Season of the Wolf

An even three centuries ago, in the swamps, forests, and mountains forming an arc around the northernmost Gulf of Bothnia, nations of peoples jostled into incipient states. Here swamp water might “pretend to be blue,” the forest could “hold its breath,” and the silence “so present, it felt loud.” The land of the midnight sun was also the land of “winter’s midnight,” when the sun “hadn’t yet mounted the horizon.”

The only indigenous peoples were of course the Saami, here called the Lapps, it being 1717. Russians loomed to the east, while Swedish and Finnish settlers included aristocracies that could tax, convert, and conscript the peasant classes. Done in that order, the more egalitarian nomadic reindeer-herding Saami would only be taxed, converted, and conscripted when they could be pinned down, which was seldom possible.

Into this maelstrom, destitute Finns—fishermen, foragers, and swidden agriculturalists—moved westerly onto sparsely settled regions of the Swedes. While trending to the north, the Saami nomads seasonally intersected with both of the intrusive ethnicities. Imagine a Finnish lineage of women endowed with powers of sorcery making this migration. A mother, Maija, two daughters Frederika and Dorotea, and the father Paavo, take over a homestead left by Paavo’s uncle; the cottage was “lopsided,” the land “unkempt.”

Without near-neighbors, the family tries to be self-sufficient even as they show good will to anyone they encounter in their gathering and hunting forays. Maija is also an experienced Earth Mother, that is, a midwife with wider knowledge of healing; in Swedish, the midwife would be called “jordmor,” or, literally, “earth mother.” Magic and medicine fuse when Maija’s barren cow is observed to give milk, and when her herbs are suspected to affect the unborn.

Alas, one of the first persons encountered in this new landscape was dead, far up atop the Blackåsen Mountain. Maija also learns that children have gone missing. Rather than accept any of these tragedies as resulting from random acts of a predator, or a pack of them, such as wolves—as assumed by everyone including the man’s kin and the priest— Maija intuits more complicated explanations implicating other humans. Then the widow, also a suspected sorcerer, commits suicide, killing their two children. For over a year (throughout the course of the book), Maija perseveres with her theories of foul play. The older daughter Frederika matures during the year, and shows how similar she is to her mother, and to her maternal great-grandmother Jutta.

Indeed, the spirit of Jutta migrated with them, first communing with Maija as they always had, and then, without the mother’s awareness, with the equally alert young Frederika. Almost everyone is allowed a voice in Cecilia Ekbäck’s debut novel, including Jutta and nature itself. Frederika sensed the presence of her great-grandmother as she “smelled of sweat, of love, perhaps of spring onion.” Jutta advised that one should verbally greet the elements of nature; she also observed that “the older you got, the more present your past became...”

Everyone in this female lineage was already familiar with the Saami from the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia, so it was natural that they were comfortable helping and being helped by the Saami now, in this unforgivingly stingy environment. Early on, the father Paavo leaves to find employment in a coastal parish. The mother Maija will never whine, although she would have welcomed a letter, or a message of any sort. The cabin had not yet been, as we might say, weatherproofed; there were ice roses on the windows, and rooms could smell of “wet dog and sour wool.” So many tasks involved outdoor activities—desperate trapping of small game, getting to the barn to tend the few livestock creatures. These included some goats loaned by the Saami...the goats “bleating large question marks.” Firewood, too, had to be hauled indoors. Under these circumstances, even a shoddy cabin affords welcome shelter, from weather and an occasional marauding predator.

The younger daughter Dorotea...