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Overview
Occupied Norway, 1943. After seeing an allied plane go down over the mountains, headstrong fifteen year-old Kari Dahlstrøm sets out to locate the wreck. She soon finds the cocky American pilot Lance Mahurin and offers to take him to Sweden, pretending she's a member of the resistance. While her widower father Erling and the disillusioned Nazi Oberleutnant Conrad Moltke hunt them down, Kari begins to fall for Lance, dreaming of a life with him in America. Over the course of the harrowing journey, though, Kari learns hard truths about those around her as well as discovering unforeseen depths within herself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780998465722 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grenzland Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2017 |
| Pages: | 214 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.49(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Stjørdalen Valley, Norway March 1943
Kari looked up from mending a damaged sheep pen when she heard the faint buzzing noise. At first, it sounded like the blackflies that swarmed up from Lake Rømsjøen every summer, but she knew that couldn't be, as it was still weeks before the thaw. She scanned the horizon, looking for the origin of the sound. There was nothing but empty grey space in every direction. Then she looked southward and spotted a fighter plane streaking across the sky. Thick black smoke trailed from its fuselage as it plummeted toward the mountains.
Even if she hadn't seen its Army Air Force markings, she knew by the whistling sound of its engine that it was a P-47. She'd seen a few in December, over Trondheim, escorting a bomber on its way back to England. She dropped the heavy stone she'd been carrying and hurried back to the barn, clumping through shin-deep snow in men's boots that were two sizes too big for her. Before long, her thin chest ached from sucking in the cold air, but she rushed onward, unable to contain her excitement.
She found her father inside their ramshackle barn, hunched over a thin and sick-looking ewe. Erling Dahlstrøm was a mountain of a man, corded with thick, knotty muscles. Even while kneeling, he was almost the same height as his daughter. Broken-faced and ravaged by life, he looked much older than his forty-one years.
Kari spoke as soon as she entered the barn.
"There's a plane," she said, gasping for breath.
Erling replied in his gravelly voice without looking up.
"Not now."
"But it's the Allies —"
Erling interrupted Kari.
"It's none of our business," he said, finding a swollen and mottled patch of skin on one of the hind legs of the ewe.
"But father —"
Erling snapped at Kari.
"That's enough," he said.
Before Kari could reply, Erling turned his attention back to the ewe. He unsheathed his knife and lifted the animal's head.
Then he slit its throat.
Kari left the barn, boiling with rage. She got a sledge axe from the shed and went out past the sheep pens to split wood, which she often did when her anger got a hold of her. Though scrawny for a fifteen year-old and scant through the arms and waist, she worked like a man twice her size. Even though the temperature was near freezing, she quickly worked up a sweat, and she peeled off her ratty wool coat to cool down.
She piled one stack of splits and then started in on another, and then another. She kept going until the day turned to night, and the sky had become as purple-black as a bruise. After she finished, she put the axe back in the shed and headed to the barn, where she watered and fed the sheep. It didn't take long, as their dwindling flock was down to seventeen head, or less than a third of what they'd had before Germany had invaded. Most of the sheep that had survived blackleg had succumbed to starvation, and the few that weren't starving had been sold to the Germans in order to keep from losing the farm.
She fed the ewes first, the ones she called Rita and Mae West after her favorite Hollywood stars. In better times, they'd had barley to feed their sheep, but they rarely even had hay anymore and were down to feeding them wheat middlings and by-products that they got from a distiller. She fed the rams next, Humphrey and Errol and the Duke, and then their lambs, which she didn't even bother naming, knowing that few would make it to the summer. After she finished with the sheep, she gave some silage to Loki, their old mule, and a bit of hay to Torden, their last horse. Before the war, Erling had had a team of six dun-colored Fjords they'd used for plowing and pulling logs to the river. One by one, they'd sold them off or slaughtered them for food, and they were down to a seventeen-year-old gelding whose best days were behind him.
After finishing with the animals, Kari made her way back to their run-down house. She looked inside one of the hoarfrosted windows and saw her father eating a meager supper at the kitchen table, eyes cast downward and head bowed like a penitent. Wanting to avoid him, she waited outside in the shadows, shivering and blowing on her hands to keep them warm. To pass the time, she traced the old constellations her grandfather had taught her. She spotted Thor's chariot, and the fisherman, and Ulfs Keptr, or the mouth of the wolf. She saw the Asar battlefield, the great wagon, and the road of the dead. She could even make out Aurvandil's toe, a sign of spring's approaching victory over the winter.
Once she finished counting the stars, Kari looked back through the window and saw Erling leaving the kitchen, taking a lit oil lamp with him. She continued to wait outside until she saw Erling's bedroom door close behind him, then carefully opened the front door and entered the house. She crept into the kitchen and got a husk of stale bread from the pantry, choking it down dry. It wasn't much — before the war, they often had dumplings or herring for lunch, and gjetost and brown bread or sliced egg sandwiches nearly every night — and even though she could taste the gritty sawdust they'd mixed in with the wheat to stretch it out, it was far better than rutabaga fried in cod liver oil, or salted horse meat, or even no supper at all, which was often the case since the Germans had invaded.
She washed down the bread with some coppery-tasting pail water. Then she lit another lamp and made her way toward her room, pausing or changing tack every time a board groaned beneath her feet. At one point, she heard her father stirring, and she stopped and waited, afraid that Erling might come out and confront her. But Erling didn't come out, and the stirring soon ceased, and Kari continued on her way.
She got to her room and slipped inside, gently closing the door behind her. Then she put the lamp atop her dresser and took off her sweaters and trousers, stripping to her long underwear. Glancing out the window, she watched the winds file down the snowdrifts, wondering what had happened to the P-47, and whether it had crashed into the mountains. Surely it couldn't have made it, she thought to herself. It'd been sinking like a stone, a plume of thick black smoke billowing in its wake. She wondered if the pilot had gone down with the plane, or if the pilot had bailed out, and if the latter, what had happened to him, if he'd actually reached the ground alive.
She finished undressing, then crawled underneath the bed's thick covers and waited for the warmth to come. While she lay there, she glanced over at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island postcards that her Uncle Agnar had sent her from New Jersey, where he lived, and the pictures of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart that she'd cut out of the Film Weekly and Picturegoer magazines she'd found at the rubbish heap. She soon found herself thinking about her mother. What would she have done, Kari wondered, if she'd still been alive, and had seen the plane going down? She'd believed in taking stands, unlike Kari's father. She'd fought for independence from Sweden as a schoolgirl, and she'd demonstrated for suffrage as a young woman. She'd even struggled valiantly against the cancer that had whittled her to a skeleton before claiming her in her thirty-fourth year. She wouldn't have just ignored it.
Kari stared up at the beamed ceiling, unable to sleep. Her thoughts kept circling back to the plane. She turned and looked out the window again, where she saw vacuous shapes merging and breaking apart in the blowing snow.
After a long moment, she got up and pulled on her clothes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Land of Hidden Fires"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Kirk Kjeldsen.
Excerpted by permission of Grenzland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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