Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin Page A

owned the shore, he has owned Stenvik, and now he
    owns the whole of the alvar surrounding the village. When his mother doesn’t need his help in the house or the yard, he roams across it every day, taking long strides. In the yellow sunlight he walks over the Oland steppes with a rucksack slung over his shoulder and his shotgun in his hands.
    The hares usually sit frozen, huddled right down to the earth, until they think they have been discovered; then they hurtle away across the ground, and you have to raise the gun to your shoulder very quickly. Nils is always ready to shoot when he’s out hunting.
    His home and the alvar have been his whole world ever since
    his mother told him he wouldn’t be able to work at the quarry anymore after the fight with LassJan some years earlier. None of the other quarry workers wanted him there. Not that it matters to Nils; he refused to go back there anyway, refused to apologize, and the only annoying thing is that his mother had to pay Lass Jan’s wages for the weeks the stevedore couldn’t work, while his broken fingers were healing.
    Shit. The whole thing was LassJan’s fault, after all!
    Nils also carries the memory of the fight: two broken fingers on his left hand. He refused to go to the doctor in Marnas despite the Pain, and his fingers have mended badly, curving inward and becoming more difficult to bend. But it doesn’t matter, he’s righthanded and he can still hold his gun.
    People in the village avoid Nils these days, but that doesn’t matter either. Maja Nyman has been on the village road a few times when he’s gone out onto the alvar, but she just looks at him in silence, like all the rest. Maja has big blue eyes, but Nils can get by perfectly well without her.
    His mother has given Nils the doublebarreled Husqvarna
    shotgun to keep him company. And he gives her all the hares he shoots with it, so she doesn’t have to pay for expensive meat from the tightfisted farmers in the village.
    The white tower of Marnas church is visible on the horizon
    to the east, but Nils doesn’t need any landmarks. He has learned to find his way around the alvar’s labyrinth of long stone walls, boulders, bushes, and endless grassy plains.
    Up ahead of him is the memorial cairn: the low pile of stones marking the place where some crazy servant killed a priest or a bishop, several hundred years before Nils was born. People walking by still set small stones there sometimes. Nils never does, but it’s a good spot for him to sit and eat his lunch.
    He stops, considers, and notices a faint pang of hunger down in his stomach. He goes over to the cairn, takes off a couple of uneven stones, then settles down with the shotgun close beside him and the rucksack on his knee.
    He opens it and discovers two cheese sandwiches and two
    sausage sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a small bottle of milk. His mother packed all this; without asking her, Nils himself has filled his slim copper hip flask with the cognac she keeps on the floor of the larder.
    He starts his lunch break by opening the flask and taking a
    long swig, which spreads a feeling of steady warmth down through his throat, then he opens up his packet of sandwiches. He eats and drinks with his eyes closed, letting his thoughts wander.
    Nils thinks about hunting. He hasn’t got a hare yet today, but he’s got the whole afternoon to shoot one.
    Then he thinks about the war, which is still filling every news program whenever you switch on the radio.
    Sweden hasn’t been attacked, although three German destroyers did stray into the minefield just off southern Oland in the summer of 1941, and were blown to pieces. Over a hundred of
    Hitler’s men ended up in the water, and either drowned or died in the burning oil slick. And many inhabitants of Oland thought the war had definitely arrived the following summer, when for some reason a German plane dropped eight bombs in the forest below the ruined castle at Borgholm.
    The