Wolves of Karelia

Simo Häyhä, whose life this story imaginatively elaborates on, was a renowned sniper during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. The fighting, which began in November 1939 and ended in a Russian victory in mid-March, was fiercest along Finland’s eastern border, in Karelia.

Distance

“Do you see?” my father said.

I breathed in and out, the air shallow in my chest. I was 10. On the way back from his dawn hunt, my father had sliced the tip off a reindeer antler and placed it somewhere in the array of space and field behind our cabin. My job was to find it. We were on our stomachs in the snow, under the stand of trees where, in summer, our horse Teemu lowered his gray face in the shade. We’d been here for two hours, waiting while I looked and looked for the tip, which would be our target.

“Yes?” my father said.

I nodded.

“Where?”

“The fang,” I said. This was the shattered birch trunk that had split the year before last in a storm and now stood, jagged and lonely, at the edge of the far field. “Well, five steps before it.”

“How far from our position?” he said. He would aim only and exactly as I instructed. Such was his test.

“One hundred forty-eight meters,” I said.

My father turned his round, dull eyes to me. “You’re sure?”

I nodded.

“Go mark it, then,” he said, and moved the rifle from where it lay between us.

Progress was slow in the snow. As I approached the fang, the sun hit the ice covering the old silver wood and made it sharp with light. I turned and faced the place I knew my father was, though you’d never be able to see him, not if you looked for a whole month. I counted five steps back toward him and stopped.

The shot rang like a bell in the frozen clearing that pocketed the cabin and the shed and our two fields. The spray of ice shards hit my face so hard that I fell backwards, and I stared at the place where the bullet had obliterated the tiny piece of antler, poking maybe five centimeters above the snow, just between my feet. If I’d said 149 meters, or taken six steps instead of five, my father’s round would’ve passed through my stomach.

When I got back to the cabin, he was already inside, the rifle half-disassembled.

“One hundred forty-eight meters,” he said, and glanced at me before going back to wiping the bolt, which was as close as he ever got to good cheer. Then he said what he always said. “You’re only wrong once, Simuna.”

The White Death

The Russians, as was their wont, had their own name for me, the White Death. My men called me the Magic Shooter, which I also hated. I am Simo Häyhä, corporal of the Sixth Battalion, Regiment 34; previously of Bicycle Battalions 1 (Third Company) and 2 (First Company); previously of the Civil Guard volunteers, all in service to the glorious and proud Finnish cause. Or