Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck Read Free Book Online Page A

thought of her mother dying until it didn’t feel good at all any longer.
    “Dorotea can boil water.” She found her mother watching her. “And you can make bread.”
    Frederika leaned forward and poked at the embers with a stick. They were still unreliable: thin, skipping all over.
    “It wasn’t wolf, was it?” she asked.
    Her mother glanced at Dorotea. Her sister was filling a pot with water, tongue steering. “No,” she said.
    “What happens now?”
    “It’s with the priest now. He’ll find out what happened.”
    Frederika divided the dough into pieces and patted them straight onto the embers: Glödhoppor, emberjumpers.
    “I know it was awful to find him, but this has nothing to do with us,” her mother said.
    Frederika picked at the breads, flipped them over with her fingers.
    “We must not become frightened,” her mother continued. “In Ostrobothnia you used to know the village and the forests around as if they were part of you. Don’t you think you can make Blackåsen your own too? When you are ready?”
    They snapped the breads off the embers and covered them with a thick layer of bright yellow butter. Their fingers became black from the charcoal. On the opposite shore Blackåsen Mountain was a muted block of gray. Frederika licked each finger and tasted the fat.
    Mirkka mooched when they returned. Frederika sat down on the stool in the barn. She pulled on the firm teats. She was wet and cold and wanted it done, and then of course, the cow couldn’t. The cow turned her head and looked at her. Her watery nostrils trembled.
    “It’s like when you’re in a rush to wee,” Jutta had explained. “You want it too much and then it doesn’t work. Think about winter calm, how the snow falls.”
    Frederika did what her mother had done when she taught the cow to milk. She leaned her forehead against the animal’s flank and hummed a song and felt like a fool, but both she and the cow relaxed, and the warm milk squirted down into the bucket.
    She carried the trough to the cottage. Further down the slope Dorotea and their mother were hanging clothes on the line. The kitchen was silent. They had removed the moss between the logs for the cottage to breathe in summer air, and the light that seeped through the whitened wood made her feel as if she were in a dream. The room smelled irritated from the lye. Her mother and Dorotea had hung their dresses on the iron rack in the roof to dry. Water dripped from them onto the floor below. Frederika didn’t like the look of them empty.
    The timber was cool and smooth against her feet. She pulled off her dress and let it slap down on the floor. She examined the sores on her hands made by the lye-water. But now all the old was out. And Midsummer’s Eve was soon over. The day had passed, and all was still well.
    She grabbed her dress and stepped on a chair to hang it over the drying rack beside the others. She tried to flatten it out. Otherwise it wouldn’t dry, and you’d be sorry tomorrow.
    There was a knocking. She covered herself, but nobody entered.
    There it was again.
    A black crow sat on the window ledge. The bird tapped on the pane with its beak. A second crow flew and sat beside the first. Then they both pecked on the glass. Tock-tock-tock. As if they wanted to come in.
    “Birds carry the souls of the unborn and the dead,” her father had told her once. They were watching a large flock of starlings, a black cloud on the sky that changed shape, twisted, fell, picked up. There was a tic by the side of her father’s mouth. “A person has to know how to read the signs.”
    “What signs?”
    “Oh, there are so many.” He hit out with his hand. “Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
    She didn’t ask more. She had thought that later she would ask Jutta.
    Frederika stepped down from the chair. The crows didn’t move as she approached the window.
    At first she didn’t register. And then she realized what she was seeing and gasped. In among the trees there was a