The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [21]
Vatanen handed over the rest of the fish in his knapsack to the women, who began to make fish soup out of them in a cauldron suspended over a campfire. Just as Vatanen was falling off to sleep, a bulldozer came rumbling to the shore. It emerged from the fire area, crushing trees in its path; huge red pines were going down under its excavator, like willow herb under a drunkard’s boots. It was pulling a large steel sleigh full of men who had mechanical saws and knapsacks at their feet.
The bulldozer thundered into the middle of the scene. Children woke up crying. The cows in the meadow panicked, heaved to their feet, and started bellowing. The women yelled at the driver, berating him: coming and shaking everybody up like that, killing the peace on the shore!
The driver couldn’t hear what the women were shouting. He switched off the engine and looked at them in bewilderment; it was probably difficult to make out human voices after the racket of the bulldozer.
“Have you gone nuts?” the women railed. “Plowing in on everybody and everything like that? Couldn’t you see you’d wake the kids and scare the cows milkless?”
The driver wiped a sooty hand over his black face and said with slow deliberation: “Shut your faces, you hags.”
“We’re not hags, you creep!” the women howled in fury.
The driver climbed down and walked over to the women. “I’ve been driving this damn machine three days and three nights without sleep, so shut your traps.”
It showed. He looked dead tired. Sweat had run great sooty streaks down his cheeks; his weary face looked like smudged ink. He went to the lake and rinsed the soot off his face, cupping some water into his mouth with his hands; gargling loudly, he spat the water back into the lake. He returned with his face still wet, not wanting to wipe it on his sooty sleeves. The cauldron of fish soup was bubbling on the fire. He went to take a look at it, pulled a mess tin out of his knapsack, and began ladling some soup for himself.
“Stop that!” the women shrieked. “Who do you think you are? That’s our soup!”
The man had managed to scoop a single ladle of savory-smelling soup into his mess tin. He took no more: he hurled the tin and soup back into the cauldron with a splash; the ladle he flung into the forest, too far to be heard dropping. He walked slowly over to his bulldozer, leaped athletically into the driver’s seat, started the huge machine up, and pressed his heavy boot down hard on the accelerator. The engine roared, sparks showered up from the exhaust pipe, and the machine clattered off, its broad tracks ripping up the smoothly trodden evening shoreline.
He aimed his machine straight at the fire and the steaming cauldron of fish soup. Nearing the fire, he lowered the excavator; it scraped the ground, peeling off a three-foot-thick layer of earth, sent the fire and the cauldron flying, and ground them into the dirt. Steam boiled up from the fish soup before both soup and cooking gear disappeared under the turned soil. Nothing was left but a three-foot-deep channel pointing to the lake. Three kinds of smell hovered in the air: fresh soil, burned diesel, and the fading odor of fish soup.
The driver didn’t stop after wiping out the fire: he accelerated the bulldozer to full speed. The machine broke through the bank by the lake; the ground gave way, the caterpillars squirmed, the bushes swayed as the apparatus muscled through the bank and straight into the lake; the calm surface of the water was shattered. The excavator pushed a large foaming wave into the heart of the lake. It was as if a steel hippopotamus had angrily taken to the water.
The lake bottom had a gradual slope. First the excavator was immersed, then the caterpillars; as the water foamed into the tracks, the clatter changed to a squelching. The machine was butting a wave in front of it, which swilled farther and farther out. Soon, water rose up to the red-hot engine: there were rumblings and bubblings as the lake water boiled on the engine sides. A thick cloud of steam plumed upward, as if the machine had suddenly burst into