23 December
His steps grew heavier. The snow grew deeper. His breathing grew more labored.
Berwald had walked straight through the night, stopping here and there to catch his wind now and again, but hadn't paused to sleep.
He couldn't pause to sleep.
He had to find shelter.
Warmth.
By now, it was well into the foggy daytime, and he didn't have a sense of how far he was from his own tiny village.
His former home, which nestled in the crook of a frosty forest in the outer edges of Norrbotten.
To him, it was now just as ice-cold and remote as the woods which surrounded it.
Unknown.
The boy urged himself to continue onward into the unknown lands. He had walked a good distance even from the village he'd found the day before; this much he knew, and he wondered how much farther he would be able to go.
Food was running low once again.
The bread he had carefully nibbled from time to time, only on breaks and never more than a little at a time. But it, and even the mix of nuts and dried berries he'd brought had run out during the course of the day. He only had the orange left, which was more than slightly frozen. Its juice would give him energy, but he wanted to save it as a last resort.
Time was running out.
There appeared to be no houses, no fires, no signs of civilization for at least a mile* around. How much longer would Berwald be able to travel, before succumbing to the frigid grip of winter?
He didn't want to think about it, and buried his face a little deeper into his scarf.
He didn't want to die in a place he would never be found.
Trees.
The land was far from barren. In the dim, ethereal glow of the mists, Berwald could glimpse a darker mass and the foremost sketchy outlines of dubious trees.
Maybe it was warmer between the evergreens, he thought. Then again, it could have been a delirious idea from his head as he slowly froze. But his footfalls grew a bit more certain, and he marched with a strange determination toward the tall vegetation, the looming branches arcing overhead and seeming to wrap around the boy to swallow him into their leafy depths.
Comfort.
It was indeed a peculiar sensation, this feeling of security, but perhaps it could have been attributed to the shelter the trees provided.
Slowing his steps a bit so his numb feet dragged slightly across the snow, the teenager stopped to lean against the reassuring bark of a sturdy tree. The bears had long gone to hibernate, so there were hardly any dangers to worry about. He couldn't see much, and so he closed his eyes in a brief respite to shut out the remainder of the scenery. Just for a few seconds, and he could then resume his journey.
Just for a few seconds.
And then he would hasten on.
Hasten on toward a new home.
PANG.
The loud crack shot through the woods, resounding as it died out into the fog.
Berwald jerked himself awake. He had slept too long, hadn't he? He was far from the nearest town, but where had that sound come from?
PANG.
Nearer now, and he could feel his eardrums buzzing with the impact of the sharp sound waves. There was no mistaking it, however. It was a-
PANG. PANG. PANG.
His head erupted into a splitting pain, his ears stung beyond what he could tolerate, and he felt sick. He fell to his knees, weakly dropping his sack into the snow before coughing into the ground. He felt the ground tremble around him as a feeling of thunder swam past him.
He vomited.
His stomach, empty with the lack of food, refused to cooperate, and he struggled for air amidst the gagging. Strings of saliva dripped from his lips, and nothing more. His vision swam with all the colors that weren't in the landscape and his ears played a cacophony of tricks in his head. It was too loud to think. No—it was too quiet to think. He couldn't hear anything but his own pulse, drumming and pounding and beating through his veins. It hurt to hear it, while the rest of him was still so numb with cold.
At least it was proof he was still alive.
Silence.
He rocked himself slowly back and forth, clutching his stomach and squeezing his eyes shut against the roaring headache as it began to fade into a regular throb.
At least now, it didn't feel as if he were being stabbed in the temples.
He knew he still couldn't properly hear anything, but the noise traffic generated by his eardrums had now dissolved into the cottony aftermath of hearing damage.
It was mostly silent.
It was close.
Whoever had fired the shots was nearby. Reindeer or elk hunters, no doubt, and so the large animals were also lurking nearby. One of them must have passed by him in his fit of nausea.
The hunter was likely an amateur, one who couldn't kill in a clean shot.
And suddenly, he arrived at a lucid realization: he had to watch his step.
He didn't care to be mistaken for a reindeer, and suffer the fate doomed to the animal.
Hunted.
His legs were still unstable, and he wobbled as he sought to regain his balance, but he managed to stand and pick up his sack once more.
Tottering carefully forward in the fluffy snow, he stayed along the line of trees where he figured he wouldn't be shot. Every venture forth was a creeping step, uncertain and unbalanced.
And after another couple of steps, Berwald collapsed into the snow.
Cold.
He felt something sticky against his face as he lay there, freezing quickly into an icy gunk.
His eyes strained in the blackness to squint at his surroundings, and he finally noticed darker splotches that tainted the pure snow. Footprints that were likely his, and hoof prints of the large animal that had thundered by.
And blood.
Blood in the snow, and he couldn't tell whose it was.
His, or the animal's, and he didn't even care.
The snow was comfortable, and cold, and it made him sleepy.
He could just settle here, surrounded by something that felt akin to what a cloud must feel like. Deep snow, fluffy snow, snow that couldn't bear his weight above the surface.
He gradually sank farther down.
And he felt the lure of the winter coax him into sleep just as the faintest sound of boots crunched through the snow.
"Pappa, did I kill it?"
"I believe you did, but you must learn to use fewer bullets. It also seems you shot through an artery: look at the blood on the ground. It won't make for very good meat."
"How do I avoid the arteries?"
"You'll learn with time. The biggest arteries-"
"Pappa?"
"-are in the neck and legs. If you shoot at them, it will kill the-"
"Pappa?"
"-animal, but at the cost of blood. It's a messy kill, and the fur is also harder to sell. But if-"
"Pappa."
The strong, bearded man glanced down with irritation at his son. "Why do you ask questions if you don't listen to the answer?" he sighed, his lantern swinging and throwing light around the shallow grooves in the snow where the blood had spilled.
But the boy simply pointed toward the base of a tree as the beams of light stretched over, and he lowered his voice. "…Is that a person?"
And the man's eyes widened at the indentation in the snow as he quickened his pace.
*Note: A Swedish mile (en mil) is the equivalent of 10 km.