Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Anne Born Read Free Book Online

successful/ I said, 'I was thrown off, right over the barbed-wire fence.' I held out my arm to show the cut, but he looked me straight in the face.
    'How was Jon?'
    'Jon? He was the same as usual. Except at the end. He wanted to show me the eggs in a goldcrest's nest high up in a spruce tree, and then suddenly he crushed the whole nest, like this/ I said and held my arm out again and made a squeezing gesture with my fist, and my father put the last bag into the cupboard, still looking at me and nodding, and then he closed the cupboard door and stroked his bearded chin, and I said:
    'And then he went off, and then the thunderstorm started.'
    My father took his backpack over to the door and put it down there, stood looking out at the yard with his back to me. He scratched his neck, then turned and came back and sat down at the table, and said:
    'Do you want to know what they're all talking about at the shop?'
    I didn't particularly want to know what people were talking about at the shop, but he would tell me anyway.
    'Yes,' I said.
    The previous day Jon had been out with his gun, hunting hares as usual. I didn't know why he was so mad about shooting hares, but it had come to be a speciality for him, and he was good, he got one out of two. And that was not bad considering what a small, swift creature the hare was. I didn't know whether his family ate all those hares. They might get a bit tired of that. Anyway, he came home with two of them dangling by an ear on a cord, and he smiled like the sun, for he had fired two shots that morning, and both had hit the mark. That was a rare triumph even for him. Now he was home looking round for his mother and father to show them his booty, but his mother was visiting friends in Innbygda, and his father was in the forest. In his hurry to go out he had forgotten that, he did not notice who was at home, but it was his job to look after the twins. He put his gun down in the hall and hung the cord with the hares on a peg and ran through the house to find his brothers, but they were nowhere to be seen, and then he ran out into the yard again and round the shed and round the barn, but he did not find them. Now he panicked. He ran down to the river and waded out beside the jetty they had there, turned and looked along the bank upriver, and he looked downriver, but all he saw was a squirrel in a spruce tree.
    'Damn tree-bear,' he said. He bent down to the water and ran his hands through it as if to pull it aside so he could see better, but of course it was pointless, the water only came up to his knees and was perfectly clear. He straightened up and drew a deep breath and tried to think, and then he heard a shot from the house.
    The gun. He had forgotten to make the gun safe, he had not removed the last cartridge, something he always did when he got home. That weapon was the only thing of value he owned, and he had looked after it and polished it and kept it in good order as if it was his baby, and he had done that ever since his father gave it to him for his twelfth birthday, with strict exhortations on what it should be used for, and in particular what it should not be used for. And he always put it at half cock and took out the cartridges and hung it in place in the closet on a hook high on the wall. But now he had just put it down in the hall because it suddenly came to his mind what he had forgotten, that he was the one responsible for the twins, who were at home alone. They were just ten years old.
    Jon splashed out of the river and ran a stretch along the bank, then on in a straight line for the house, and it seemed such a long way, and his trouser legs were wet and heavy right up to the knee, and his shoes squelched and made a squishing sound with each step that he took and it made him feel sick. Halfway to the house he saw his father come running out of the forest on the other side of the farmhouse. He had never ever seen his father run, and the sight of the big heavy man leaping out from