But Jens wasn’t comforted. On the contrary, he was horrified at the thought of the poor trees giving their lives to protect his home. A loud, ripping sound followed by a hollow thud from the forest made his throat tighten. He pressed himself against Mogens, who held his baby brother in a loving embrace while he fantasized about inventing an effective storm shield to the south and expanding the workshop to the west.
The next morning they walked around the house and the outbuildings with their father to inspect the damage. Nothing serious had happened to the buildings, but stuff had been scattered all over the place, and they spent some time picking it up and piling it up along the walls – pretty much where it had all stood to begin with. The animals had long since settled down and were chewing the cud in their modest quarters.
Afterwards they went into the forest to see the extent of the wind’s ravaging. At first they walked through the Christmas-tree plantation, which had survived remarkably unscathed, and then along the winding paths in the mixed forest, where a few spruces lay like fallen soldiers in the mist. One or two had ripped up whole chunks of the forest floor so it looked like a thick shield of soil and roots was rising from the yawning hole. Jens walked carefully up to one of them and stared into the underworld that had opened up in front of him: roots of varying shapes and sizes sticking out from the vertical soil in every direction like exposed tentacles, a few brutally snapped, others pulled out in thin, thirsty strips. At the bottom the most stubborn roots still clung to the soil, and at the top a blanket of moss hung over the edge like a waterfall that had changed its mind halfway down. Nothing remained of the forest floor’s usual natural order and quiet harmony, but even this unfamiliar chaos beckoned Jens with a shivering delight.
Soon he felt a pair of familiar hands on his shoulders.
‘We’ll leave it alone,’ Silas whispered above him. ‘I bet a fox will make its home down there. It was a very old tree. Maybe she was ready to die.’
Jens nodded. Mogens started measuring the tree.
The boys followed their father down the narrow forest path that wound its way through spruce and pine and oak and birch and aspen, and every time Silas ducked under a branch Jens would duck too, even though he wasn’t in danger of being hit by it for a few more years. His stomach lurched when they passed the tall spruces and carried on northwards. The boys were under strict instructions to go no further than the tall spruces when they were alone in the forest, and Jens had never dared defy them. He stared, at once scared and mesmerized, at the forest of crooked pine trees that replaced the spruces. They seemed to be stretching out their branches towards him, and he couldn’t decide whether it was to embrace him or strangle him. Silas would appear to pick up on his younger boy’s apprehension because he stopped for a moment and put his hand on a long, twisted arm reaching halfway across the path.
‘Look, Jens. I call these gnarled old pines my troll trees. They’re very friendly trees that like to say hello.’
Jens nodded happily. Then he too clasped the knobbly branch and greeted the trunk politely.
The path curved and suddenly there was noticeably more space between the trees. The white mist which had lain across the forest all day had slowly drifted south. At that moment the troll trees ended completely and left the scene to the afternoon sun, which lit up the forest floor, revealing a myriad of life: glossy beetles struggling across steaming grassy mounds; insects dancing in the air between the tree trunks; a shrew’s ceaseless pottering between blades of grass. A rabbit darted past them as if it wanted to catch up with the fog, and in a quivering, silvery web a spider rushed towards its prey, seemingly oblivious to the cross it carried on its back.
Jens held his breath when they passed the furthest trees and stepped out into the open area that separated the forest from the sea. This was the common. The mysterious, large common he knew only from his father’s and big brother’s descriptions and from his own dreams at night.
‘Look how the heather blossoms,’ Silas said. ‘And try smelling it…’
They heard him take a deep breath in through his nose. Jens did likewise as he looked at the purple carpet spread out in front of them. The scent was new and captivating: the fresh, salty sea air was scented with the heather and the coarse grass. Jens thought that this had to be the most peaceful spot in the whole world. He would love to lie here chatting to his father for ever and ever.
‘Look at those ones over there… They’re called devil’s-bit.’ Silas pointed at some round blue flowers balancing on long stems in between the heather and the grass.
‘Devil’s-bit?’
All Jens knew about the devil was that, according to the vicar’s wife, he reigned in the postmaster’s home. Judging from her tone of voice, it was a sorry state of affairs, and Jens hoped that it would soon be handed in to the workshop to be fixed, so that he could finally get to see it for himself.
‘Yes, and this summer I’ll show you the other flowers that grow out here. There’s one called bird’s-foot trefoil…’
Now he was talking. There were plenty of birds on the island, according to Mogens, but Jens still wasn’t altogether sure what made a girl a bird. Perhaps it had to do with being hen-pecked.
‘And the Virgin Mary’s bed straw…’
Jens’s jaw dropped, and he looked at his father: ‘This is where she sleeps?’
He had heard about the Virgin Mary at school and knew that she had a donkey and was married to a carpenter. He couldn’t remember anything else, but it had been enough for him to warm to her immediately.
Silas smiled. ‘Not as far as I’m aware, but if she did decide to lie down here, at least she’d be comfortable,’ he said with a wink to Jens, who thought his father had got something in his eye.
Mogens wasn’t listening. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, eager to get to the sea. Once they were ordered to scare off any vipers that might hide in the heather, his shifting turned into enthusiastic stomping. Jens stayed between his father and his brother. The viper was the only animal apart from mosquitoes that he really hated.
‘Come on, Jens, come on,’ Mogens urged him as he raced down to the beach to the point where the sea had last drawn a line in the sand. He fell to his knees in his short trousers and waited. A moment later the water returned and trickled softly under his hands and knees and the tips of his shoes so that he sank slightly into it and got a little wetter than he had expected. Mogens grinned happily.
Jens stayed put in the lyme grass, which tickled his legs like tiny needle pricks over his knee-high socks, but he barely felt it. He was mesmerized by his big brother and the sea.
When the sea crept across the beach it resembled a thin, shiny tongue. But there was nothing ferocious about the tongue. It licked Mogens’s knees carefully, like a loving cat would have done. Jens concluded that the sea must be nice. For some reason he had always imagined that the sea up here would be scary. Now he felt safe about everything that lay to the north.
He had often sat on the back of the pickup truck and gazed at the sea as a blue surface either side of the Neck when they rattled down the gravel road to the main island. And he had also seen it between the hills as they approached Korsted or delivered restored furniture to the islanders. It was always there, a surrounding danger and a distant sound. But he had yet to touch it. He had never taken off his shoes and socks and stepped out into it and felt it whirl softly past his ankles before it was pulled back with a small whoosh in the sand under his feet. And he had never bent down and felt it flow between his fingers – cold, soft, incomprehensible.