The spruce trees in the hedge surrounding the house at Joutsentie 3 were old, thick resinous giants. Their lower branches swept across the ground like the hem of a long skirt, and sheltered beneath that hem lay countless metres of spruce tunnels. The ground in these tunnels was covered in a thick, brown mattress of years of pine needles.
About halfway along the middle section of the hedgerow, right behind the red cottage, grew a larger, grander spruce like the mother or father of all the others. Perhaps whoever planted this hedge had taken inspiration from this very tree.
The pieces of branch scattered around the base of the Mother Spruce’s trunk betrayed the fact that someone in the tunnel had been busy with a saw. If anyone were to stand tight against trunk and look upwards, they would notice that certain branches had been cut away to create a small shaft, just big enough for someone skinny, leading straight up into the sky, with supporting branches left at regular intervals to form something almost like a ladder.
About halfway up the spruce, high above the cottages and ramshackle roofs, in the thickening evening darkness, sat an eagle owl. It was a rare bird in southern Finland – particularly in the city, right in the middle of an area of detached houses. What made this eagle owl even rarer was the fact that it had the body of a human.
The owl clearly considered this something of a deficiency, a shortcoming, but the Creator had made up for this deficiency by giving him a human mind, in addition to a bird’s mind, and the power of thought. Or something thereabouts.
At that moment the eagle owl was thinking for the umpteenth time that it had been a wise decision to cease being a human and to become a bird. He had done this because he was afraid of what humans called love, something that represented the greatest deceit in the world.
Humans said love was good, worth striving for, the most beautiful thing in the world. But they kept their mouths shut about the fact that those who had been blessed with love seemed to have a clandestine entitlement to destroy those who begged for love in return.
The eagle owl sitting in the tall spruce at Joutsentie 3 knew this very well. The first love in his life, the source of his former human life, every human’s role model, his own mother, had tried to kill him. In doing so she had struck an ineffaceable fear into the owl’s soul, a fear which, from that moment forth, had dictated his every decision and which his mother had used to control him throughout his life thus far.
The eagle owl had loved his sister, perhaps he’d loved her the most after his mother, and his sister had said she loved him back, even in the last few days, but she too secretly wanted to destroy the owl and that’s why she had deliberately given him the wrong advice and forced him into a trap. And as for the deliriously beautiful, blonde-haired woman for whose love the owl would have crawled on the ground… The eagle owl removed one of his hands from the resinous branch and felt the side of his head. The wound had stopped bleeding and the blood had dried to form a plug across it. Even this woman had tried to kill the owl, and still all he had wanted to do was give her love and to accept the love she offered him in return. It had been the first time in the eagle owl’s life that he had dared even to attempt such a thing.
The eagle owl leaned his head to one side and smiled the almost sinister smile of a bird of prey. He would never be trapped again. He wouldn’t beg for love from anybody ever again, wouldn’t offer his own love. He no longer had anything to offer; what he’d once had, had died along with the human being the eagle owl had once been. Best of all was that the owl had finally killed his human form himself, and had done it very skilfully.
After he’d escaped from the clutches of the people dressed in white, he had flown to Joutsentie and climbed up the ladder into his former nest without anyone seeing. There he had taken off his old clothes, his human clothes, and put on his shadow-grey coat of feathers that smelled of his new self.
He’d taken his wallet, stuffed it in the pocket of his red trousers and packed the trousers and the jacket, the shirt and the tasselled shoes into a carrier bag. Then he’d picked up the map in the telephone directory, selected a page with lots of sea and written on it the words ‘You’ll find me here’, and left the directory open on his bed. Then the owl had flown into the city, down to Mustikkamaa and emptied out the contents of the bag on the rocks by the shore.
The eagle owl was a wise bird. Of course he understood that there would be times when he would have to interact with humans, for the world belonged to humans, and was therefore a bad world. He knew that sometimes he would have to pretend to be human, and that’s why he had soared across the skies to Good Johansson’s place. Good Johansson had promised to make him a new human identity. The eagle owl had chosen the name Huuhkaja.
The eagle owl turned his head, listened to the night and looked down at the cottages beneath him. Things had slowly calmed down. He had been sitting up in the spruce when all the commotion had started; he’d seen the police arrive and peer through the windows, then came the shot that had made him tremble and keep his eyes closed for a moment – he remembered how he too had been shot – and that’s when the commotion had really started.
Blue lights had started flashing; men and cars came and went. The last to arrive was a white van into which they had carried a human body covered in a blanket. The eagle owl knew who it was: it was the witch. He had seen all the others in the yard, but not her.
And now she no longer existed. She had ceased to be. The eagle owl was puzzled that, though he thought about it time after time, he felt nothing, neither joy nor sorrow. Nothing at all. Perhaps he didn’t feel anything because the dead person wasn’t his mother: she was a witch.
Lasse had shot the witch. He was the only one the police had taken with them. And because they hadn’t taken Sisko or Reino that meant they couldn’t know that they were the ones that had paid a visit to the bank. And of course, Lasse had only shot the witch because he loved her. He’d always sworn he loved her, even as a little boy, crying, his backside raw.
His bird’s instinct told the eagle owl that it was time to set off. He released his grip on the tree and clambered down the ladder of branches to the tunnel with the pine-needle carpet. He stood for a moment staring at the yard through the branches sweeping the ground, then flew towards the workshop gable, his wings beating silently.
He stood there for a moment and listened, grey and unnoticed, by the front wheel of the crippled digger. There was no movement, and no sounds came from inside, and he darted nimbly beneath the digger. It was like a bear, a real dead bear, a fresh corpse, and the eagle owl wanted to eat its flesh. He ran his hands along the underside of the digger’s frame until he found what he was looking for: a hole just big enough to fit your hand through. He worked his fingers inside the gap, groped further inside and found them: a number of tightly sealed copper tubes. There were three of them in the hole, and the eagle owl took all of them.
The eagle owl knew that there was nothing but Finnish marks in the tubes, but that suited him perfectly well – eagle owls weren’t migratory birds. He didn’t know how much money was in the tubes. No doubt it would be less than his share of the loot, but it would be enough to see him through the next few years. Perhaps there’d even be enough to buy a small nest with white walls somewhere far away.
And when the money eventually ran out, the eagle owl would start to hunt again. He’d hunt the way he should have hunted when he was still a human: he would scavenge for money, only money, the flesh of life, and if a human were to take him by surprise, he wouldn’t fly away again. He would fight back. He would strike Flame, his razor-sharp beak, right into that human’s chest.
The eagle owl stuck the tubes under his arm, listened for a moment, and when the coast was clear he fluttered into the air, flew towards the gap in the hedge, skimming the tall grass as he went, and made his way through to the path. Then he disappeared somewhere to the left.