I reach the top of the hill and pause for a minute to catch my breath. The track flattens out and I emerge from a dense clutch of trees; I’m standing on the shoulder of the mountain. Far below me a jet-black lake spreads out in full view, its water held beneath a fragile lid of sparkling ice. I look around for signs of Leah’s cabin, but can’t see anything man-made at all. I notice a smudge of blue paint on a birch tree a few meters away, and realize it’s a trail marker. I consult the map again, it seems I need to find a much smaller path winding further into the woods from the clearing. When I start walking again, I see a little hand-carved wooden sign strung from a tree that reads ‘Bekkebu’, with a pointed arrow in the direction I’m heading. I wonder if she made it herself; it seems like the kind of thing Leah might do.

How does she even bring groceries up here? I can’t imagine wanting to stay in a cabin so remote you have to walk for twenty minutes from the parking spot up a steep, slippery track through the woods, but each to their own, I guess, and it is fairly common among Scandinavians to seek out this kind of very basic back-to-nature experience.

I stop for a minute and have to control another onslaught of sudden fierce fear of being here in the woods, so utterly alone, so far from my real life, but there is something rather exhilarating about it, too. I’m able to control my thoughts and dispel the anxiety. I feel proud of myself for being able to be somewhere like this, in the thick forest, alone, and not succumb to an irrational, blind panic.

I look at my phone, but as I suspected, I have lost reception. I’m about to keep walking when I glimpse a slash of wan white sky beyond the trees just ahead of where I’m standing. It must be another clearing, and I push my way through the trees and spot what looks like the low grass-topped roof of a cabin, noticeably straighter than the craggy clearing it edges on, nestled up against the woods, overlooking the lake and the valley. The snow, already falling thicker and faster, settles onto the roof and I imagine it’s only hours until the cabin will merge with the surrounding terrain in a cloak of pristine white.