The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [31]
At ten o’clock a hearse drew up in the yard. Vatanen helped the farmer transfer the corpse to the vehicle. They closed the eye that had opened in Vatanen’s arms, the driver presented a form, and the farmer signed it.
Vatanen was given a lift to Kuhmo in the hearse. Behind him, the coffin looked very dignified under its black pall.
The undertaker chatted on and on about the hare and revealed that he himself had a tame magpie in Kajaani.
“It’d stolen a reflector, from the chief constable’s wife, or so I heard, right in the middle of the town. Anyway, that’s what it flew in the house with.... By the way, changing the subject, I knew this Heikkinen, the old guy. He was a communist in his day, but he didn’t get fat on that. Turn communist and you’ll never get rich.”
12
Kurko
As July turned to August, Vatanen got as far as Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle. The last logs had floated down past the town, and there were fewer tourists than usual.
In the ground-floor room of Rovaniemi’s Lapland Restaurant, Vatanen met an old lumberjack, a luckless drinker named Kurko. In his youth, in the hard-bitten lumber camps of those days, Kurko had been known in Lapland as metsien kuningas—“the king of the forest.” This had been shortened to the nickname “Kurko,” Finnish for an evil spirit.
Kurko was grumbling about his fate: there was no work for him nowadays in the forests: too old, and a drunk besides. He ought to be seeing about an old-age pension, but that’d hardly keep a free-ranging maverick like himself going. Life was hard for an old tree-feller.
Vatanen was pondering how he could help the old man.
He managed to get a temporary job with the Lapland branch of the TVH, the Water and Forest Authority. His contract was to break up three log rafts on the Ounasjoki River, north of the village of Meltaus.
Kurko was eager to come along as partner, and they took off upriver for their job.
Once there, they winched the rafts ashore. They had rented a mechanical saw, and they began dismantling the cumbersome old rafts with iron handspikes and other tools. The work went well in the early autumn weather. They lived in a tent and did their cooking over a campfire in front of the tent. Kurko grumbled that there was nothing to drink, but otherwise he, too, was content enough with the demolition work.
People from the village wandered to the site from time to time. They marveled, in their slow northern way, at the hare. Vatanen asked the farmers not to let their dogs loose, and only rarely did the hare come tearing in from the village with a dog at its heels. When that happened, the hare dashed into the camp, leaped into Vatanen’s arms, or slipped into the tent, and the dogs had to trot back to the village, disappointed.
When two of the rafts had been dismantled and the timber stacked, Vatanen paid Kurko two weeks’ wages. At once Kurko ran off to Rovaniemi. He was away for three days. When he came back, he was dead drunk and broke, to which he was accustomed. The binge went on for another night, and it might have taken a very nasty turn, for Kurko wanted to show what a good logger he was. He went dancing along the floating logs that girdled the riverbank, missed his footing, flopped in the river, and was on the point of drowning, for he couldn’t swim. Vatanen hauled the drunken old-timer out of the chilly river and carried him to their tent. In the morning, Kurko woke up with a blinding hangover. Feeling aggrieved, he opened his mouth to complain and realized his false teeth had gone to feed the fish. Life can sink you sometimes.
A day later, Kurko was back to his usual self. He couldn’t eat anything but gruel, though, and naturally he felt the pangs of hunger. “Teach me to swim,” he begged.
Vatanen began swimming