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her children by the hand and begins walking along the snowy track.
    ‘Oh, such times, and such a people. How the Lord is testing their faith now,’ the vicar laments.
     
    They walk for a long time. The short period of daylight is drawing to an end. No sign of the boy or the sledge. Mataleena walks behind her mother, treading in the footprints, holding her coat more tightly to protect herself from the blizzard. She does not hear the rumbling of her stomach, but she feels it.
    Hunger is the kitten Willow-Lauri put in a sack, which scratches away with its small claws, causing searing pain; then more scratching, then more, until the kitten is exhausted and falls to the bottom of the sack, weighingheavily there, before gathering its strength and starting a fresh struggle. You want to lift the animal out, but it scratches so hard you dare not reach inside. You have no option but to carry the bundle to the lake and throw it into the hole in the ice.
    Mataleena bumps into Marja’s back; Mother has stopped. All around, heavy snow makes the shoulders of spruces hunched.
    ‘This is the end,’ Marja says faintly, but Mataleena hears the whinnying of a horse on the road behind her and tugs at her mother’s sleeve. Marja lowers Juho and waves, but the boy driving the sledge looks past her, straight ahead, and fails to stop. Marja sinks on to her knees and falls into the snowdrift. Her body shakes slowly, her sobs come out jaggedly, in time with her breathing.
    Mataleena tries to pull her mother up.
    ‘He stopped at the turning over there,’ Mataleena says.
    Marja gets up and sees the sledge. The boy continues staring ahead in the direction of travel. Marja lifts up Juho and, summoning all her strength, begins striding towards the sledge.
    Once they have climbed in, the boy gives them a single glance over his shoulder. One of his eyes is identical to the old farmer’s at Viklund. He says nothing, merely smacks his lips to get the horse moving.
    The motion soon makes Juho go to sleep. The blizzard has ceased. It is as if the flurry had originally risen up off the field, which has now dragged the snow back down touse as a blanket. The first stars light up, and a grey shawl covers the fragment of moon.
     
    They wake up in the abandoned cabin where the lad from the inn left them the night before. There is a lake half an hour’s walk away, he told them, and beyond it a house.
    An ice road leads across the lake, but snow has fallen here, too. At every step, Mataleena sinks into the snow, which nearly reaches her waist, though she tries to tread in her mother’s footprints. Wading through the snowdrifts is hard work. Mataleena shuts her eyes and thinks of Father, their last shared boat trip on the local lake.
    Father was calm. He looked solemn, just as when he rowed Willow-Lauri’s coffin to the church. Mataleena thought Father was handsome as he moved the heavy boat across the lake with long, steady strokes, but then a strong wind rose up, almost taking off Father’s hat, and he pulled it back down so low that his ears bent under the brim. The wind tried to turn the boat, and Father had to struggle to keep it on course and his expression dignified.
    Lauri’s coffin was small. How did they manage to stuff the big man inside? Was he lying there curled up, the way Mataleena herself slept on cold nights? Mother explained that people shrink in death. Something leaves them, but even Mother did not know if it was the soul; or whether, if so, the soul floated away like steam fromboiling water in a saucepan, or instead flowed downwards, a sticky, black liquid.
    Perhaps different people have different souls.
    Mataleena thinks of Charcoal-Kalle, who was found dead in his cabin. No one ever went there except Mother, who was related to Kalle, and Roope the cobbler. It was he who found Kalle’s body and fetched Mother. She took Mataleena along, and Mataleena still shudders when she remembers the smell of death. There was a black puddle