The Last Boat Home by Dea Brovig Read Free Book Online

their wheels like fossilised snakes. Above them, branches sewed up the sky.
    ‘We’re going into the woods?’ Else asked.
    ‘For now,’ said Lars. ‘You’ll see.’
    He planted his feet on the ground and cut the engine. He dismounted from the moped after Else and set the kickstand with his shoe.
    ‘This way,’ he said.
    Lars took her hand and led her into the forest, where the air seemed to clot around them. Chinks of sun filtered through the leaves to dapple the ground at their feet. With her free hand Else brandished her pail, swatting awkwardly at the insects that buzzed in her ears. She struggled to get her bearings among the firs that towered skywards, accepting at last that she had no idea where she was.
    Somewhere nearby, a brook murmured. A thorny pelt of pine needles covered the mud, where mushroom caps peeped out from under fern fronds. Else noticed blueberry bushes in the scrub but, instead of stopping, tagged along after Lars into a strip of tallweeds. Moss sucked at her heels, slowing her progress as the shadows between the trees brightened to blue.
    At the forest’s rim, they stepped into a meadow. There were no fences that Else could see. Wild grasses and dandelion stalks grew waist-high in the paddock, whose limits appeared to be set by the contours of the land. Behind a hill at the far end of the field, she could make out the peak of a black-tiled roof.
    ‘Who does it belong to?’ she asked.
    ‘Tenvik,’ said Lars. ‘He never comes here, though. Just look at it. It can’t have been grazed all summer.’
    He spread his arms at his sides and waded into the paddock, letting his flattened palms skate over the heads of the weeds. In spite of his assurances, Else met each rustle of grass in the wind with a nervous look. Knut Tenvik was her family’s neighbour. She had cycled to his farm many times over the years to collect the jars of honey that, early in autumn, his wife sometimes promised her mother after church. Else knew the Tenvik property was vast, though she had never guessed it stretched this far. They must have come full circle. She realised with a twinge how close they were to home.
    ‘Tenvik has more land than he knows what to do with,’ said Lars. ‘Pappa said he wants to rent some of it out. Did you know he went to Kristiansand some weeks ago?’
    To their left, a path broke off from the field’s perimeter and disappeared behind a copse. Else steered Lars away from it, pulling him deeper into the meadow.
    ‘He went to a circus when he was there. He met the owner afterwards and offered him a deal.’
    ‘A circus?’ Else said.
    ‘That’s what he told my father.’
    Lars’s eyes glittered like snowflakes in the sun. He wound an arm around Else’s waist and thoughts of home melted away.
    ‘Can you imagine it?’ he said. ‘A circus. Right here. Elephants. Lions, even.’
    At the heart of the field, the grass had sprouted so high that the tips of its stems drooped towards earth as if straining to return to the comfort of the soil. Else remembered the photos Lars had showed her as a child in the copies of National Geographic , whose yellow spines lined the bookshelves of Karin Reiersen’s library. Elephants. Lions. She almost laughed at the idea.
    ‘When are they coming?’
    Lars shrugged. ‘We’ll have to see it together, you know.’
    He tasted of oranges when he kissed her.
    ‘I can’t be late,’ Else said.
    He kissed her again. A wasp zipped by her elbow as she sank with him to the ground. Before long, her shirt was damp with dew and her head filled with the smell of the warm soil. Weeds swished around them like seagrass in a current. She vaguely wondered what had become of her pail.
    When Lars dropped her off on the road by the farmhouse, Else stayed where she was in front of the mountain, unwilling to give up the easy feeling he brought, though it was already slipping away. She watched his moped speed off down the road before she trudged to the bottom of the hill,