‘It’s beautiful,’ I’d said to the park warden as I’d sat on the gently swaying suspension bridge, dangling my hook and line over the Ruunaa rapids, ‘and so peaceful. The whole area could have been designed by a Zen master; these rapids, the red tinged lakes, the islands of pines among the swamps, the animals…’

‘You’ve seen many?’ he’d asked enthusiastically.

‘A few eagles, a moose…’ a large fish had leapt from the white water, mocking my inability to catch it, ‘and some snakes…’

‘Any bears?’

‘None!’ I’d grumbled, ‘even though I leave food outside the lean-to every night!’

‘It’s not surprising, there’s only one sighting per summer nowadays. Perhaps, though, if you head north, on the Bear Trail…’

That had been days ago. Now I knelt gingerly, examining the damp earth at my feet.

‘They’re fresh!’ I thought prodding a series of paw-prints, ‘if I keep up a good pace and stay quiet, then just maybe…’

The uninhabited trail led me away from the sun streaked fields of violet heather and pine topped ridges of northern Ruunaa and deep into a cool, calm forest. The thick ranks of huge trunks, un-logged since the dawn of history, smelt musty and old. I rested with my back to one and gazed upwards. An owl blinked widely and blustered skyward, gripping a rodent between its talons. The similarities between the majestic trees and the great fluted columns of the Parthenon and other temples were too strong to ignore. Not surprising really since the tribes which so influenced both classical Rome and Greece (the Sabines, Oscians and Dorians) were animist invaders from the forests of Scandinavia. A black snake slithering nearby interrupted my musing; it squeezed under a protruding root and circled a hole before…a hole? No, a track. A bear track? The gloom made it impossible to be sure. I left the eternal temple of the trees and hurried onwards.

The battlefield of Anakainen appeared slowly; first a few mossy bomb craters among the rolling hills then lines of trenches supported by rotting timbers and laced with lengths of rusty barbed wire and finally, as I neared the lake, four seemingly endless lines of tank barriers, huge upright monolithic stones, sacrificial altars upon which numerous Russian vehicles had been ripped apart during the Winter War of 1940. Duckboards swept me along the lake’s lily packed boundaries past collapsed tunnels, dugouts and machine gun posts to a serenely placed lean-to where I could break camp, wade to waist level and, casting a line, attempt to catch my first Finnish fish. An osprey, a temporary pulse of electricity beating in a timeless landscape, glided metres from the shimmering surface, searching for dinner by the last of the days golden rays. A trout, perhaps linked to the bird by fate, surfaced at the wrong moment, disrupting the still waters. In the fractured reflections of sky and forest I saw beauty, the beauty that our modern Gods - supermodels and action heroes – are simply fleshy representations of, the beauty that our cultural ancestors, who gave us our concept of ‘if it’s symmetrical it’s attractive’, so admired in the nature of their Scandinavian homeland. I felt a tug on my line and began to reel in slowly. Perhaps my luck was about to change…