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Chapters (21)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. CONTENTS
  5. IN A DEER STAND
  6. SUN DOGS
  7. HYGGE
  8. BY SYDVEST STATION
  9. BETWEEN OFFICES
  10. THE FAIRGROUND
  11. COMPACTION BIRDS
  12. PERSHING SQUARE
  13. HONEYSUCKLE
  14. ON NARROW PAVED PATHS
  15. INSIDE ST. PAUL’S
  16. THE FREEZER CHEST
  17. MANITOBA
  18. WILD SWIMS
  19. PUSHKIN PRESS
  20. ALSO BY DORTHE NORS
  21. COPYRIGHT

15

SUN DOGS

16 17

IT’S A LONG TIME AGO NOW, BUT ONCE I LIVED IN A cabin in Norway. It was Olav who mentioned the place to me, at the start of our relationship. He told me it had been the summer cottage of the Norwegian author Knut Terje Aasbakken. Now it was a writer’s retreat, and a narrow lane led up to it from the village Olav came from. As a boy, he’d go up there sometimes to spy on the writers who lived there. They seemed so secretive, he said, and dove into me.

The spring that our relationship began to get complicated, Olav invited me to the King’s Garden. I didn’t take it lightly, I begged, but he would not relent. As July drew on I became a wisp, and a friend suggested I go away somewhere. So it was I remembered Aasbakken’s cabin. The one in Norway, on a mountainside, in a forest.

I applied, got the cabin, left at the beginning of September. A woman from the general store drove me up from the village. She talked about the area as we crept up the mountain in her little Golf. On the way we passed the community center. She said it was customary for whoever lived in the cabin to give a reading at the center. I gazed down on the river in the valley, and then she dropped me off with a key to the woodshed.

Evenings, I would take a chair out in front of the cabin and try to stay in it till I was shaking from the cold. In the mornings, I read over the notes I’d brought along, wrote nothing.  18Late in the day I would take a walk, usually on the path down to the village. I read the nameplates on the doors I passed, and then one day I found myself at a standstill in front of the community center notice board. bunads, the heading read, and under it the name of Olav’s mother. She was called Halldis and taught the locals how to sew their own folk costumes.

The days lasted an eternity, and at night the cold moved in. I walked around Aasbakken’s house and picked paint from the cabinet doors. Out in the forest the mushrooms poked up, and it was impossible to escape the reading event at the community center. The chair of the library club came by several times and pressed. One evening in October, I positioned myself against a large loom-woven tapestry, read aloud and talked. During the coffee break, a woman with short dark hair and a face with Inuit features came over to me. She said, “I think you’ve met my son. He lives in Copenhagen.” I must have stared. “I’ve got an article he’s written about you,” she said. “Who’s your son?” I asked, and the answer was obvious.