Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,35
cupboard belonged to somebody who had been in this cottage, who might even have built it, who had shared her bed and who might come back.
He eyed her as he had looked at the sailor with the snotty nose. He wanted to hit her. Quickly he moved his stool back to avoid that happening. In order to have something to say he said: 'Do you not have any animals? I thought I saw a cat with bluish-grey fur. If there is such a thing as a cat with a touch of blue in its fur.'
'There are no animals here.'
'Not even a cat?'
'I wouldn't mind having a dog that could swim out and fetch the birds I shoot.'
'But I thought I saw a cat?'
'There is no cat. I know what there is on this skerry. There are two adders, one male and one female. I kill the young ones every spring. Maybe I ought to let one or two live so that the skerry doesn't become snakeless if the parents upped and died or are caught by an eagle. There was a fox here once.'
She pointed to a fox fur lying on a bench.
'Had it swum here?'
'Sometimes the winters are so cold and long that ice forms on the sea even as far out as this, and occasionally further – as far as the outermost herring grounds. That's when the fox came. It stayed when the ice melted. I shot it through the door when it was scavenging for food. It had seaweed and bits of stone in its stomach. I think it had gone mad and started chewing stones in desperation. I suppose it's worse for a fox than for a person to be all alone. But it may be easier for animals to do away with themselves.'
'Why?' he said, surprised.
'They have no god to be afraid of. Unlike me.'
He hoped she would start talking about herself. He did not care about the snakes and the fox. But she kept on about the animals.
'Seals sometimes bask on the reefs north-west of Sandsänkan if it gets too crowded on their usual rocks. Occasionally a seal comes ashore here. But there are no animals apart from those. I think this is the only skerry out here where there aren't any ants. I don't know why.'
'I see no sign of a rifle,' he said. 'But you say you shot a fox?'
She pointed under the bed she was sitting on.
'I have a shotgun. And crampons for my boots. And also a seal club. My father made it. He was born in 1851 and died when I was a little girl. No picture of him exists, nothing. A photographer from Norrköping visited the islands in the 1890s, but my father didn't want to have his picture taken. He ran away and hid in a rock crevice somewhere. Some of the old men out here used to believe they would lose the ability to aim straight at seabirds if they had their photo taken. There was a lot of superstition in the archipelago when I was a girl. That seal club is the only thing I have that belonged to my father. A club covered in dried seal blood instead of a face.'
He tried cautiously to wheedle out an answer to what really interested him.
'Are there any other people on this skerry?'
'Not any more. There used to be.'
'That's hard to understand.'
'Understand what? That anybody would stay here? I've stayed here. But there'll be no one when I've gone. When I leave, the island will revert to what it used to be. The snakes will be able to live in peace. They might multiply. There might be so many of them that no humans will dare to land here any more. Once, a long time ago, people rowed out to here. They used their ribs as oars. Now they've all gone. Even the stones that were carried up here from the shore to make the foundations for the houses have started to go away. I go out and look at them. It's like trying to watch the elevation of the land. You would have to stand in the same place for very many years to check if the land really was rising. It's the same with the stones they lugged up here, the first of the people who came to the skerry hundreds of years ago. Now the stones are slowly sliding back again, to the places they were taken from.'