“No! No!” she screamed.
She wanted to tell them they could have the gun, if only they wouldn’t shoot her and the children. The children! Quickly she pushed them behind her; now she protected them with her own body, now the bullet must first go through her. If she only could have called to them: Don’t shoot! Let us live! Don’t kill us here now!
But they wouldn’t understand her.
The flat-nosed Indian again held the butt, while the other one held up the barrel, helping his friend to aim the heavy weapon. It was clear they wanted to try the gun by firing a shot; the flat-nosed Indian was fingering the hammer, trying to cock it.
Pressed against the wall, Kristina crouched over her children, she couldn’t move any farther, she was trembling and weak with fright. The poor children — she couldn’t ask the savages to spare them, they wouldn’t understand. But Someone else understood and would listen to her; she stammered forth a prayer: “Dear God! If I die now, what will become of my children? My little, innocent children? Dear God, help me!”
Lill-Märta and Harald, squeezed between her body and the wall, began to whimper. But the visitors paid no attention to Kristina and the children, they were busy with the gun. Now both of them were fingering the hammer. The gun had a hard action. Kristina followed their motions with wide-open, frozen eyes. And she saw they had managed to cock the gun. Then she didn’t see anything more.
Black and red clouds covered her eyes. She closed them, her whole body numb with terror. Karl Oskar! What are you doing out there? Why don’t you come?
Karl Oskar! Perhaps he had encountered the Indians before they came in! Could they have done him any harm? Was that why he didn’t come? Suppose he were lying out there. .
“Dear sweet God! Help him! Help us!”
Kristina closed her eyes and waited. She waited for the shot, she waited for the lead bullet. . She must die. This was the end for her on earth. And she prayed incoherently and silently that her merciful Father would receive her, wretched, sinful creature that she was, and let her children live unharmed in this world: the poor children. . dear God, let them live, my poor children. .
Her trembling lips moved, but she kept her eyes closed and waited, waited through an eternity. It was silent in the house. She heard, nothing. As yet no shot had been fired from the gun. It remained silent.
Kristina kept her eyes closed and waited. . Until a child’s voice said: “Open your eyes, Mother! Why do you keep your eyes shut?”
Then she opened her eyes and looked about her, all around the cabin, as if awakening from a long, bad dream. Lill-Märta sat on the floor with her playthings as before, and little Harald stood in the open door and looked out. No one else was in sight. She was alone in the house with her children. The callers had gone: the two Indians had gone their way with the gun. They had come into the house soundlessly, they had left in equal silence — stolen away on their soft moccasins like animals slinking back into the forest. They had not fired a shot. .
But when she tried to walk, she felt the floor sway under her: the planks sank steeply under her feet, she took one step into a depth — she fell full length to the floor and knew nothing more.
— 3—
Karl Oskar came in, Johan at his heels; he carried a few pike strung through the gills on a branch; he threw the fish on the floor in front of the hearth. It was cold inside the cabin and he wondered why the door had been left open. Then he discovered Kristina, stretched out on the floor at the other end of the room.
He hurriedly soaked a towel in the water pail and laid it on his wife’s forehead. In a few minutes she opened her eyes and sat up, confused and questioning: What was it? Why was she on the floor?
“You fainted,” Karl Oskar said.
She still felt dizzy, she put her hand to her forehead and began to remember: Karl Oskar had returned — at last!
“What were you doing? Why did you stay away so long?”
“So long? I was only gone a short while.”
He looked at his watch: he had examined the snares and moved them a bit, but he hadn’t been gone a half hour.
“A half hour?” Kristina was surprised. In that time she had suffered death, spent time in eternity. “I called you.” Her dulled senses were clearing: “The Indians came. Two awful ones! They took your gun.”
Karl Oskar looked at the wall — the gun was still there where he had hung it. As Kristina noticed this, she said: “I was so confused — I thought they stole the gun. But they cocked it.”
Karl Oskar took down his muzzle-loader and examined it; he couldn’t see that anyone had touched it.
“Did they handle it?”
“They aimed it.”
“At you? Oh Lord in Heaven!”
“I thought they would shoot me and the children.”
“God, they must have frightened you! No wonder you fainted!”
She related what had taken place in the cabin the few minutes he was gone. And as Karl Oskar listened, a cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. While he had been gone less than half an hour, the greatest disaster he could imagine had nearly befallen him: he might have returned to find wife and children dead on the cabin floor.
“Oh Lord my God! What an escape!”
Kristina said: First she had called him. Then she had prayed God to help her, and He had listened to her prayer and sent the savages away from their house without harming her or the children. Never before in her life had she realized so fully as today how all of them were under the protection of their Creator.
“They left the gun. I don’t understand it. What did they want in here?”
Karl Oskar suggested that the Indians were curious: they hadn’t come to murder anyone, they only wanted to see how the new settlers lived. But they handled shooting irons like children — the gun might easily have gone off and killed her!
“This must never happen again,” he said.
They had had a serious warning today. She must bolt the door carefully whenever he was out, even if only for a short time. And they must rig up a loud bell so she could call him when there was danger.
“I hope you didn’t hurt yourself?”
“No. I feel perfectly well again.”
She had looked very pale when he saw her lying on the floor, but now her color had come back. She busied herself with her chores, they must have their evening meal at last. She stirred up the fire under the pot and Karl Oskar went outside for more wood.
She sat down to clean the fish. But as she stuck the knife into the first pike belly, she felt a jerking convulsion grip her: an intense pain began in the small of her back and spread through her whole lower body. It felt as if she had stuck the knife into her own belly instead of into the fish.
When Karl Oskar came back with the wood, he saw she had grown pale again, her very lips were bluish. And her hand with the knife trembled as she cut the entrails from the pike.
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing much. It’ll soon be over.”
“But you’ve pain?”
“It will soon pass.”
She went on cleaning the fish, she cleaned all the pike, and the pain abated. She had told Karl Oskar the truth — the pain had passed.
But what she hadn’t said was that it would soon be upon her again; she had recognized the pain.
And it did come back — an hour later, when they sat around the chest lid eating their supper. The same pain returned, radiating from the small of her back, shooting and cutting through her lower body. This time it lasted longer than before. Her appetite was gone, but she forced herself to swallow a few bites of the boiled fish.