The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [6]
Vatanen sighed.
The summer morning was getting brighter and brighter, but his gloomy thoughts were getting darker and darker. Not till the hare had eaten and Vatanen had put it in his pocket did the wretched thoughts leave him. Purposefully, he set off westward, the direction he’d taken the evening before, shunning the road. The forest murmur gladdened him. He hummed a couple of snatches. The hare’s ears poked out of his jacket pocket.
After an hour or two, Vatanen came to a village. Walking along the main street, he found a red kiosk. A girl was bustling around it, just about to open her little business, apparently.
He went over to the kiosk, said good morning, and sat down on the bench. The girl opened the shutters, went in the kiosk, slid aside a glass partition, and said: “We’re open now. Can I help you?”
Vatanen bought some cigarettes and a bottle of lemonade. The girl studied him carefully and then said, “You’re not a criminal, are you?”
“No ... do I scare you?”
“No, that’s not it. It’s just that you came out of the forest.”
Vatanen took the hare out of his pocket and let it bumble around on the bench.
“Hey, a bunny!” the girl exclaimed.
“Not a bunny, it’s a hare. I found it.”
“Aw, poor thing! It’s got a sore leg. I’ll get it some carrots.”
She left her kiosk and ran into a nearby house. Soon she was back with a bunch of last season’s carrots. She washed off the soil with a dash of lemonade and eagerly offered them to the hare, but it didn’t eat. That made her a little disappointed.
“He doesn’t seem to take to them.”
“He’s a bit sick. You don’t have a vet in the village, do you?”
“Oh, yes, there’s Mattila. He’s not from around here, of course—from Helsinki. Always here in the summers, away in the winters. His villa’s over there, by the lakeshore. Climb on the roof, and I’ll show you which it is.”
Vatanen climbed on the kiosk roof, and from down below the girl told him which way to look, and what color the villa was. Vatanen looked toward where she said and spotted the villa, then climbed down as the girl supported his bottom with her hands.
The vet gave the hare a small injection and carefully bandaged its hind leg.
“It’s had a shock. The paw will heal all right. If you take it to town, get it some fresh lettuce. It’ll eat that. Don’t forget to rinse the lettuce well, or it might get the runs. For drinking, nothing but fresh water.”
When Vatanen got back to the kiosk, several men were sitting there with time on their hands. The girl introduced Vatanen: “Here he is, the man with the hare.”
The men were drinking lager. They were fascinated by the hare and asked a lot of questions. They tried to reckon how old it might be. One of them related how, whenever he was going haymaking, he first went around the hay-fields shouting, so that any young hares hidden there would run away.
“Otherwise the blades’ll get ’em. One summer there were three. One had its ears cut off, another lost its back legs, another was cut in two. The summers I’ve chased ’em off first, not one got caught in the machine.”
The village was so agreeable, Vatanen stayed on there several days, occupying an attic in one of the houses.
3
Arrangements
Vatanen took the bus bound for Heinola: even in an agreeable village, one can’t hang around doing nothing forever.
He sat on the rear seat of the bus, with the hare in a basket. Several countrymen were sitting at the back, so they could smoke. When they spotted the hare, they started building a conversation around it. There were, it was soon established, more young hares than usual this summer. They tried to guess: was it a doe or a buck? Did he intend to slaughter and eat the hare when it was fully grown? No, he had no such intention, he said. That led to a consensus: no one would kill his own dog; and it was sometimes