The Girl at the Farm

They were camped in the field beside the station, in the small tent Nana Adwoa had insisted on bringing despite Kwame's protests that a tent was unnecessary suffering when hotels existed, and in the morning, which was bright and cool with a wind off the mountains, a girl appeared on the track.

She was about Kwame's age, perhaps slightly younger, with the practical clothing and easy outdoor movement of someone who had grown up here. She stopped when she saw the tent and looked at it with frank curiosity rather than concern.

"Hei," she said.

"Hello," said Kwame.

She switched to English without difficulty. "Are you staying here? At the old station?"

"Camping beside it," said Kwame. "My grandmother is inside."

The girl looked at the station building. "I know this station," she said. "My family's farm is three kilometres south. We have passed it many times." She looked at Kwame with the direct assessment he was beginning to think was a specifically Norwegian quality. "Why are you here?"

Kwame explained, briefly: his grandmother's connection to the station, the key, the ledger, the plan for today.

The girl listened carefully. "The old narrow-gauge railway," she said, when he mentioned it, and something in her expression shifted. "I know about that line. Or I know it exists. I have never been up to it."

"Would you like to come?" Kwame said, because it seemed obvious to ask and because, if he was honest, the prospect of navigating unfamiliar Norwegian mountain terrain was more comfortable with a local person along.

She considered this for a moment with the same directness she applied to everything. "My name is Ingrid Solberg," she said. "I will come. Let me tell my father."

She disappeared back up the track and returned twenty minutes later in slightly more serious outdoor clothing with a rucksack on her back and a phone in her pocket. She told them, as they set out, that she knew the birch forest to the north because she had been through it twice on ski tours in winter, though she had never been to the far side of it where the mountains began.

Nana Adwoa was pleased by Ingrid's presence in the particular way of someone who has been quietly hoping for reinforcements. They walked together at the front, the grandmother and the local girl, talking in a mixture of Norwegian and English, and Kwame walked behind them and listened and looked at the landscape.

The birch forest was extraordinary. The trees were old and large, their white trunks spaced widely in the way of northern birch forest, and the ground between them was covered in a deep, springy layer of moss and low bilberry plants whose leaves were turning red at the edges in advance of the coming autumn. The light filtered through the leaves in a shifting, greenish gold.

A stream ran somewhere to the west. The mountains were ahead, close enough now to see the detail of their lower slopes: scree and birch giving way to bare rock and, near the summits, the remnant patches of snow that stayed all year.

Nana Adwoa navigated by the annotated map, which she carried folded in one hand, and by memory. "Harald wrote that the access point was at a large boulder, split in two, at the edge of the forest where the slope begins," she said. "And that from the boulder there was a path used by the mine workers, going north-east up the slope."

They found the boulder forty minutes into the forest. It was enormous, the size of a small house, split cleanly down the middle by some ancient geological event, the two halves separated by a gap of about a metre. And beyond it, at the edge of the trees, running uphill across the open slope, just barely visible as two parallel lines of discolouration in the vegetation, were the rails.

Kwame stopped and looked at them.

They were there. They were actually still there, after ninety years: narrow-gauge rails, perhaps sixty centimetres apart, lying in the heather and grass, rusted to the colour of the surrounding earth but unmistakable once you knew what you were looking at. The wooden sleepers were mostly gone, rotted to an earthy mulch that still showed the regular spacing. But the rails themselves, spiked to the rock at intervals rather than to sleepers, were intact, running uphill in a gentle curve and disappearing over the first rise.

Ingrid crouched and touched one of the rails. "Norsk Jernverk markings," she said, examining a faint stamp in the metal. "Norwegian Ironworks. That would be consistent with a 1920s Norwegian industrial railway."

Nana Adwoa looked at the rails with an expression Kwame could not quite read. "I have been an engineer for forty years," she said quietly, "and I have never seen anything quite like this. An entire railway line in the open, untouched."

"Because there is nothing up here that needs anyone to come," said Ingrid. "No farms, no forestry, no roads. Nobody had any reason to remove it and nobody had any reason to visit."

"Until now," said Kwame.

They followed the rails uphill.