking.
We caught nothing that day so we had to make do with fish balls for dinner
. We sat on the doorstep as the can simmered on the gas stove. Seb prepared the pipe in case those pesky mosquitoes and midges came to bother us again. Ola examined the landscape and furrowed his brow, trying to work out the time.
But then he caught sight of something else. He craned his neck and hushed us.
‘Someone comin’,’ he whispered, pointing.
We jumped up and peeped around the corner. She was coming across the dam, a short girl in strange clothes with a dog following – a fat, shaggy Norwegian Buhund.
‘That’s her!’ I said. ‘That’s the woman I saw in the river!’
The fish balls boiled over. We rescued what we could. Moments later she was standing on the doorstep. The dog sniffed around with its tongue hanging out. She just stood there, for a long time, staring at us, and we became quite frenetic.
‘Fancy some food?’ I asked with a dry throat.
She nodded, unhitched her rucksack and sat down. I gave her what was left of the fish balls. She shared them with the dog. Then laughed.
‘Great catch,’ she said. ‘Freshly canned.’
She was weird. She was the weirdest thing we had ever seen. She was weirder than the gnome. Her hair was long and very dark. And she had put lots of flowers in it, daisies, harebells and marigolds. She was an entire bouquet. But it was her eyes which were strangest. On the outside they were intense, they stared at you with all their gravity, but behind the blue there was a matt grey, like water that has been trampled in and the sand and mud stirred up.
We made coffee. She didn’t move. Seb lit the pipe and cleared his throat. She wanted to try. We were laughing inside. Karva Blad. But she inhaled the smoke with a huge drag and there it stayed. She passed the pipe to me without batting an eyelid.
‘Did you catch anything this morning?’ she asked.
I instantly went as red as a tomato. All the blood rushed to my head. And it was hot. Blood-red beads of sweat seeped from my brow.
‘No,’ I whispered.
But she didn’t look angry. She was smiling.
‘Tonight we’ll catch loads of fish,’ she said, rolling a cigarette with nimble fingers. The tobacco looked dry and dark. She lit up, sucked in all the smoke, held her breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they had changed. The clear blue had receded and the matt, murky sediment appeared. It was as if she couldn’t see us. She smelt sickly sweet.
‘Tonight we’ll catch fish,’ she repeated. ‘But first of all I have to sleep.’
So saying, she laid her head on the dog and slept on the doorstep.
We went down to the river and each of us sat on a rock.
‘She hasn’t got a rod,’ Gunnar said.
We chewed on that for a while.
Ola spotted an anthill.
‘It’s half past s-s-six,’ he said.
‘So you were right after all,’ Gunnar said.
‘Think she’s an Indian,’ Seb whispered, blowing smoke rings skywards.
After a good hour she and the dog woke up. They joined us. She looked around and nodded several times.
‘Have you seen or heard anyone?’ she asked.
‘No,’ we said, bemused.
‘Come on.’
We followed her to the dam. There she stopped and pointed to a large lever. It looked like a lock on a door.
‘We have to close the sluice gate,’ she said.
‘Why’s that?’
She smiled.
‘Wait and see.’
We had to heave and strain, all of us. The big handle barely moved. But then we got it in an upright position and it slipped down towards the other side. We straightened up and listened. The river dwindled to a trickle. It became quieter and quieter.
‘Come on,’ she whispered.
She fetched her rucksack and Gunnar took the torch. We went down to the banks.
‘We’ll have to wait a bit,’ she said, sitting down.
It was strange. The sounds from the forest closed in on us now that the roar of the waterfall had gone. I looked at Gunnar. Even in the dark I could see that he didn’t like this. He was uneasy.
After a while she stood up and flashed a white smile.
‘Now we can fish,’ she said.
Gunnar was incandescent. The trout squirmed between the stones in the pools that were left, jammed together like in a can. It was crazy. It was like picking berries. Seb fetched our nets. The Indian woman filled her rucksack.
Gunnar grabbed my arm.
‘This ain’t legal,’ he snarled.
‘Course it’s not, but it’s the first time I’ve picked fish!’
He let go and went up towards the cabin. We filled two nets before we considered stopping. The insane woman had her rucksack full to overflowing. It was jumping about like an octopus.
Then we opened the sluice gate again, pushed with all our might and raised the lever. And slowly the world returned. A murmur at first, then the water plunged down, the roar resounded in our ears and the river flowed into the night with rafts of white foam on its back.
We lit the fire in front of the cabin, gutted eight trout, roasted them on a spit and drank tea. They tasted like waffles with bones. We smacked our lips and slurped so loudly they must have heard us in Skillebekk. Only Gunnar was not hungry. He sat apart from us looking grumpy and cleaning his nails with the knife.
Seb lit up the pipe and passed it round. She rolled one of her own, smoked it for a long time and then began to talk, as if to herself, or to the dog lying beside her with its rough, red tongue spread over its front paws.
‘Life is a river,’ she said. ‘Life is a stream.’
She leaned back and the sky sank in her face. Then she fell silent again. The fire crackled. Behind us, the water flowed.
‘Can I have a drag?’ Seb asked.
She passed him the cigarette. Seb took a huge drag, his eyes stood out in his face like bandy balls.
‘Bloody hell!’ he groaned and made straight for the river and drank like an elephant.
She laughed, sucked at the glow until it almost reached her lips, took a flower from her hair and threw it on the fire.
Gunnar was whittling a stick. He said, ‘What’s your name actually?’
She leaned back again. The dog rolled up its tongue.
‘The night doesn’t exist,’ she said into the air.
‘What do you do actually?’ Gunnar persisted.
The dog began to growl. The ears on its shaggy head stood erect. A row of teeth came into view in the bared jaws.
She stirred uneasily and stood up. The dog joined her, listened, then growled again and showed its teeth. The animal’s body was trembling.
‘I have to go,’ she said, throwing on her rucksack.
And she left, in the dark, disappeared like the river.
‘Wow.’
That was all we could say. ‘Wow.’
We sat for a while getting cold. A wall of cold rose from the river. Then the midges came. They came quickly and without mercy. We poured water on the fire, ran for the cabin and dived into our sleeping bags. The moon shone through the small, dirty window casting eerie light into the room. Then it slid away and darkness was all there was. We slept fitfully, talking in our sleep, a strange nervous conversation.
Gunnar was the first up. He returned with teeth gnashing and narrow slits for eyes.
‘Sod her,’ he said. ‘Screw her!’
Ola and I went out for a look. Down by the fire all the fish lay rotting. Flies buzzed in a compact stinking swarm above them. The mesh shopping bags were ruined.
‘Forgettin’ the fish was our fault,’ I said.
Gunnar kicked a stone that went sailing through the air.
It was downright impossible to wake Seb. He was mumbling, talking gibberish and totally incoherent. He was screaming, too. We had to use force, drag him into an upright position and lean him against the wall. Then we packed our things and moved on. We had the longest stretch of the journey in front of us, all the way to Kikut and Lake Bj
ørnsjøen.
‘All those fish thrown away!’ Gunnar mumbled. He was furious. ‘I knew it!’
‘What did you know?’ I asked.
‘That shit is what you get from messin’ around like that. It ain’t right to shut the gate. It’s no fun. And think of all the people left without water!’
We hadn’t thought about that. Ola lost his tan on the spot.
‘D’you think they’ve n-n-noticed that in the n-n-north?’
‘Of course,’ Gunnar said. ‘Lake Maridal. All of Oslo!’
Perhaps it was best to make a few detours. We took a look at the map, but the paths were quite tortuous. We didn’t want to end up at Hadeland Glassworks.
I said, ‘Wasn’t us. We were asleep.’
Seb chuckled.
Gunnar walked at the rear scratching the bites on his forehead.
‘Had a wild dream last night,’ Seb grinned, rubbing his eyes. ‘Dreamt I was a fish.’
‘What s-s-sort of fish?’ asked Ola.
‘Dunno what sort of fish, do I, you puddin’. Just a fish. Swimmin’ like mad. And we were talkin’ to each other. I mean, we, the fish. Talkin’ with little screeches. I know physically what it feels like to be a fish. Mad, eh! And under the water it was totally clear.’
‘Was no one fishin’?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Spotted a big hook. And I was just goin’ to bite when you woke me.’
It was five o’clock when we finally found Lake Bjørnsøen. That was what Ola said anyway. He could see it from the colour of the clouds. We burst into the Kikut lodge and ordered open sandwiches with liver paste on, Cokes and Ascot cigarettes. A huge clock hung on the wall. It was five past five. We looked at Ola. He was tuned in to time.
Footsore, sunburnt and exhausted, we sat there for quite a while. There was an old codger behind the counter and two women in the kitchen. And none of them complained about our lack of activity. Gunnar calmed down a little.
‘No one knows we did it,’ I whispered across the table. Gunnar looked straight at me.
‘That’s got nothin’ to do with it, has it!’
We found a place to camp a bit closer to the mouth of the river, right out on a flat headland that protruded into the water like an index finger. We erected the tent and took out our fishing tackle. The rainworms were beginning to go limp, there was very little resistance when we squeezed them onto the hook. The floats didn’t move. Slowly the water turned black as the clouds rose in the sky. A current of cold air blew against the back of our necks. The forest began to sough.