And then I drove home. Through the forests on roads that were tarmacked every three years, and every three years, but not the same year, were blown to bits when the ground frost thawed in April. The timber roads I passed were in surprisingly good shape, but still you could see the clear-cutting all the way up the hillsides in wide dead ravaged swathes, as in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the ruins of the Great War; April is the cruellest month, he wrote. I didn’t necessarily agree. And then the naked hills vanished as abruptly as they had appeared, and then the forest stretched out as it had done since what I liked to think were times immemorial. That was not the case. Large parts of the forest had been planted. But along the shores of the still lakes, along Rømsjøen, along Mjermen and Setten with their fine, half-hidden beaches, I could see Hiawatha of the Onondaga tribe kneeling in his white canoe gliding through the smooth water and on towards the river mouth on the other side of the lake and from there on down the waterways to the south to spread his message of peace between the clans. It was a heavy burden he had taken on, he was still young, but his dignity left no one untouched. If I paid close attention, I could still see him as I always had seen him, ever since I was little and read my first books and disappeared into them and somehow felt I was an American Indian, for when I was a child playing Indians, I didn’t really want to play an Indian, I wanted to be an Indian. There was a big difference, that was clear to me, and when I was with the other children in the Dip then they were just playing Indians, I was one and could feel the whole time that I was not like them. And when their mothers came out between the houses and called them home for supper, they stopped being Indians and walked featherless back home to eat, their hands open and tomahawk-free, while I stayed where I was, prowling the paths, invisible in the dark night, between the trees with their high crowns around every turn multiplied in an endless row, and finally my mother too came out. And yet I have thought, what if she hadn’t come, what if she hadn’t called me up out of the dark shadows in the Dip, would I still have been an Indian today. What if she, for a brief but decisive moment, had forgotten that I was her son, would I then have kept moving along the paths and stayed there, would I have remained an Indian for the rest of my life. But you couldn’t. There was no way you could be anyone else than yourself, but still I have always kept the possibility open, that I could disappear in that way if I wanted to, merely a brief glance back towards the house, and then be swallowed up and hear the door slam shut behind me, and enter a world beyond all reach, but then I had to let go of that thought, for now I was driving past the old log flumes which plunged steeply down from the lake to the river and were still in use up to the 1980s, it was not so long ago, but were out of play now, crumbling, grey and rather sad, and still further down the beavers had made ready for winter. On the slope towards the river the forest floor lay covered in woodchips and shavings of aspen and alder, of sallow, strewn like a golden carpet between the trunks, and several trunks were down for the count, and some stood half-gnawed, dejected on their toes, waiting for the winter winds to topple them over.