I smeared jungle oil on my wrists and neck. Decided not to bother about the car and walk through the forest to saraoppalia. There was a track more like an old horsetrail leading to small plots at the edge of the forest and heathland. In the more distant past it had been a trader’s path linking smalånger and other villages in the area. These days it was mostly used by huntsmen. Nature 160had taken over. Tree seedlings and stiff grasses scratched my legs bared in shorts after a long winter and unused to walking. The track followed the lower reaches of afta hill going northwards and would eventually join the village road at a crossing and then continue westwards.

On the way I stopped at one of the playgrounds of my childhood. The forest was moving in here as well. I tacked between prickly small firs that hit back with elastic branches. By now the old byre was almost completely hidden. It had once been a standalone byre without a farmhouse.

The really exciting thing about it had been that it was full of things. It had been hard to get at because even then the roof had collapsed. We got in through the old dungtrap. Crawled over dried cowshit and heaved ourselves up into the main section with the cattle stalls.

Our greatest find had been a bundle of letters dated nineteen-hundredandtwentyone. The oldworld handwriting quivered with desire and reading turned us on the same way as the sexy bits in the readers’ letters printed in the adult mags that father kept in a box shoved out of sight in the coldattic.

I carefully rounded the open well but now as then I couldn’t resist lying down with my head over the edge to look into the black abyss. Shout something into the hole to hear it answer. Throw a stone to hear it break the surface with a plop.

The roof was completely gone now and the walls were caving in as well. Where the gate had once been the ground was oddly free of nettles and I stepped over the rubble to have a look inside. I used my phone torch to search for traces of the past. Once my eyes had become used to the obscurity I realised that the furniture was still there. Handcrafted worn beautiful and forever captured 161under a ruined building. Rain and snow would continue to do their work and in the end all would vanish and no one remember what had been.