The Unicorn
Home.
Yksisarvinen clings to the black edge of the mountains where they plunge into the sea. A grey town of fishers and whalers, it is either a trap or a bolt-hole and often both. Sären has never been so grateful to see the miserable collection of wooden buildings crammed against the shore of the icy ocean. The poets would have you believe that either fire or love are enough to keep a man alive, but spend a winter or five in the Kesperi mountains and see which you’re begging of God.
He has been days without food, the sledge he drags is not heavy, but he is very weak. As he descends the slope it wants to run away from him. He is forced to walk in front of it, its weight pressed against his back. The snow through which he trudges is light but deep, each step grows agonizing. It becomes a game: I will give up when I reach that birch tree, leap aboard the sledge and ride it down the hill; upon reaching the birch he will chose a new tree: now I will give up at that fir. He loses the game at a scraggly pine tree, allows the sledge to pick up speed and leaps aboard.
The Kesperi are wild and ragged: more than wolves prowl their ridges, accordingly, the mountain-side wall of Yksisarvinen is thick and well-maintained. The crack of the frozen runners of the sledge breaking against it echoes back off the peaks. That’ll wake them up, he thinks as he collapses in the snow.
The woman spoon feeding him pungent fish soup is startlingly ugly, though, Sären supposes that might be an uncharitable thing to think about his mother. His brother, of course, is still yelling.
“… and you’ll chop that tree down by yourself and haul it by yourself and lash it into the fence by yourself. And if so much as a single fucking cat is taken by paasselkä I will personally, personally lash you to the hull of the Haarla and I will dance as you drown.” That last delivered directly into Sären’s face, his brother’s blue eyes shining violently between black brows and blacker beard.
Sären sucks fish stew from his mustache and opens his mouth for his mother to feed him more. Embarrassing to be spoon-fed, but being bound to a chair is better by far than being strapped to his brother’s whaling ship. Stew spills into his beard and he wishes he could push the hairs up to his mouth to suck the rich, familiar broth from between them. As though he’s an infant, his mother presses a cloth to his face, soaking up the spilled liquid. Sørinen can’t suppress the smile at the humiliation and Sären doesn’t begrudge his brother’s petty revenge.
“I will, brother: fix it myself, and then I’ll be gone again and this time, most likely, I’ll die.” The forty men gathered in the hall mutter and grumble amongst themselves, Sären was supposed to have died long ago: the whalers and fishers of Yksisarvinen do not survive the mountains, trapping and skinning and hiding from passelkä. The unasked question hangs in the smoky air. Mother’s wooden spoon rattles again against the bowl and he slurps away. Eventually Sørinen is forced to ask.
“Why did you come back?”
❄❄❄
Love or a fire. Ylonen’s verse says something like either is enough to save a man, but only one will bring him home. Sären doubts Ylonen was ever in love or in desperate need of a fire. Most likely he spent his life in the great hall in Kippru, sleeping well under heavy furs with women he felt nothing for. Sären has many uncharitable thoughts about a great many people, but winter is arriving quickly and he has nowhere near enough food so he tries not to dwell. Today’s trapline is as disappointing as yesterday’s: a thin marten, one good rabbit, and three consecutive bloody stains on the ground where passelkä had taken his catch. A wolf, he thinks, kicking the still-gory lower jaw angrily away, a big one; smoked and stored it would have meant more than a week’s worth of meat this winter. Likely a black-furred and light-eyed wolf, thinks the vicious, traitorous part of his brain; with a smile as wide as the ocean and a laugh like summertime and he loses an internal struggle and stares at the ground without seeing.
Definitely, Ylonen definitely knew nothing of love. Or fire.
His mind comes back to him across the miles and years and he realizes he’s been staring at a hoofprint.
❄❄❄
The ax vibrates horribly in his hands. The beech tree is frozen through and the iron manages only feeble chips. It will take him a week to hack through the trunk. He sits down in the snow and catches his breath, the chain around his ankle clinking as he does. More petty revenge: chained to a stake like the animals he now traps. Sørinen likely thinks it’s humiliating, and he’s right. Two hundred yards away, Yksisarvinen glows and smokes in the timid, grey midwinter afternoon. He watches the figures and sees the passing of time. That can’t be Teemu, Teemu’s dead, must be his son? He’ll be bigger than his father ever was. Ortio and Upi, the twins, Kaisu must be that small one there, she was never going to be a big girl. That’s Sørinen’s black-beard for sure, with … a smaller figure, long black hair. For a moment he’s certain he can, despite the distance, despite the weak light, despite the intervening curtain of gently falling snow see the tiniest twist of her lips hinting at a smile as wide as the ocean.
Chips of frozen beechwood fly under the assault of his ax. Less than a week, he can be here for less than a week if he pushes himself.
❄❄❄
The trail goes cold with depressing regularity. Gaisa, his big black and white karelian ranges with her snout to the earth seeking spoor. She’d cost him almost his entire summer’s take, every last pelt and almost all the meat, but she’d already proven her worth. Three times she’d found the beast’s trail when Sären would have lost it, and once already she’d chased away a bear. She clearly thinks he is a fool for following this thing higher and higher into the Kesperi, but he imagines, she is confident in her ability to leave him behind should the situation warrant.
The hoofprints are distinctive and unsettling. Most would think they were the prints of a moose. Enormous, nearly the size of a bear print, they were split into two, almost like claws. But a moose-print, he had come to know intimately in his second fall in the mountains, has two small markings behind the large claw-like marks; a moment to remember a short, fat winter feasting on not one, but two moose cows. These prints were bigger, and they lacked the tell-tale small marks of the moose. Vastly more unnerving were the dozens of scrabbling claw marks which paced the hoofprints. Passelkä are vicious, solitary things. They may be the one thing mothers fear more than the ocean, and certainly are more often used to threaten children. It is not uncommon for boys of a certain age to decide they are a myth, a lie dreamed up by adults to frighten the young into compliance. Then a boy turns thirteen and he is shown. Sären, fortunate to be a summer child, spent a night in a tree retching as quietly as he could as one of the smoke-grey things shredded a pig. Looking part fish, part wolf, and part fog, passelkä are the nightmare against which Yksisarvinen arms itself. And, by all appearances, they are letting this thing lead them.
Gaisa finds the trail and they are off again, moving steadily higher, and steadily westwards; towards the teeth of the Kesperi, towards the one pass through the mountains, towards home.