He would come to see me every other day from then on and
I would follow him, tagging along as he wandered through a
lost and forgotten world, past traces of buildings hidden
between the trees or withering away in the undergrowth,
serving me puzzles and puns that made him laugh as we
followed old roads that ended abruptly and forced us to
wade through rivers and marshlands. We were the stewards
of the forest and a world that needed our protection from
outsiders that would descend upon us from time to time, to
disrupt and pollute and dislodge us from our peaceful ways.
We patrolled the highlands and the valleys on routes that I
came to know as the back of my hand while the old man told
me how to cut through the land unnoticed from prying eyes
that hovered above or followed behind and he told me
stories of the old world and small anecdotes about the huts
and the people who had built them and lived in them before
us, tales about their tietäjä who had lived in one of them or
rather the-One-who-knew he had said, as if he was telling a
joke, leaving a sense of sadness in the air between us. She
had pulled him into this world he told me later, him as well
as all the others he knew and she had kept him alive with
her skills and her knowledge of plants and herbs and every
time she had nursed him or someone else back to health
she had refused their gratitudes and told them that in one
way or another they had all saved themselves.
He would tell me about the forest that we walked through
and of the rivers that we followed and the pools we passed
on our way, where he had caught his first trout a lifetime
ago. Later we would go back there to fish together but only
after he had taught me how to tie my own flies.

«Soft hackles are the only flies you need when fishing trout
in a river like this», he told me before showing me how to tie
one with colors of red and bronze and a single silver rib to
keep it all together.
He showed me how I should wade out into the middle of the
river before casting up stream, short and precise and then a
few steps before casting again, always upstream, leaving
the imitation to the water for a few feet before pulling it back,
one short tug at a time, so that the hackle would fold around
the colours then letting it rest in the water for an instance,
making the fly pulsate in the water to trigger an attack.
Sometimes the surface would explode almost before the fly
touched down and sometimes the fish would bite while I
pulled the fly back in and I can still feel it in my hands, that
pull on the rod when the fish strikes and I can still remember
the feeling after spotting a fish thats feeding in the stream
and then catching it moments later.
And I remember thinking that we looked like a pair of
herons, walking up stream in the shallow river, searching for
frogs and fish to eat, wondering if the herons would ever feel
like anything other then herons.
And then he told me about the eight starred cabin and that it
had belonged to the No-Lords of the Mountains, a name that
he bore with pride even though it had meant to mock him
and added that he would have been glad to know that his
old hut was offering shelter to someone again, no matter
how run down it might have become. He always laughed
when he spoke of the No-lords and his constant defiance
against anyone he deemed a threat to his world.
«You know, we could have been sitting on the shore of a
great lake if it wasn’t for him, all that you see before you
could have been hidden beneath thousands of cubics of

water», he said one evening as we sat by the kitchen table,
looking out the window.