Wandering

Wandering

Entry #1

30th of June

Location: Lake Guordesloppal, on the border of Stora Sjöfallet NP and Sarek NP (67˚24'00N 18˚05'56E, 750m ASL)

Jokkmokk municipality, Norrbotten, Sweden

I noted the snow-crested peak of Sarvatjåkkå, somewhat visible in the distant southwest as I reeled my line in. We'd gotten a decent haul – it had definitely been worth the somewhat roundabout entry route we'd taken, since our initial supply load had been considerably lighter than last year. On our previous expedition – okay, I'm being pretty precocious here, but hey – we'd simply brought way too much stuff.

“That’s gotta be enough for now, I think.” I kept my eyes on the line to make sure it didn’t tangle, but my words were directed at the woman sitting with her own line still in the water a few meters to the side. “There’s not much use packing light to begin with if we’re just going to fill it all up as we go. Besides, I’m pretty sure fishing here is sort of skirting the law pretty damn close. Reel up, Freja.”

My sister gave me a doubtful glance, before returning her eyes to her line. “Since when did you ever give two shits about the law, Martin?” She did start reeling in, though. Most likely, the thought had occurred to her as well.

I gave a chuckle in reply as I wound up the string around the little handle it was attached to, fastening the little package with the hook and sinker. “That’s not what I’m worried about. What Iam worried about is mom reading someone’s log when we get back home. Imagine the looks of that in the media. ‘EPA department head sponsors fishing in national parks!’ I mean, not that she’d do that, but still.”

Freja simply rolled her eyes at this as she finished wrapping up her own bundle of fishing gear, and we started back toward our bags and the rest of the group. We were done with the reels now, and they’d be spending the rest of the expedition safely tucked in with the rest of our equipment. Fishing in regulated waters bordering two national parks might be just about passable in the gray morals of reality, but doing so inside would just be plain stupid. Blatantly illegal, as well, but that’s largely beside the point.

The haul was in the middle of being sliced up and sizzled for lunch. The rest of our eight-man team were huddled around our pair of trangias in a tight circle. Not that it was cold in any way – even this far north, with the sun up it usually stays warm unless it’s windy – more than likely they were just as hungry as me and Freja. Despite our reasonably light packs, the ten-kilometer cross country leg had taken a fair toll on our stomachs, and we had just as far to go in the afternoon. Except that we’d now be heading straight south, midnight sun right in our faces all the way, instead of northwest with a small mountain in the way of its gods-be-damned light. The day was far from over, yet; and we’d planned the expedition to last a week and some, well more than enough to have your face burnt to flaking red crisps if you weren’t careful.

Then again, glaring sun is usually the better alternative by far. Sarek is infamous for its harsh weather, and frankly, if we’d brought enough equipment to weather the worst storms it could possibly throw at us, we wouldn’t even have made it to the train station.

So now we were barreling on through the wilderness, hoping and praying that the weather gods would see fit to not drop the sky over our heads before we at least made it all the way in. After all, going back is just a matter of keeping your legs going – there's not exactly any issue of morale when all you're doing is going back to civilization. Goingin, you always have the option of turning back. Which is good if you find yourself facing 25m/s stormwinds and hammering rain on the first day, because advancing in those conditions, up here? Bloody stupid, that'd be. Not to mention that the jokks would all flood and stop you from getting anywhere at all.

Fortunately the weather luck from last year seemed to be keeping up still. It was the third day of our expedition, and we had yet to be rained on, stormed on, have our tents blown away while we were sleeping, or get our camp overrun by reindeer – which does actually happen sometimes, with very little benefit to either party of the conflict.

About an hour later, we were once again preparing to depart. Or, the others were, at least – I’d been all ready since five minutes after I finished eating. Hoisting my backpack, I went to scout ahead a bit.

I’m fairly certain that this decision was what dragged me into this whole mess.

While surveying the area to the southwest, I caught a glimpse of something in the sky, moving about in the corner of my eye. I didn’t pay it much heed at first, but it persisted, so after a few seconds I turned around to give it a look.

It was a cloud. White and fluffy, lazily drifting across the sky and covering the peak of Ähpar, to the south. A quite ordinary cumulus cloud – if you ignored the shining wisp of violet light swirling around it. I stared at the light for a few moments, waiting for my mind to stop playing games with my eyes, but when it finally disappeared it took the cloud with it. Suddenly, Ähpar’s jagged peak was fully visible, and the mysterious cloud appeared right above me.

I’m imagining this was probably not too obvious to anyone not actually watching – at least that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn from the fact that nobody mentioned anything about it, or were in the kind of brooding, mysterious mood people have when trying to hide something. To my eyes, though, it was easy to realize that this was no mere trick of the light – much despite the fact that it didn’t make a single sound.

A second later, the cloud parted. In an instant, the cloud went from solid to split, and for a few moments a shining band of scintillating colors was visible, connecting the sky with the mountain across the lake, piercing upwards through the now parted cloud. A second or two after the beam disappeared, the cloud formation blinkedagain, vanishing from my field of vision.

I spent two minutes just standing there, my eyes darting frantically, half trying to convince myself that I’d had a sunstroke or something that could explain what I’d seen, and half daring any of the other clouds to start screwing with the laws of nature. Then I shook down the building sense of panic in my mind and went back to the others; assuring myself, after none of them mentioned anything about teleporting clouds, that whatever I’d seen hadn’t been real.

I convinced myself that since we were all pretty tired, and since I've had plenty of freak events happen to me in the past that I couldn't risk talking about without submitting myself to public ridicule, it was most likely in my best interest not to tell anyone else about this incident either.

In hindsight, that was not the best decision I've made in my life.

I spent the rest of the day in a glum mood, not talking too much with anyone. I kept scouting ahead, staying a couple hundred meters in front most of the time, looking for crossings whenever we came upon a jokk and guiding the party away from the masses of dense undergrowth that crowd around the smaller streams. I had my headphones on almost all the time, trying to clear my worries with the sound of heavy metal rumbling in my ears, and kept to myself whenever we stopped, absentmindedly chewing down mouthfuls of peanuts with both eyes fixed on the distant sky.

At 21:00 sharp we crossed the Guhkesvágge bridge, entering Sarek proper. The cloud cover was nonexistent, having cleared out rather suddenly a few hours before; thus, we were rather eager to make camp and get out of the sun. Luckily the Skanátjåhkkå and Niendotjåhkkå mountains shield this part of the valley from sunlight during most of the “night” – while the midnight sun is never very strong, it still makes sleeping a lot harder if you can't get into cover properly.

We split up in order to search for a good campsite south of the bridge. Most of the others opted to fan out northwest, in an attempt to find the campsite we've used last year. For some reason, I decided to go southwest, following the small flows of water coming down from Vuojnesvárásj.

Looking back, there probably wasn't much I could've done about the situation at that point, but I still feel like I missed out on something. I don't know why, really. I guess it's one of those tiny subconscious things that keep nagging you for reasons you can never understand, until the day they mysteriously vanish and leave you wondering what it was all about in the first place.

Whatever the case, I felt like I reached the peak of Vuojnesvárásj far faster than I should have. After all, the distance from the bridge to the peak is 1,6 km, with an ascent of 200m – and that's the direct route, which would entail climbing up a pretty damn rough patch of rock with a full load on your back. Either way, it's not a distance you cover without putting your mind to it. I definitely hadn't planned on going the full way up, but I decided to take my camera up to take some pictures of the Ähpar valley on the other side of the peak. I walked the short distance that remained until I was at the top–

I don't really have any words to describe what I felt here. Ähpar was, simply put, gone. In its place was an expanse of open plainlands – far, far down.

Throwing a quick look at where I'd come from, the landscape was vaguely familiar – but there was definitely no bridge in sight, and the river, while flowing in roughly the same direction, was much further away than I'd expected. Fifteen kilometers, at least – about the distance we'd covered today. More to the point, this was definitely not a minor sub-peak with a prominence of 200 meters. This was an alp, true and true, and the distance down was way more than I could hope to accurately estimate just using my eyes. At least a kilometer. Probably more.

Unless there's been some stupidly stealthy terraforming going on without my noticing, I can say for certain there's no mountain this high in all of Sweden. Or the rest of Scandinavia, for that part. I know as much from personal experience; while I haven't climbed either Galdhöpiggen or Kebnekaise, the tallest mountains in Norway and Sweden respectively, I have done both Glittertind and Spijkka, who are both pretty close competitors. Bottom line, there's nothing over 2500 meters. I've been up the Swiss alps in summer, though – and if anything, this was even bigger.

All in all, I wasextremely lost. Which is the very last thing you want to be in the middle of absolute wilderness of northern Sweden. Or absolute wilderness anywhere, for that part.

What I could tell, though, was that unless my compass was lying to me I was still about as far north as I had been – the sun was still in the exact same position, though the lack of mountain cover had it peering out from a small patch of clouds in the far southwest. Unless I had randomly been warped to the southern hemisphere, it meant that at least my clock was still telling time correctly. Small blessings, maybe, but I take what I can get.

Getting a last look around, I noticed something moving down in the valley that separated this mountain from its still-higher neighbor to the northwest, the peak I'd thought was Vuojnestjåhkkå. Fumbling around in my pack for a few seconds, I retrieved my binoculars to get a closer look.

Naturally the amount of clarity I could get with a pair of pretty lackluster binoculars from a mountaintop was pretty small – even if the valley was higher up than the plains to the east. However, I could confirm what I'd seen.Something was moving down there, and whatever they were, there was a great, big mass of them. As far as I knew, there was only one kind of herd animal up in these latitudes – one that, by chance, also happened to produce one of the most delicious kinds of meat there is.

Reindeer.

I was in full-on survival mode now, and damn any angry Sami who were going to try coming after me for killing his livestock. Besides, I already knew I wasn't in Sápmi anymore anyway, and to the best of my knowledge, they're the only reindeer-herders left in the world. For all purposes, this meant that whatever was down there was free game.

I started scrambling down the mountainside as fast as I could manage, while securing one of my bigger knives to the end of my trusty birch walking stick to use as a spear. Call me a cheater, but hey – at least I managed to get totally lost in the wilderness with a full set of survival gear on my back, which is far better than most.

It seemed mother nature had sensed my plight. Much of my descent was composed of flat, snow-covered slopes that I could simply skate down, despite my lack of skiing gear. The last little leg of my run was a tight little pass, and while I was a little winded by this point, it was steep and well covered in pristine white, with a rather discreet exit. I'd have a running charge down a mountain at more than full speed,and an ambush all at the same time. I licked my lips as I struggled to keep my balance in the last turn – there's areason you usually wear skis to ski down mountains, after all – but despite my being distracted by the tantalizing prospect of a feastly carnivore dream buffet, I managed to stand through it without losing speed. Like a hoplite with a jetpack, I raised my makeshift spear as my skid turned into a heavy run when the snow ran out under my feet. A second later, I shot out from behind a boulder into the massive, jet-black herd, spear first.

The plan was, admittedly, not the best one, but it wasn't really ridiculously bad either. For one of those spur-of-the-moment things, it was a pretty solid scheme to acquire some much-needed provisions. Hell knows I can't set traps for shit, and foraging at 67°N is pretty damn tough, I tell you.

The only major flaw in my plan was, of course, that it wasn't really applicable to creatures that could fly.

I sure as hell took them by surprise – I missed the first one I came across simply because I was going too fast to realize it was even there before I was already past it. It let out a loud yelp, and started flapping its fleshy green wings like a butterfly gone mad. If the others' progress on the same avenue were any indication, the bloody thing was probably up in the air second after I was past it. Damn, they got up fast!

It was hard to get a good look at them in the total chaos I'd spread around me, but they were sure as hell nothing like reindeer. They hissed like snakes and looked like enormous mutated insects on four legs. For some incomprehensible reason they were also riddled with tiny little holes all over their bodies – like giant pieces of swiss cheese. Except that this swiss cheese was all black, and skittering with life.

Before too long, almost all of the creatures had gotten up in the air. Adrenaline was probably the only thing keeping me going at this point – running full speed down a mountain to hunt for food kind of gets to your head. If not for that, I should've realized that these were not the easy prey animals I'd been looking for.

There was, though, one group of slightly larger individuals that had remained on the ground, bracing themselves against my oncoming assault. I was closing in on them, even though most of my initial charge had lost its momentum and I was now mostly jogging. Then–

“What is the meaning of thisinsolence!? Seize this creature at once!”

Then I smashed face-first into a wall of black swiss cheese, sending my spear flying in a wide arc to the side.

If the surprised yelp that came from the creature I'd just rammed into was any clue, it hadn't been intent on actually getting in my path. If the voice that I'd heard the moment before the crash was any clue (and not just a hallucination or something), it was also most definitely a female – and a stuck-up as hell one, at that.

As to why and how the hell she was speaking English, well, your guess is as good as mine, but the fact that the whole “breaching the communications barrier” part of meeting a sentient alien species had been skipped over wasn't something I was going to complain about at the moment. Seeing as I had, you know, just charged in arms blazing intent on eating them.

As far as a knife tied to a stick could be “blazing”, anyway...

Several moments passed with me lying on the ground on top of the alien, trying to gather my addled wits best I could. Combined with my hunger, the fact that I was stuck with my face in what had bore an unmistakable likeness to swiss cheese – aside from the fact that it was stirring slightly, giving off brief, weak moans of pain every few seconds or so – distracted me considerably from this endeavor. In the end, I just couldn't help myself. I stuck my tongue out and wet the surface a bit, before opening my mouth and taking a careful nibble of that cheese.

Three things happened at once. First of all, the piece of her flesh that I'd enclosed with my teeth came loose, slipping into my mouth. Second, the taste hit me – I'd been half expecting cheese, or even more likely some kind of sane meaty variant, but this was what,CITRUS? – like a fighter jet hitting a flock of geese while taking off.

Hard. Catastrophically hard.

Third, the inevitable reaction of someone taking abite of you came from below, as the creature I'd tackled gave a frightened cry and scrambled away from me, wings and legs in one big incoherent mess. “Wha- wha- wha-a-AT ARE YOU D-D-DOING!? GET IT AWAY FROM ME!”

As I briefly realized that I was now surrounded on every side by an enormous, buzzing mass of smaller versions of her, I gave her a completely straight face and promptly stated:

“Yeah, you don't taste anything like swiss cheese at all, do you? I mean, is your blood lemons or something?”

She gaped. I realized she probably hadn't expected me to be able to speak. Well, that makes two of us.

Seconds later she shook her head, and on her face incredulous surprise changed to determination. It was a bit eerie how easily I could read her emotions, but her facial features weren't actually too far from most mammals'. She got to her feet – four sleek, hole-riddled shafts of black, somewhat like a lizard's with the slight metallic sheen they had to them – and advanced toward me. I started to feel slightly worried as the huge swarm around me drew ever closer along with her, but the moment the thought crossed my mind their slow advance came to a halt, and they started backing away slowly – leaving me alone face-to-face with what was evidently their leader.

I hoped for all my nonexistent luck that her first attempt at contact would not be reciprocation in kind and try to eat me back. All I could see in her eyes, though, was curiosity – and the scrutiny they put me under had me stressed indeed.

Well,” she said as she cocked her head to the side slightly, “I've certainly never seen one likeyou before...”