Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck Page B

eight. There are four bodies buried at different locations that will be transported to the church when there is snow: two from the area of Storberg, one from Vanberg, and one from Blackåsen.”
    “From Blackåsen?”
    “A settler. Eriksson,” the priest said. “Wolf,” he added.
    “Eriksson is dead?”
    The priest nodded.
    “Wolf had him?”
    The priest hesitated. “One or two people seem to think otherwise.”
    The bishop got to his feet with astounding agility for a man of his age. He walked to the window. His large frame blocked out the light. “What do you mean ‘otherwise’?”
    “A new settler woman, a Finn. She thinks Eriksson was killed by someone. Everyone else says wolf.”
    The priest wasn’t certain why he said so much. It was a fine balance between not neglecting to tell anything you’d later be blamed for concealing and giving your senior too much say in how to manage your congregation. It was one of the predicaments with being in such a remote place: you lost your astuteness.
    “Where on Blackåsen was he found?” the bishop asked.
    “On the top.”
    “Close to what they call the Goat’s Pass?”
    “I believe so.” The priest hadn’t realized the bishop knew Blackåsen that well. The bishop had been in the district much longer than himself, but still, to know such detail …
    The bishop turned around. “Your judgment worries me,” he said, with early thunder in his voice, a low rumbling the priest felt rather than heard.
    “Anything, anything at all regarding Blackåsen and in particular regarding the Goat’s Pass is of highest priority.”
    “I don’t understand,” the priest said.
    “I know your predecessor died before you arrived, but you ought to have familiarized yourself with your parish by now.”
    “I have read the Church Books.”
    “Not everything is in the Books. Especially not what concerns the Prince of Darkness and those who are with him in pactum .”
    The Prince of …
    “What do you mean?”
    “There was a hearing against Eriksson’s wife, Elin.”
    “That, I know. For acts of sorcery. You resided over the inquiry. She was found guiltless, fortuitously.”
    “Guiltless.” The bishop swung his large head. “She didn’t deny anything—claimed to have received her sagacity from God. No, I deemed we couldn’t afford rumors of sorcery on Blackåsen, and so I closed the hearing down.”
    The priest looked away, to give himself time to arrange his features. It was as if the bishop were telling him he believed in magic. But they knew that the trials of the previous century had been misguided. The bishop had turned back to face the window.
    “Blackåsen is full of the old,” he said. “The old and the ugly. The Lapps used the mountain for their worshipping. In one of the missionary’s stories he tells how he came upon them after they had raised a pillar toward the sun—I have read the account myself. What isn’t written down, but what people believe, is that during the tumult that followed, one of the old Lapp women pushed the pillar so it fell.It hit the mountainside and the mountain split open. She reached down and pulled the Devil out by his tail, tied it around one of the boulders inside the crack, and put a spell on him so he couldn’t leave the mountain. ‘You think your god has all powers?’ she is supposed to have said. ‘Let’s see then how strong he is.’ They burnt her at the stake.” The bishop turned to face him. “That’s how the name ‘the Goat’s Pass’ arose. And now, whenever something happens on the mountain, people claim it is the Devil. They say that on that mountain God does not rule. They say that whatever is said on the mountain will echo for generations.”
    “There is talk of some … disappearances? I’ve heard it said that children disappear?” The priest tried a chuckle.
    The bishop tossed his head. “I looked into that when I first came to the district. Two children have gone missing over ten years. It’s no