South of Pudasjärvi, Mikhail once more ran across Arnie’s tracks. The wind had picked up just enough to make him wonder if worse weather was on its way. It was already snowing lightly. The overcast sky would slow the radiation heat loss at night, which was good. Visibility, however, was cut considerably, but that made little difference skiing through forest since he could see no farther than ten or fifteen meters even on a clear day. The key piece of information was that there was barely any accumulated snow in Arnie’s tracks. He was tempted to cheat, gain speed by following in Arnie’s tracks, letting Arnie do all the heavy work of moving through fresh snow. His code of honor and fair play, however, wouldn’t allow him to cheat. It wasn’t sport if victory was won at any cost. Sport had rules. Abandon rules to win and everyone loses. You may as well not have had the contest.
He slogged on, breaking his own trail, his mind wandering with the monotony of it, turning over unrelated thoughts. Humans were such a potent mixture of good and bad he thought. People followed rules because people were good. However, they broke rules because people were bad. That’s why there were other rules that promised shame or punishment, which helped keep rules from being broken. He knew this human dichotomy from his years of combat. He had watched men unhesitatingly throw themselves on a German grenade to save their friends. His own medal had been earned because he cared more for others than himself—he chuckled aloud—at that particular time. The memory, still vivid, of waiting before the assault on the day he’d won that medal rose like a ghost from a grave. All of them, waiting for the order to go, scared shitless. An interesting figure of speech. He’d heard of men shitting themselves from fear but never knew anyone who had; nor had it ever happened to him. Maybe it was just another of those fictions that writers come up with to try to communicate what is impossible to understand without direct experience. Or maybe civilians thought it might be that way, so they said it was. Maybe it happened. He remembered wanting nothing more than to turn around and run until he was in Natalya’s arms. But he knew that just behind the assault troops were the troops of the NKVD, waiting to round up deserters and cowards. And the penalty for running was death.
Once the fighting started, something took over, something beyond himself. It was that something good that put the lives of others above his own operating at the same time he was killing people. It seemed impossible, but he’d lived it.
He became aware of the snow falling harder.
Arnie was trying to control his feelings of frustration as he worked his way around trees. To get speed, one had to glide. To glide, one had to stay on top of the snow and have gliding distance. He had neither.
Being in forest cut the chances of sighting Mikhail directly, but Arnie had seen no other signs of him, such as tracks. He assumed Mikhail was behind him.
Arnie suddenly came upon a clearing. It was only a couple of acres in size and clearly the result of human effort. Stumps still poked above the snow. From the looks of the stumps, the trees had been cut long ago.
He passed through the clearing and reentered the forest, resuming his steady rhythmic push and glide or, too often, push and sink. His mind wandered in the sameness of the white snow, gray sky, and unchanging gray-green and silent trees, switching randomly between thoughts and memories. Why would someone have been way the hell out here cutting trees? Then he remembered that Finland had gone through periods of famine and many farms had been abandoned over the years. Most Americans thought farms were permanent. That was because most American farms were new. Arnie remembered the ski trip he took to Vermont in his First Class year. He’d come across stone walls in the middle of forests with nothing near the walls at all. In the nineteenth century, Vermont had nearly double the number of farms it had previously. Vermont farmers had abandoned them, just as Finnish farmers had abandoned the house that at one time must have stood in this clearing. Maybe there were foundations of the old farmhouse beneath the snow. Big difference, though. Vermont farmers left to find factory jobs—or bigger farms out West. Few farms in America were abandoned because of starvation. Had to make a difference in the character of the two countries. He’d tuck that observation away when assessing Finland’s current fighting capacity. Nonaligned now, but which way would they go if forced to choose? He needed to spend more time with Pietari and his veteran friends. Intelligence was also about gathering information on the character of your potential enemies as well as your potential allies. How willing were the Finns to starve and even die for their country’s cause? Ever since the big successes by the navy using signals intelligence to figure out that the Japanese were heading to Midway, signals intelligence was all the coming rage. But how tough was someone? How willing to sacrifice? How ruthless? How compassionate? You got none of this from radio waves.
Maybe it wasn’t a farm. Maybe it was just a simple logging operation—or whatever Finns called gyppo logging operations, small family owned, fiercely independent. Maybe someone got the timber rights, and they dragged the logs down to one of the many lakes, and from there to a river, and from there to a mill. He remembered his first day on the job at 200-Foot Logging, his dad’s gyppo logging company. Sixth-grade summer. He was twelve. He remembered his mother and father talking about it—openly—at dinner one night. He’s too young. He’s old enough. He’ll get hurt. Only if he’s stupid. He’s twelve! No excuse for stupidity.
His dad kicked him out of bed at four thirty the next morning and told him to put on his work boots. All day he hauled stuff. He washed stuff. He put up with practical jokes. He would never forgive that goddamned Heppu Reinikka for making him look for a left-handed peavey, which he learned the hard way was a tool that didn’t exist. Now that was a crew, he mused, those old World War I veterans. People call them the Bachelor Boys. All sorts of rumors about bootlegging. Axel Långström, his father’s best friend. They’d logged the Middle Fork of the Nemah by themselves. People still talked about it. Axel was famous for pulling a Tommy gun during a fishermen strike. Dad had done well during the recent war, like most good loggers. Axel had also done well because he owned his own gillnet boat. And now all those returning servicemen were having babies. That meant houses and that boded well for 200-Foot Logging. Dad was in the Astoria Country Club for Christ’s sake. War. Not all bad. For some. The ones not fighting it. Or the ones sitting on their asses back at headquarters thinking to themselves that they actually were fighting in the war. Or telling that to everyone back home. Hell, they were directing the war. That’s real different than fighting in it.
If he did well here in Finland, he’d make colonel earlier in his career than most. That gave him a good shot at a general’s star. Of course, with no war, the army was shrinking. Promotion was going to be slow. God, I hope the politicians don’t pull us back down to prewar levels. If they do, I’ll be lucky to be a captain. I’ll have twenty years in June 1952. Retire on half pay. Dad wants me to take over 200-Foot. So does Mom. What would Louise do in Astoria? Hopefully, have a bunch of kids. That problem. Was he shooting blanks? He didn’t think so. He’d masturbated and looked at his semen under a microscope when he was in high school. Weird. No, hell, scientific. Anyway, lots of sperm.
A sudden fall of snow from a branch showered his face. He snapped back to consciousness, but for a moment didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. He knew that mind wandering was dangerous. There seemed to be some sort of trade-off between the body’s energy requirements and consciousness. Willpower. Sisu. Better focus on skiing. Focus on what is directly ahead. No telling where Mikhail is. That’s wandering again. Yes! Here’s another of those frozen marshes. No trees or brush to slow him down. His frustration lifted, along with his spirits. Now he could make time.