Vetle’s feet were too cold for him to keep up when Arne increased his speed. He had tried, but had to fall back just where the ski run turned a bend that was long enough for Arne to have vanished completely when Vetle finally skied all the way around.

It must be at least seven o’clock by now. Maybe later. There were hardly any people on the ski trails and the cold had begun to eat its way from his tight ski boots up towards his calves and thighs. His mittens were damp with perspiration that eventually turned to ice. His fingers were tingling. He had started to totter, he noticed, and he was gasping for breath as he struggled to ski properly. The way Dad had taught him. The way Arne did. Swaying, swinging, with effective diagonal movements so rhythmic that it wasn’t even particularly strenuous. He wanted to ski like his hero, Ivar Formo, but he couldn’t manage to do it.

What’s more, he could hear something.

Voices. Loud voices and laughter that didn’t sound happy at all. The laughter of big boys, the kind there were a lot of in the school playground, and that often made Vetle hide behind the bike shed and stay there for the whole of the break. From the trail he was on he could see another clearing near the forest, where the sound was coming from. A couple of pairs of skis, Vetle thought for certain, maybe three. Or four. It looked as if there was a new, proper ski trail up there past the spruce tree that had fallen on a boulder and that sometimes looked like a dead man. If you screwed up your eyes a bit. In the darkness it was as if the snow was incandescent, with a faint, bluish light that only looked attractive when he was with someone. Preferably Dad.

The voices did not subside.

Vetle wanted to go home. He sniffed and trudged past the new trail. It wasn’t far now. Arne was probably already at home. Maybe Dad would come to meet Vetle on the track; he would certainly be angry that his brother had left the wee one behind. At least Mum would be. Mum would be furious, and had probably got Dad to put on his coat and go out to fetch Vetle who was all alone in a world that would soon be full of houses and lights, but nevertheless could still be scary and dangerous.

He came to a sudden halt. Just ahead on the ski trail, maybe fifty metres or so, three boys came whizzing out of the forest. They were laughing and yelling and didn’t look back. None of them caught sight of Vetle, but Vetle recognized the first of them, the biggest one: a fifteen-year-old with a knitted helmet in red, white and blue. He wore that hat all winter, the boy from Brannvaktveien, even though those helmets were really only for speed skaters. He was in the tenth grade, the class that actually didn’t exist, and everyone knew what sort of people were in there. The guy had Kandahar bindings attached to a pair of clunky, tar-coated wooden planks.