The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [40]
While still at the teachers’ college, in a muddle of shifting notions about what was real, he hunted for his true identity in literature. He was fascinated by Tolstoyism, but the charm of that faded with time. Then he turned to Oriental religions, particularly Buddhism, whose study went deepest with him. He was even planning a trip to Asia, to visit the centers of the faith, but his parents, who certainly weren’t going to countenance pagan notions, refused travel money, and Kaartinen’s Oriental leanings gradually diminished through force of circumstance.
In his first and only teaching post, Kaartinen became interested in anarchism. He ordered anarchistic French works for the school library in Liminka and, with the help of a dictionary, pored over them. He put the ideas sufficiently into practice so the school authorities relieved him of his duties at the end of the spring term. The following summer, no longer a teacher, he renounced his disastrous anarchistic ideology and enthusiastically immersed himself in ancient Finnish culture, in his own roots. He waded through dozens of works inspired by the exalted ideal of promoting Finnishness. That summer of study led him, as autumn drew on, into a deep insight into the prehistory of the Finnish people. The more he immersed himself in the thought world of his forefathers, the more convinced he became that he’d finally found what he’d been feverishly searching for all those years: he’d hit upon the faith of his ancestors, the true religion of a true Finn.
Now he’d been practicing his faith for years. In rapture, he expounded it for Vatanen. He told of forest spirits, earth spirits, the god of thunder, stone idols, the primal forest’s shaman-seers, spells, sacrificial offerings. He introduced Vatanen to ancient religious rites and rituals and revealed that he himself had adopted the thousand-year-old sacrificial practices of his ancestors. Since becoming a northern ski instructor, Kaartinen had enriched his Finno-Ugrian religious ideas with Lappish notions, and when alone in the wild, he celebrated all those rites. Urban life, he said, made the practice of religion impossible.
Near the headwaters of Vittumainen Ghyll, at the edge of a little pond, he had carved his own fish god, using a mechanical saw. It was a stone idol, resembling those of the Lapps. Outside the tourist seasons he worshipped it. At the center of the god’s sacred circle he had set up a sacrificial stone for burnt offerings. There it was his practice to immolate living creatures—sometimes a Siberian jay trapped in a net, sometimes a snared willow grouse, even a puppy bought in Ivalo. This time he had wanted to make an offering of a true wild animal from the forest—Vatanen’s hare—and when Vatanen hadn’t agreed to sell it, Kaartinen was left with a single way of propitiating his gods: he had to steal it from its master.
In his new life, he claimed, he was living a very rich, balanced, and full existence. He felt that the old gods were pleased with him, and that there were no other gods. He wished this same wonderful peace of mind for Vatanen; they should join forces, and, communing together, sacrifice the hare to the gods.
After this long account of Kaartinen’s religious pilgrimage, Vatanen consented to overlook the incident; but he also insisted Kaartinen swear to stay well away from the hare in the future, and particularly where his religious concerns were in mind.
That evening, when Vatanen slowly skied back from Vittumainen Ghyll to Läähkimä Gorge, accompanied by his hare, he ceased to think about Kaartinen’s strange world. There was a half moon, and the stars were glimmering faintly in the frozen evening. He had his own world, this one, and it was fine to be here, living alone, in his own way. The hare ambled silently along the trail ahead of the skier, like a pathfinder. Vatanen sang to it.
15
The Bear
Vatanen felled several stout pines near the corner