1 A ragged dress was hanging from one branch of a rotting pine tree. It put the old man in mind of a song from his youth, about a dress on a washing line. But this dress wasn’t hanging in a southerly breeze like in the song, but in the ice-cold meltwater in a river. It was completely still down at the bottom of the river, and even though it was five o’clock in the afternoon, and it was March, and the sky above the surface of the water was clear, just as the forecast had said, there wasn’t a lot of sunlight left after it had been filtered through a layer of ice and four metres of water. Which meant that the pine tree and dress lay in weird, greenish semi-darkness. It was a summer dress, he had concluded, blue with white polka dots. Maybe the dress had once been coloured, he didn’t know. It probably depended on how long the dress had been hanging there, snagged on the branch. And now the dress was hanging in a current that never stopped, washing it, stroking it when the river was running slowly, tugging and pulling at it when the river was in full flow, slowly but surely tearing it to pieces. If you looked at it that way, the old man thought, the dress was a bit like him. That dress had once meant something to someone, a girl or woman, to the eyes of another man, or a child’s arms. But now, just like him, it was lost, discarded, without any purpose, trapped, constrained, voiceless. It was just a matter of time before the current tore away the last remnants of what it had once been.
“What are you watching?” he heard a voice say from behind the chair he was sitting in. Ignoring the pain in his muscles, he turned his head and looked up. And saw that it was a new customer. The old man was more forgetful than before, but he never forgot the face of someone who had visited Simensen Hunting & Fishing. This customer wasn’t after guns or ammunition. With a bit of practice you could tell from the look in their eyes which ones were herbivores, the look you saw in that portion of humanity who had lost the killing instinct, the portion who didn’t share the secret shared by the other group: that there’s nothing that makes a man feel more alive than putting a bullet in a large, warm-blooded mammal. The old man guessed the customer was after one of the hooks or fishing rods that were hanging on the racks above and below the large television screen on the wall in front of them, or possibly one of the wildlife cameras on the other side of the shop.
“He’s looking at the Haglebu River.” It was Alf who replied. The old man’s son-in-law had come over to them. He stood rocking on his heels with his hands in the deep pockets of the long leather gilet he always wore at work. “We installed an underwater camera there last year with the camera manufacturers. So now we have a twenty-four-hour live stream from just above the salmon ladder round the falls at Norafossen, so we can get a more accurate idea of when the fish start heading upstream.”
“Which is when?”
“A few in April and May, but the big rush doesn’t start until June. The trout start to spawn before the salmon.”
The customer smiled at the old man. “You’re pretty early, then? Or have you seen any fish?”
The old man opened his mouth. He had the words in his mind, he hadn’t forgotten them. But nothing came out. He closed his mouth again.
“Aphasia,” Alf said.
“What?”
“A stroke, he can’t talk. Are you after fishing tackle?”
“A wildlife camera,” the customer said.
“So you’re a hunter?”
“A hunter? No, not at all. I found some droppings outside my cabin up in Sørkedalen that don’t look like anything I’ve seen before, so I took some pictures and put them on Facebook, asking what it was. Got a response from people up in the mountains straight away. Bear. A bear! In the forest just twenty minutes’ drive and a three-and-a-half-hour walk from where we are now, right in the centre of the capital of Norway.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“Depends what you mean by ‘fantastic.’ Like I said, I’ve got a cabin there. I take my family there. I want someone to shoot it.”
“I’m a hunter, so I understand exactly what you mean. But you know, even in Norway, where you don’t have to go back very far to a time when we had a
lot of bears, there have been hardly any fatal bear attacks in the past couple of hundred years.”
Eleven, the old man thought. Eleven people since 1800. The last one in 1906. He may have lost the power of speech and movement, but he still had his memory. His mind was still OK. Mostly, anyway. Sometimes he got a bit muddled, and noticed his son-in-law exchange a glance with his daughter Mette, and realised he’d got something wrong. When they first took over the shop he had set up and run for fifty years he had been very useful. But now, since the last stroke, he just sat there. Not that that was so terrible. No, since Olivia died he didn’t have many expectations of the rest of his life. Being close to his family was enough, getting a warm meal every day, sitting in his chair in the shop watching a television screen, an endless programme with no sound, where things moved at the same pace as him, where the most dramatic thing that could happen was the first spawning fish making their way up the river.
“On the other hand, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.” The old man heard Alf’s voice. He had gone over to the shelves of wildlife cameras with the customer. “No matter how much it might look like a teddy bear, all carnivores kill. So yes, you should definitely get a camera so you can figure out if it’s settled down somewhere near your cabin or if it was just passing through. And now’s the time brown bears emerge from hibernation, and they’re
starving. Set up a camera where you found the droppings, or somewhere close to the cabin.”
“So the camera’s inside that little bird box?”
“The bird box, as you call it, protects the camera from the elements and any animals that get too close. This one’s a simple, reasonably priced camera. It’s got a Fresnel lens that registers the infrared radiation from the heat animals, humans and everything else give off. When the level deviates from the norm, the camera automatically starts to record.”
The old man was half listening to the conversation, but something else had caught his attention. Something that was happening on the television screen. He couldn’t see what it was, but the green darkness had taken on a lighter shimmer.
“Recordings are stored on a memory card inside the camera—you can play it back on your PC afterwards.”
“Now
that’s fantastic.”
“Yes, but you do have to physically go and check the camera to see if it’s recorded anything. If you go for this slightly more expensive model, you’ll get a text message every time it’s recorded anything. Or there’s this one, the most advanced model, which still has a memory card but will also send any recordings directly to your phone or email. You can sit inside your cabin and only have to go back to the camera to change the battery every so often.”
“What if the bear comes at night?”
“The camera has black-light LEDs as well as white. Invisible light that means the animal doesn’t get frightened off.”
Light. The old man could see it now. A beam of light coming from upriver, off to the right. It pushed through the green water, found the dress, and for a chilling moment it made him think of a girl coming back to life at last and dancing with joy.
“That’s proper science fiction, that is!”
The old man opened his mouth when he saw a spaceship come into the picture. It was lit up from within and was hovering a metre and a half off the riverbed. The current knocked it against a large rock, and, almost in slow motion, it spun round until the light from the front of it swept across the riverbed and for a moment blinded the old man when it hit the camera lens. Then the hovering spaceship was caught by the thick branches of the pine tree and stopped moving. The old man felt his heart thudding in his chest. It was a car. The interior light was on, and he could see that the inside was full of water, almost up to the roof. There was someone in there. Someone half sitting, half standing on the driver’s seat as he desperately pressed his head up to the roof, obviously trying to get air. One of the rotten branches holding the car snapped and drifted off in the current.
“You don’t get the same clarity and focus as daylight, and it’s black and white. But as long as there’s no condensation on the lens or anything in the way, you should certainly be able to see your bear.”
The old man stamped on the floor in an attempt to attract Alf’s attention. The man in the car looked like he was taking a deep breath before ducking under again. His short, bristly hair was swaying, and his cheeks were puffed out. He hit both hands against the side window facing the camera, but the water inside the car leached the force from the blows. The old man had put his hands on the armrests and was trying to get up from his chair, but his muscles wouldn’t do what he told them to. He noticed that the middle finger on one of the man’s hands was a greyish colour. The man stopped banging and butted the glass with his head. It looked like he was giving up. Another branch snapped and the current tugged and strained to pull the car free, but the pine wasn’t ready to let go just yet. The old man stared at the anguished face pressed against the inside of the car window. Bulging blue eyes. A scar in a liver-coloured arc from one corner of his mouth up towards his ear. The old man had managed to get out of his chair and took two unsteady steps towards the shelves of cameras.
“Excuse me,” Alf said quietly to the customer. “What is it, Dad?”
The old man gesticulated at the screen behind him.
“Really?” Alf said dubiously, and hurried past the old man towards the screen. “Fish?”
The old man shook his head and turned back to the screen. The car. It was gone. And everything looked the same as before. The riverbed, the dead pine tree, the dress, the green light through the ice. As if nothing had happened. The old man stamped the floor again and pointed at the screen.
“Easy now, Dad,” Alf said, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “It
is very early for spawning, you know.” He went back to the customer and the wildlife cameras.
The old man looked at the two men standing with their backs to him, and felt despair and rage wash over him. How was he going to explain what he had just seen? His doctor had told him that when a stroke hits both the front and back parts of the left side of the brain, it wasn’t only your speech that was lost, but often the ability to communicate in general, even by writing or through gestures. He tottered back to the chair and sat down again. Looked at the river, which just went on flowing. Imperturbable. Undeterred. Unchanging. And after a couple of minutes he felt his heart start to beat more calmly again. Who knows, maybe it hadn’t actually happened after all? Maybe it had just been a glimpse of the next step towards the absolute darkness of old age. Or, in this case, its colourful world of hallucinations. He looked at the dress. For a moment, when he had thought it was lit up by car headlights, it had seemed to him as if Olivia was dancing in it. And behind the windshield, inside the illuminated car, he had glimpsed a face he had seen before. A face he remembered. And the only faces he still remembered were the ones he saw here, in the shop. And he had seen that man in here on two occasions. Those blue eyes, that liver-coloured scar. On both occasions he had bought a wildlife camera. The police had been in asking about him fairly recently. The old man could have told them he was a tall man. And that he had that look in his eyes. The look that said he knew the secret. The look that said he wasn’t a herbivore.
Copyright © 2019 by Jo Nesbo. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
