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When they returned to the house, the children were back, too.
"Mamma, kom och se, we've found kittens!" Sigrid shouted, mixing her languages in the middle of a sentence while asking her mother to follow her. As Hoss came in to a small barn himself, he too saw, in the middle of the stored winter clothes, a mother cat and five helpless, blue-eyed kittens.
"Were they here when you found them?" Elin asked Tor and Sigrid. The siblings exchanged a look between themselves. Of conspiracy, of that Hoss was certain of, having all his knowledge about siblings and farms.
"They were under the barn... but we took them here. It's cleaner and softer", Sigrid confessed.
Hoss hid a smile and observed the face of Elin as she was trying not to laugh, not to be pleased over the little kittens and trying to be stern with her young ones. "I was as much as guessing so, sweet children", she said, with flint in her stare but chuckle in her tone. "All right, let them stay here, but don't forget your chores even if you come to pet them here."
The children showing the kittens they had found from the barn made Hoss remember, how exciting new life had been when he was observing it as a child himself. Stroking over the fine silky fur of the little creatures, while they were scratching his fingers with their constantly revealed nails, his heart was joining the thrill of the children when they were fascinated by the tiny whining discovery.
"Our Pappa made a picture of little kittens, once", Rebecka, turning up from the thin air, said. "Come, Hoss, I'll show you."
Pulling him from his hand, she took him into the house, and collected a chair to help her climb to catch a book from the only bookshelf the little house had. There were other similar books, which Hoss guessed to be the sketchbooks of late Fredrik, on the shelf. Rebecka didn't waver in her thoughts when she took that one precise book in her hands. As Hoss sat down on the chair, she pushed her elbows over his knees and settled the book there firmly.
"This is my favourite", she told Hoss, and opened the covers of the book, revealing a world of little animals, puppies, squirrels, mice and moles that were digging holes, jumping from trees and gathered around little acorns and given life by a pencil and charcoal lines. While Rebecka flipped through the pages with her little hands, he could see how flowers and trees were growing out of the ground and the surface of the lake Tahoe glimmered on the thick paper that had not suffered at all from the hands that probably had touched its corners numerous times.
"Here, here are the kittens." Rebecka showed Hoss a similar setting to what he had seen just a moment ago, about kittens that were crawling almost out of the page and out of the drawer into which they had been gently stored by Fredrik Nilsson. In fact, Hoss could almost hear the little meows of them and feel the soft patting steps of the mother cat, of whom he could only see the tip of her tail.
Rebecka knew the picture already, and left it for Hoss to look at, while she herself returned to the real kittens outside.
Hoss was the smallest man on earth.
Hearing Elin come behind his shoulders, and feeling her hands on them, he turned his face to her and tried to cover the anxiety of his shrunken chest. Misery he never knew had existed in him before nearly dumped his voice in the air.
"But I can't make anything live like that."
Elin looked surprised, with an astonished look on her face, and took his hand. Sitting on his lap and pressing his hand against her chest, smiling under her brow, she spoke with a tone she used when her children were being very silly.
"Feel it, Hoss. You are making me alive."