Read Online Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Anne Born - Free Book Online Page B

slowly green, and the wire filled up, and we fixed up another one and filled that one too, and then another, until we had five wires crammed full one above the other, and the top one with a slightly shallower layer of grass hung down like a thatched roof on each side, so when the rain came it would just run off, and the rack could stand there for months and the hay would be just as good right under the outermost layer. Barkald said it was almost as good as having it dry in the barn, that is if everything was done properly, and as far as I could see nothing was wrong. The rack stood as if it had been there forever across the landscape and lit by the sun with its long shadow behind it, and in harmony with every fold of the field and finally turned into a mere form, a primordial form, even if that was not the word I used then, and it gave me huge pleasure just to look at it. I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now. No-one makes hay this way any more in this part of the country; today there is one man alone on a tractor, and then the drying on the ground and the mechanical turner and wrapping machines and huge plastic white cubes of stinking silage. So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.

5

    I did not recognise him the first few times I saw him, so I just nodded when I passed by with Lyra, for my mind was not running on those lines, why should it be? When he was outside his cabin stacking piles of firewood under the eaves and I was on my way along the road thinking of other things entirely. Not even when he told me his name did it register. But after going to bed last night I began to wonder. There had been something about that man and the face I had seen in the wavering light of our torches. Now suddenly I am sure. Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he's past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating. I have in fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlier too, by all means, and I have thought about what I've read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it's worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.
    Not that it changes anything. It doesn't change my plan for this place, doesn't change how it feels living here, all that is as before and I'm sure he did not recognise me, and that's the way I would like it to continue. But of course it does make some difference.
    My plan for this place is quite simple. It is to be my final home. How long that might be for is something I haven't given much thought to. It is one day at a time here. And what I have to work out first is how I shall get through the winter, if there is a lot of snow. The road down to Lars' cabin is two hundred metres long, and there's another fifty on to the main road. With this back of mine it will not be possible to clear that stretch with a shovel. I could not have done it with my back as strong as it ever was. There wouldn't have been time for anything else.
    Snow clearing is important, and a good battery in