North of Tromsø

North of Tromsø, the road ended at a village called Kvaløysletta, which was not so much a village as an argument between houses about whether this was a reasonable place to live. The houses had apparently decided yes, though the wind disagreed, and the darkness disagreed for several months of the year, and the nearest cinema was forty minutes away, which Ingrid's daughter considered a human rights violation. Ingrid had moved here from Oslo eleven years ago. People in Oslo said "Why?" the way they said it when someone announced they were becoming a monk — not hostile, just baffled by a decision that seemed to involve the voluntary removal of everything they considered essential. "For the quiet," Ingrid said, which was true but incomplete. She had moved for the quiet the way a person moves to the desert for the sand. The sand is real, and it is there, and it is the reason you give, but the actual reason is something underneath the sand that you can't name without sounding ridiculous. She was a veterinarian. This, north of Tromsø, meant mostly reindeer. The Sámi herders brought their animals to her clinic — a converted garage attached to the house — and she treated infections and parasites and the occasional injury from fights between bulls during the rut, which were violent and stupid and reminded her of Saturday nights in Oslo. The herders were patient. Not with the animals. With her. She was Norwegian, not Sámi, and she had arrived knowing everything about veterinary medicine and nothing about reindeer, a combination that the herders found entertaining in a way they were too polite to express openly but not too polite to express through the careful raising of an eyebrow. She had learned. Eleven years of learning. Reindeer were not cattle. Reindeer were not horses. Reindeer were reindeer, which was a sentence that sounded obvious and was not. They were semi-wild animals that tolerated human contact in the way that a colleague tolerates an open-plan office — functionally, without enthusiasm, and with the clear understanding that they could leave at any time. Jonas, who had been herding for longer than Ingrid had been alive, brought a calf in December. It was limping. The right front leg, swollen at the joint. "How long?" Ingrid asked. "Three days." "Why didn't you bring it sooner?" Jonas looked at her. After eleven years, his eyebrow had become more of a verb than a feature. "It's a reindeer," he said. "Three days is soon." This was fair. Reindeer did not announce their ailments. They walked on broken legs until they couldn't, and then they stood still, and you had to know the difference between a reindeer that was standing still because it was resting and a reindeer that was standing still because it couldn't do anything else. Jonas knew the difference. Most of the herders knew. Ingrid was still learning. She examined the calf. Infection in the joint. Treatable. She cleaned it, drained it, gave the calf an antibiotic injection that the calf accepted with the resigned indifference of a creature that had been injected before and had decided that humans were inexplicable but occasionally useful. Jonas watched without comment. When she finished, he nodded. "Good," he said. This was, from Jonas, a review of approximately five stars. She had received a "good" maybe four times in eleven years. Once for a difficult calving. Once for treating a bull with a lacerated shoulder. Once for fixing his snowmobile, which was not part of her job description but which had seemed more urgent at the time than the distinction between veterinary medicine and small engine repair. He loaded the calf into the trailer. His truck was older than the calf and possibly older than the truck. It started on the third try, which Jonas accepted with the patience of a man whose relationship with machinery was based on low expectations and mutual stubbornness. Ingrid stood in the yard and watched him drive away. The sky was dark. It was two in the afternoon. The dark lasted from November to January, a darkness so complete that visitors from the south experienced it as a physical weight. Ingrid had felt this weight for the first two years. By the third, it had become a room she knew how to move through. By the eleventh, it was just December. Her daughter came out. "Was that Jonas?" "Yes." "His calf?" "Joint infection. He'll be fine." "Jonas or the calf?" "Both." Her daughter went back inside. Ingrid stayed in the yard for another minute. The northern lights were out, green and faint, draped across the sky like a thought that hadn't fully formed. They appeared several times a week this time of year and she still looked up every time, not because they were extraordinary — they were, but you got used to extraordinary — but because looking up was the thing you did when you lived in a place where the sky was doing something. She went inside. The house was warm. The clinic smelled of antiseptic and reindeer, which was a combination that would have alarmed her Oslo self and which her Kvaløysletta self registered as evidence that the day had gone well. She made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table. Outside, the dark pressed against the windows, and the wind negotiated with the houses, and somewhere north of here, in the vastness that had no name and no road and no cinema, a calf was walking on four legs instead of three, and that was enough.