The Harbinger

Left.

     Aching, this climb. I’ve been since dawn ascending this worn path. A stretch of gravel mounting the side of a slumbering beast, asleep for so long it has mossed and grassed over. The ease of summer strolls through flatter lands was now a reminiscence, and the dew sits heavy on auburn ash leaves.

Right.

     But the climb needs making if I am to pass over into the next valley. The next valley, that western Cwm, is a kind one where I will be housed by a stranger in return for merely telling of my travels. I will be warm and will rest, and may drink a little if I can sell the carvings of wagtails and skylarks I whittled on the road.

Left.

     In that next village I will post a letter to tell my elder sister I am alright. She worries about where and how I get about with my life on my back, my few remaining belongings exposed to the elements as the seams of the gunny sack split open. Perhaps I will find a new one in the next village or sit still for long enough to sew this one whole again. If I can find coins and the courage, perhaps I will even call her from a phone booth.

Right.

     Each step seems heavier, lifting these second-hand boots I earned from a farmer. A day’s labour and three days soreness these cost me; he had me shovel out the cow and pig barns, and the horse stables before hauling in more bales for them to feed on; I bruised my tailbone from slipping on the muck. The sole peels from the leather, flapping with every step, and I feel the water being squeezed out of the front of my socks with each step, only to be sponged back in as my foot lifts again.

Left.

     It is yet the morning, and the sun fights for its place amongst the grey folds of cloud overhead. I spent last night slightly misshapen, having slept in the hollow between some tree roots and under a thin canvas which leaked a lilt of water near the middle, making me sleep with my legs off to one side.

Right.

     I have just rounded a left bend, which I know to be one of the last from my camping on this mountain some years ago with a friend, in which we told ghost stories to the nine-year-old brother that one friend had brought with him. It was us who were scared when said younger sibling put a snake he had secretly caught on the floor of our tent.

     I halt.

     A score paces ahead of me I hear a rustling. I see the brambles, the blackberries on which have now withered or dropped off, shaking on the left of the trail – the uphill side.

     Shortly a black face appeared from the greenery, eyes squinting to avoid a thorny blindness. The white wool atop the head bounced forward as it passed out of the snagging bush. The rest of the creature came out, its rate of exit increasing as the thorns lost their grasp of its curling fleece.

     The ewe emerged with water-laden, sagging wool now dusted with thorns, leaves and small runnings of blood. It was followed shortly by calf. The little one also carried water, thorns and leaves in its coat, but was spared of bloodshed in its mother's wake.

     The mother trundled down the two foot slope and onto the path. She did so awkwardly, limping not to overbear her front right leg, which dragged a section of barbed, woody plant stem from it. Hobbling until central in the gravel trail, its body turned to face down the path toward me. Lamb followed, stopping just behind to the right of its guardian.

     Two pairs of dark eyes pierced the sparse mist to meet my own. The smaller eyes of the young carried hope in them – childhood naivety that the world is a just place is not an exclusively human trait -; the larger, elder eyes held sadness and grief, for they had bad news to deliver.

The path ahead is gone.

     Its mouth did not move, and I did not hear it say this - I did not hear a voice at all -, but I was told so. I knew it did not come from elsewhere.

     "What do you mean? There has always been a path here.” I say aloud. The air seemed thinner now, my voice croaking on the first words I had said today.

It has been washed away.

     “How?” I questioned “The rain has only been fine today. This path has seen worse rai-”

It was not the rain. The mountain woke.

It has had enough of man's unkindness.

A spring swelled. The land has slid.

The path is gone.

     I hear it now. The running water; the clattering of small stones being rinsed away; the dull thumping of larger rocks that rolled as the soil they leaned on had been stolen.

     “What will I do now? I needed to go that way to the next village.” I pleaded.

You shall continue on this path.

Your way in this world was decided before your first steps.

     The ewe’s coat now seemed darker than it had at first, washed with a black dust. The lamb beside seemed whiter now in comparison. The ewe placed its front foot down now, and the two-inch thorn stabbed in.

You will walk on to where the path is no more.

To where the roar of its leaving deafens you.

You will join the path in its fate.

     I sensed only truth in this. My stomach, now lined with lead, sat heavy in me. My left foot grew lighter in a boot that was no longer heavy; no longer waterlogged.

     “Can I not be forgiven for my unkindness?” I begged “I am sorry for the campfires I lit upon its back. I was young when I camped here.”

Left.

It is not your unkindness that angered it. The campfires did no harm.

The mountain was ravaged from below;

insulted by the theft of its innards for man’s wealth.

Right.

     “But I have not mined from this mountain. I have now pillaged its insides. I am not to blame for this robbery.”

But you are the one who is here now.

Left.

     The gaze finally broke. I blinked for the first time again. Both mother and child’s heads turned quickly, and they left the path on the downhill side. The pure white of the lamb's tail disappeared into the thicket.

Right.

     Each step was no longer mine but belonged to something older, greater, and infinitely more patient than I.

Left.

The noise grows louder. The roar swallows the world.

Right.

I slam my eyes shut.

Left.

Gods, help me.

Poem: At Home in Autumn

Rid of sticky summer sweat and

Campfire smoke that aims for eyes.

Done with shorts and t-shirts.

Safe from sunburnt skin.

I belong amidst the gold leaf fall,

When one can don tweed coats and wool hats,

Cover ears from bitter air, hide joints from dull cold aches,

Knit closed the moth holes in wool jumpers.

Trees release the burden of their clothing.

Squash of shed leaves underfoot,

Promise builds in darkening soil.

Stingy conifers refused to donate.

Bird song dampened by a denser medium.

Squirrels pack away winters lunch.

Mist smears scenes as watercolour.

Stovetop returns to labour for broth.

Grit bins filled for ice ahead.

My rootedness here soon upheaved.

Poem: A Small Fellow’s Spring

Beneath the moss, in small confine,

Something stirs below the pines.

Enclosed by frost through winter’s curse,

Now back to life the creature bursts.

Sounds of spells have made him wake.

Allure of slumber hard to shake.

At last, he rocks from mossy bed,

And dons a cap to thaw his head.

To the doorstep of this earthen den,

He walks more slowly now than when

The squirrels – beasts – hid away their goods

And humans – titans – stocked up with wood.

Time for rest is over, one must eat.

He misses the berries, those fattening treats.

But nettle leaves and burdock shoots,

Are enough to fill his humble boots.

He scans for ‘shrooms in shaded nooks

Collecting food with patient look

He hums his tune, expects to hear

A neighbour’s voice to call from near.

But the paths are quiet, the woods are bare.

No neighbours pass, no kin are there.

A village bustling, now no more

How many lost? Five, six score?

From forest’s breath their lives depend

It’s bloom, their birth. Its fall, their end.

Bound to the magic, their fates entwined,

When the mana fades, so goes their kind.

This vital essence once ran deep,

In each hollow, through soil’s keep.

But now its feeling wanes, subsides.

His friends departed. No goodbyes.

Godstiden.

     White foaming waves wash against the jagged coast. The landing will not be an easy one for the supply ship, the food aboard which we are reliant on. Stígrøy's isolated situation in rough waters while out fishing for our own, especially through the long-enduring dark of winter.

     The mainlanders crewing the delivery vessel think us islanders insane. They cannot comprehend why we remain here on the twelve-acre island where so little grows, merely enough grass and weeds to sustain a few goats. Nonetheless, the men aboard the Truva are happy to accept the pelts, cheese and cash - which they have repeatedly queried the unending source of - to warm their skins, stomachs and pockets, respectively.

     The Truva comes in unsteadily, brushing its dark pine hull against our modest peer. The captain is routinely drunk by the time he arrives at Stígrøy, having traded for beer and juniper mead in Tønsvik on his route to us.

     I walked down the peer, squinting my eyes to avoid the stinging sea spray. To my surprise, out from the wheelhouse walks a sober man, who wobbled with the boats rock upon the water and walked steadily once stepping foot upon the dock - the opposite routine occurred when he was inebriated and flush-faced.

     We exchanged goods at the usual rate, but the cash price of their goods had gone up.

     "Money is not worth what it used to be, Bjorn." the captain said, smirking.

     This was all routine, and we chirp up the extra coins to pay. What else would we do? We can hardly send a letter to the mainland to ask what the money is worth nowadays. The crew of the Truva would skim through our letters, running their fingers beneath each word to avoid losing their place.

     The play ends with the same closing lines

     "We can take you all and your goats back to the mainland," the captain offers. "We'd only ask for a single goat in return. We have plenty of their pelts but I'm yet to taste the flesh of a Stígrøy goat."

     "We are quite happy here, thanks." I reply with a downward nod of my head.

     "The Nordlys must be very beautiful here. No cities or towns, the sky must get so dark here," the captain says, although I believe these words were only intended to himself.

     "This rock is a halfway house between Tromsø and the gods." He mutters

     If only he knew how right he was.

     It was then that the Captain gave a smile and raised his hand to wave, without actually shaking his hand side to side, to my sister-in-law Elsa, who stood at the start to the dock, wrapped in a heavy shawl we bought some three years ago, and she had patched a hole in with a square of sack.

     Elsa was an attractive woman, tall with pale blonde hair. My brother had travelled to the mainland twelve years ago on the promise of easy work and good booze that another ship's crew - that of the Solstrøm - had planted in his mind. He arrived back with Elsa aboard the wooden Truva, which has now returned to us regularly since.

     Behind Elsa, however, was what caught the captain's attention; my niece. Helena, now seven, was meant to remain at home when we had deliveries. It is for her sake that we remain on the island. She follows in her mother's blondness and tallness, but unlike her mother, whose eyes are a blue-grey like a thin-clouded sky in Oslo's summer, and unlike her father, whose eyes were brown - courtesy of my Spaniard father -, her eyes were a crimson red.

     There is a reason my father came here, all but dragging my mother - then only seventeen - along, some thirty-six years ago. Stígrøy, like the other territories at its latitude, experiences almost endless daylight for its summer and near-perpetual night for its winter. Spring and autumn are blended between, marked only by the blooming and dying of the flora. Every twenty-eight laps around the sun, however, another period occurs.

     Godstiden - the gods’ time - lasts for six days, always following a winter. The Nordlys - the northern lights - are constant above the island, moving slower than their usual dance, breathing back and forth. In these six days, the goats get fatter, and the grass grows four inches taller, shifting from dying yellow to lusciously green. Any aches, pains or wounds of men and women on the island heal in the first two days and, like the goats, become more plump and vital. All of this, my father was told, before the elder reciting this - a former sailor who had been to the island decades beforehand - then claimed:

     "...and if a child is born on the island during the godstiden, they will become a vessel for the gods. They will become the mouthpiece through which the universe whispers its secrets."

     That was when my father hurried to find a bride, worked long hours to feed her well on fish and meat and rice, so that she was strong enough to bear a child, and got a boat captain to take them to Stígrøy. All of this for me to be born here, thirty-six years ago. My father had been a year early. The elder, in his senility, had misremembered the year of the last godstiden.

     My father rushed to get his young bride pregnant again, but she birthed my brother prematurely, so much so that the tiny child grappled with death for four days until he was fattened up like a goat by the arrival of the breathing lights.

     My mother was overjoyed. Her child survived. The gods had saved him.

     My father cursed. He was born four days too soon.

     After my father’s drowning ten years ago, my mother moved back to the mainland. My brother, his wife and I, then in our twenties, stayed on the island with the other family that lives here, the Kristiansens.

     Helena was the promise that had been made to my father, but that he had not lived to see. She was a child of the Godstiden. That is why her eyes carry their red. She has not yet whispered any of the world’s secrets. She has yet to say a word at all.

     She can read and write rather well, for which her mother's teaching is to thank. Elsa was training to become a teacher before meeting my brother. She has not written anything out of the ordinary, she has transcribed no messages from beyond the stars yet.

     “I’ll be right back to help you unload” I say to the captain and walk briskly down the dock to the girls.

     “She wanted to see the men who bring us food” Elsa told me, beating me to the question.

     “Did she write that?” I asked

     “No, but she heard you and Jan talking about the delivery last night. She looked at me and I could tell she wanted to see what you were doing.”

     “Where is Jan?” I questioned. “He should be here helping us unload this stuff, and you two should be back in the hut.”

     “The older doe is unwell,” she told me. “He is concerned it will give birth early. He wants to be there in case it does so.”

     Helena moved from behind her mother and began walking forth. I thought about grabbing to stop her as she passed on my left, but I figured she would stop. The men were strangers. We, on an island of seven people, have raised her not to talk to strangers.

     I turned to watch as she walked past me. She broke into a fast skip now. We had also taught her not to run where it is wet. She was five metres ahead of me before I began walking after her, not quite meeting her pace.

     She came to a stop on the wooden dock just where a crew hand was unloading a barrel from the boat. He moved around the barrel to one end to lift it upright. He clocked Helena as he lifted the barrel, not her eyes but just the shape of her. It was once he had the barrel upright that he looked at her properly.

     She stood there and raised her right hand, shaking her whole arm side to side erratically as children do when they wave. He smiled and raised his hand back, shaking it at the wrist, the way adults do when they wave.

     Helena turned to her left now, her attention shifting to the boar. She stood on her toes now, craning her neck to see into the boat, her small hand still raised. Another crewman inside the boat chuckled softly upon noticing her.

     “Well, hello there!” he said in a faux-surprised tone. However, when he locked eyes with her, he froze.

     "What do we have here?" he wondered aloud, his voice louder now, drawing the attention of another man on the boat and gestured vaguely with his head in Helena’s direction. The second crewman joined him, and they exchanged a glance. One muttered something I couldn’t hear, and the other nodded, his gaze darting back to Helena. Their voices were low, their words lost to the wind, but the tone was unmistakable. They had noticed her eyes.

     I finally caught up to Helena, swiftly took her hand, and marched her back down the dock to her mother. The men in the boat came up to the nearside gunwale to talk to the barrel handler; I didn’t hear what they said but felt their eyes in the back of my head and Helena’s.

     “Here. She’s met the men who bring our food, now please take her home.” I said as I handed the child off to her mother.

     “Sorry. I’ll see you later for dinner,” Elsa said, turning and heading up the steps carved into the rock by my father and the elder Kristiansen.

     I hadn’t noticed the captain get back off the boat. I know heard his boots trotting on the dock behind me, one squelching step at a time.

     “Thats something special you have there” he said casually, as if he was complimenting one of the pelts or cheese wheels.

     “She’s not my wife,” I said, turning to face him. “She married my brother, remember?”

     The captain shook his head disappointedly, blinking slowly “not the woman, Bjorn. The child.”

     “She’s not mine, either” I replied lightly, letting out a breathy chuckle. I knew very well what he was getting at but tried to diffuse it.

     “I’ve heard the tales of this isle” he continued in a tone as though he wanted neither the girls nor the deckhands to overhear. “Your father spoke of them, too. He spoke about them plenty after a few bottles. Said there were seasons here unlike anything else in this realm. Magic seasons.”

     I didn’t answer.

     “She looks about the age to have been born in the last of those... seasons. What do you call it? The Godstimen?” his stare interrogating me.

     “Godstiden.” I stated. “It’s just a story. My dad liked it.”

     “Just a story,” he echoed, looking past me to the girls now halfway up the steps. “Her eyes say otherwise. They’re the colour of the Nordlys when they get red and angry.”

     “She’s just a kid.” I said, practically pleading at this point.

     “Maybe. Or maybe she’s something else.” He stepped back now, his boots scratching the dock. “See you next time, Bjorn” he called over his shoulder, his tone light again, almost cheerful.

     I stayed on the dock to watch the Truva pull away. The crew’s laughter rang faintly over the waves. The ship became a dark smear on the horizon, then vanished.

     I will be seeing them again too soon.

Stove Wood

I don my grandfather's hunting coat—a moss-coloured size forty-six that fit his broad shoulders well in his prime, I'm told—and turn the door handle to head outside. The brass lever is cold in my palm. The house’s warm air follows me outside, but within a few steps, my breath turns visible in the cold. The fog from my mouth rises, drifting over my eyes on the cold breeze. 

I stuff my hands into the pockets of my coat, the comforting feeling of their fleece linings. I rarely bother with gloves. They make the bowsaw handle slip; I need a firm grip for the work ahead. Still, pocketing my hands leaves me vulnerable to a fall on black ice or slick mud. 

My pack sits light on my shoulders, holding only my saw, a bottle, two apples, and a half litre of black coffee. This fifty-litre sack will hold some forty pounds of wood on the way back.  

I am glad to live in the valley, for I collect my stove wood from the forest up on the hill. The uphill walk with an empty bag is pleasant; the weighted return downhill feels earned. 

The air is sharply cold, carrying the smell of sap and damp earth. The electric company has been at work, for once, and felled a stripe of young trees so they can erect a row of those eyesore pylons. This saves me the guilt of denying these young trees – so eager to be giants - of their potential.  

These young trees, though, are perfect for my needs. If much wider than their five-inch thickness, my modest saw—as well as my arm—would struggle through them. They would also need splitting to fit into my bag, which means bringing the seven-pound axe along. I don’t have a chainsaw like the men from the electric and water boards. 

I amputate the limbs from a chosen pine before sawing through its torso—like the magician we watched saw his assistant in half. My bag must close over top of these two-foot lengths, as these woods—and, by extension, this bag of wood—are not my property. Whoever decided that a man can own a forest? These woods are older than the men who own them. Still, I take only what I need. The forest offers, and I accept. 

I cinch the lid and pull the cross-strings tight to keep my cargo from jostling on the descent. The pack is heavier than I’d hoped, with all the moisture in this fresh wood. Still, I’ll manage the forty-minute walk home. 

This would warm the whole house for two days. But since I am alone for the next few weeks, I can close the doors, turn off the radiators and warm just the living room. I can watch movies late into the night and sleep on the couch, just as we did when he still owned this coat. I can make this last.  

Poem: Wildfires

We had paradise, but burnt it down.
Vivariums turned to coals around
Which we roast and toast our souls
to feel apart of nature's whole
Again. But we are invasive.
We leech Eden of its shielded casing.

We expose her, Mother Nature,
To our flames and saws and greater
greed than we can sustain
And as she bleeds, we share in pain.

And so from each small catastrophe
We can sense ourselves in atrophy.