Ane Riel - Resin

That morning I heard a scream.

It wasn’t a bird of prey or an owl or a badger or a human being who had just seen a newborn baby die. I had never heard anyone scream like that before, but I was sure that it was an animal. And I was pretty sure that it had to be a dog.

Something inside me told me that it must be caught in a trap. Except that our traps weren’t the kind of traps that made you scream; not even in daylight. A fox had once trapped its paw in a rabbit snare at the edge of the forest, but it didn’t scream, it was just stuck. I don’t think it had been sitting there very long when we found it and freed it. Dad covered its head with his jacket while I cut the string. The fox limped a bit as it ran off, but I think that it was happy. After all, we were kind to animals and we didn’t eat foxes.

But this sound. That was an animal in a lot of pain; I could feel it in my tailbone. When I knew that someone was in pain, I would get a long shooting sensation going down to my tailbone, as if my tummy was pulling itself right into my back and down towards the ground. I got the same feeling when I visited Mum and saw her sores.

If Carl had had a real body, I’m sure he would have felt exactly the same – after all, we were twins and inside one another. We had merged together, that was how I saw it. I was a little bit of a boy, and he was a little bit of a girl. Somehow, he was a little bit alive, and I was a little bit dead. Our baby sister was another matter; she was definitely dead. But at least she was here, right next to me, and that made me happy.

It was a terrible scream.

And then I remembered the new traps that Dad had set to keep unwanted visitors at bay – or at least warn us if anyone was coming. I hadn’t been allowed to see them all. He had just told me where they were and ordered me never to go near them. And he had looked at me in such a way that I could see that he meant it.

I knew about the three traps along the gravel road, of course. If you followed the path around the barrier when you walked up the gravel road towards the house, you would soon trip over a wire, and it would make some tins close to the house rattle. But tripping over a wire didn’t hurt much, did it? Not enough for anyone to scream. And I hadn’t heard the tins rattle.

If you somehow managed to evade the tripwire, you would meet another obstacle a little further on. Dad had dug a couple of shallow trenches in the road and covered them with thin pieces of cardboard with gravel and leaves and pine needles on top. If you stepped on the cardboard, your foot would go right into the trench. Now that might hurt a bit, so perhaps you would cry out, but it would also cause some junk to make noise in a nearby tree. That was to warn us. In particular me, so that I would have time to hide.

As you got near the front of the house, there was another trap in the place where most people would choose to walk if they were aiming for the front door. It was another trench, and if you ended up in it, a branch from a nearby tree would swipe your face. But you probably wouldn’t get that far before you were discovered.

Dad and I knew exactly where the three traps were so we could avoid ending up in them ourselves. He would park the pickup truck a bit further down the road, opposite the trap at the front of the house. When he got near the second trap with the pickup truck, he would drive half on to the grass so the tyres would go either side of the trench. When I walked there, I’d swerve around a particular spruce so as to stay clear of it. It was the safest way and, no matter how dark it was, I could always find that spruce with my torch. It was much taller than the others, and had a branch sticking out near its top which was easy to see against the sky.

The tripwire down by the barrier was also easy to avoid. All you had to do was not follow the small gravel path. But we were the only ones who knew that. Dad always closed the barrier behind him, even if he was only going out for a quick trip in the pickup truck. He didn’t want to run the risk, he said. Anything could go wrong if you weren’t careful; if anyone got too close.

Now, like I said, I didn’t know anything about the other traps, the new ones. All I knew was never to take the path left around the juniper bush in order to reach the house, or walk between the tall birches before the thicket, or down the path through the scrub south of the house. If you chose to ignore the gravel road, which was the most obvious route, then they were the most likely ones.

There were also certain places around the farmyard where I wasn’t allowed to go, and Dad had given me routes to follow in between the piles. Unless I followed them, I would cause terrible damage, he said. I didn’t know how, but I didn’t want to cause terrible damage, so I always did exactly as he said – except for taking a rabbit to the container. And also because he had looked at me with those eyes as he said it. I could tell from them that it was very important.

Now the sound changed from a scream to a howl, which grew inside my head. I stared out through the peepholes in the container and held my breath. My heart was pounding so hard that I could hear that too.

And then I spotted it. Down by the juniper bush. Something was moving. It looked like a dog, a big dog, but I only saw it in flashes when it threw itself to one side.

We were supposed to be kind to animals. I was kind to animals. And the dog couldn’t possibly have come to take me away. But it might bite me. I was a bit scared of dogs because they had teeth, and because I believed that Dad was a bit scared of them too. He had certainly always avoided visiting any houses with dogs that might make a noise.

OK, so we had been able to visit the insurance salesman, because his dog, which was very long as well as having long ears, never made a sound if we gave it some wine gums. I wasn’t sure that it could get up from its spot by the door to the pantry, even if it wanted to. But it would wag its tail non-stop, and the trick was to put a long, thick sock around it straightaway so it wouldn’t make a noise when it bashed it against the floor. Once we forgot to take the sock off its tail before we left and that caused such a fuss that Dad heard about it when he was queuing in the post office a few days later: the insurance salesman had been showing the sock at the pub. And it turned out to be a sock which the chemist’s wife had knitted for her husband – one of a pair, I mean. Now the chemist was accusing the insurance salesman of having nicked his priceless socks, and the insurance salesman accused the chemist of having treated his Basset hound badly. We still have the other sock somewhere. We must take good care of it.

Then it struck me that the howling dog might be heard as far as the main island. Perhaps Dad could hear it, wherever he was. Perhaps lots of doctors would come running and make us ill or take me away if they heard it.

I had to stop the howling.

My bow lay near me in the container. I put the teddy bear away and reached for it. And my quiver. Everything was ready for action, only my bow hadn’t seen much use recently, because we didn’t eat that kind of food any more. Tins were easier, Dad said. But I still practised from time to time.

As I ran down towards the juniper bush, I discovered that I had been crying, but also that I had stopped. My eyes stung a little. Or perhaps it was the daylight.

My heart was still pounding, but the rest of my body was doing what I told it to. I jumped silently over grassy knolls and zigzagged between the small trees, which were shooting up everywhere, like a forest for very small people. My baby sister would probably think the trees were tall. I could see across them as I ran. The quiver slapped my back softly with every jump; I had made it myself with the pelts from four wild rabbits. And I had moulded the tips and turned the arrows, while Dad told me everything about what wood could do and smiled at everything his daughter could do.