On some clear, cruel, frosty winter night he would perhaps stand on guard beside a soft-eyed cow and a calf that was his own flesh and blood. Then Venus, queen of the starry heavens, would glow large and bright above Ré Mountains, lending a pale shimmer to the white snow. The Aurora Borealis would shine bright and strange, then the breath from the elks’ nostrils would smoke in the night.
When once in a while Rauten lay on Black Mountain looking out across the forest, all the happenings of which his life was so rich would stir within him. Probably he did not remember, not live his reminiscences once more in his mind. We do not know about that. But each remarkable incident had set its mark in him in the shadowy life of his soul. They had sharpened his instincts, enriched his experience. There were incidents at all times of the year, in all changing lights of day and night, in sunny heat and in frosty weather—some concerning animals, some human beings.
But he grew solitary and still more solitary as age came on. He sought places where man but rarely made spots on the earth with his shoes of animals’ hide, where the steel tooth of the axe but rarely gnawed a tree, where old times were still dreaming.
For the Ré Valley woods began to be open. Foresters’ huts grew out of the earth, creating unrest. Old trees died, changed their existence, and left Ré Valley. Their stumps stayed, time and weather eating them as ravens eat carrion.
Many a dog had chased Rauten, but their muzzles grew grey and their eyes blue, and one day the barrel of a gun blew out their lives. And still Rauten walked across Black Mountains.
He also aged; he aged rapidly when Bjönn died. For after that time he lost his love of the woods somehow, and then he seemed to shrink within himself.
Soon he was no longer a wild cat, he became a tame, domestic cat. No more his fire shone at the capercailzie’s play in the blue spring evenings when the song thrush was silent in the tree-tops and flew away for the night. A sleepy petroleum lamp shone dully in Lynx Hut, where the air was not light and pure as drifted snow, but stank of leather and old footwear.
He felt as if something had died within him. His mind was like an everlasting rainy day, monotonous, without a gleam of sun. No more tumults, only silence and death, his mind was luke-warm like marsh water.