"Today, the fifth of November, I will begin my report." "I will set everything down as precisely as I can." "Yet I don't even know if today really is the fifth of November." "Over the course of the past winter I've lost track of a few days." "I can't even say what day of the week it is." "Not that I think that is very important." "I will have to rely on a few meager notes, meager, because I never expected to write this report." "I'm afraid much of what I remember will be different from my real experiences" "All reports probably share this issue." "I'm not writing for the joy of writing." "So many things have happened to me that I must write, if I don't want to lose my mind." "There is no one here to think and care for me." "I am quite alone and I must try to get through the long, dark winter months." "I have taken on this task to keep me from staring into the gloom and being frightened." "Because I am frightened." "Fear creeps up on me from all sides, and I do not want to wait until it gets to me and overpowers me." "I shall write until darkness falls, and this new, unfamiliar work should make my mind tired, empty and drowsy." "I'm not afraid of morning, only of the long, gloomy afternoons." "I write on the backs of old calendars and on faded stationery." "The paper belonged to Hugo Rüttlinger, a great collector and hypochondriac." "This report should actually begin with Hugo." "If it weren't for his collecting and hypochondria," "I wouldn't be sitting here today." "I probably wouldn't even be alive." "It was 3:00 p.m. before we reached the hunting lodge." "After a snack, as Hugo was starting to nod off," "Luise suggested that they go back to the village again." "Come on!" "We won't stay long." "We'll go hunting very early in the morning." "The key is in the ignition if you want to meet us." " Come on!" " Yes." "Where is Lynx?" "Lynx?" "The dog stays here!" "That stupid dog never obeys." "Lynx?" "Lynx, come on!" "Heel!" "Come Lynx!" " Heel!" " Don't be so strict." "Lynx, if you don't want to go, then you stay up here." "Go back!" "Go!" "Go!" "At 9:00 I decided to go to bed." "I locked the door and took the key with me to my room." "Well, Lynx?" "What's going on?" "They must have stayed in the village." "I was very surprised." "Hugo couldn't stand the short beds at the inn, and he'd not have been so inconsiderate as to leave me alone in the lodge overnight." "I set off towards the village with Lynx." "I couldn't figure out what had happened." "I hardly noticed how cool and damp it was in the gorge, because I was brooding about what happened to the Rüttlingers." "Hugo might have had a heart attack." "As it happens so often with hypochondria, we had stopped taking his condition seriously." "I quickened my pace and sent Lynx on ahead." "I hadn't thought to put on my climbing boots and stumbled clumsily behind him across the sharp stones." "What is it?" "What do you have?" "Did you hurt yourself?" "Have you bitten on your tongue?" "Lynx come!" "Come on!" "Lynx, what is it?" "Come on!" "Then I heard a thumping sound and glanced around before realizing it was my own heartbeat thundering in my ears." "My heart had been frightened before I was even aware of it." "I tentatively tried again, and once more my hand rested on something like a windowpane." "Suddenly I realized what might have been unconsciously worrying me all along." "The road was entirely deserted." "Someone would have raised the alarm ages ago." "It would have been natural for the villagers to be curious and assemble by the wall." "Even if none of them had discovered the wall," "Hugo and Luise would surely have bumped into it." "Not seeing a single person puzzled me even more than the wall itself." "I got up three more times and convinced myself that here, three meters from me, there really was something invisible, smooth and cool blocking my path." "I thought it might be a hallucination but of course I knew that it was nothing of that sort." "I could have coped much more easily with momentary insanity than with this terrible, invisible thing." "The first little farmhouse, only a cottage, in fact, was just around the next corner." "At last I could see the cottage." "It lay very still in the sunlight..." "a peaceful, familiar scene." "Excuse me, I..." "Come on, Lynx." "Come." "We were in a bad situation, Lynx and I, and at the time we didn't know how bad it was." "But we weren't lost entirely, because we had each other." "And if they did, then not in little villages in the mountains, not in Austria and not in Europe." "I know how ridiculous that thought was, but I must admit that this is what I was thinking." "I woke up around 6:00, when the birds started singing." "Although I had barely moved, Lynx knew I was awake and came to my bed to greet me." "Suddenly it seemed quite impossible that I would survive that bright day in May." "At the same time I knew I had to survive it and that I had no means of escape." "I had to stay quite calm and simply get through it." "It wasn't the first time in my life that I had had to survive like this." "The less I resisted it, the more bearable it would be." "I no longer remember what I did that morning." "Maybe the hours that followed were so awful I've had to forget them, maybe I spent them in a state of numbness." "I can't remember." "I finally emerged from this state around 2:00 p.m." "when I walked through the gorge with Lynx." "This time I was better equipped." "I had Hugo's binoculars with me, too." "If the man at the well was dead, and there could be no doubt about that, then everyone in the valley was dead, and not only the people, but everything that had been live." "If that was death, it had come very quickly and gently, almost lovingly." "Perhaps it would have been wiser to have gone with Hugo and Luise to the village." "Lynx!" "What's up?" "Lynx, come here." "Come." "Come on." "It had dawned on me that the cow might well be a blessing, but it was also a burden." "An animal like that has to be fed and milked and needs someone there all the time." "I was the owner and the prisoner of a cow." "I thought about the cow as well, of course." "If I was especially lucky, she would be expecting a calf." "But I couldn't rely on that," "I could only hope my cow would give milk for as long as possible." "I still saw my situation as a transitory condition, at least that's what I tried to do." "I thought of a name for my cow and called her Bella." "She didn't actually need a name at all." "She was the only cow in the forest, perhaps the only cow in the region." "Until tomorrow, Bella." "10 days had passed, and nothing about my situation had changed." "For ten days I'd been numbing my mind with work, but the wall was still there, and nobody had come to get me." "I had no alternative but to face up to reality." "I could kill myself, or try and dig my way under the wall, which would probably have been a strenuous form of suicide." "Or I could stay here and try to stay alive." "I was no longer young enough to think seriously about suicide." "It was chiefly thoughts about Lynx and Bella that kept me from it." "Thanks to Hugo's attentiveness, I had provisions for the summer, a home, a lifetime's supply of wood and a cow." "I firmly resolved to wind up the clocks each day, and to cross off the days from the calendar." "At that time it seemed very important to me." "I was desperately trying to hold on to the remnants of civilized life." "I don't know why." "It was almost an inner compulsion." "Perhaps I was afraid that if I did otherwise" "I'd slowly cease to be a human being and soon start to crawl about, filthy and stinking, emitting incomprehensible sounds." "It wasn't that I was afraid of becoming an animal." "That wouldn't have been so bad, yet a human being can never become an animal, he plunges past an animal existence into the abyss." "I don't want this to happen to me." "Recently that's what has made me most afraid, and it is out of that fear that I write my report." "On the 30th of May, it rained a warm and fertile rain all day that forced me to stay inside or get drenched in a moment." "That evening the cat came into my house." "So there were four of us, the cow, the cat, Lynx and me." "Lynx was closest to me, and soon he wasn't just my dog, but my friend, my only friend in a world of troubles and loneliness." "It's okay, Lynx." "Bella kept me tied to the lodge, but I wanted to try to have a look around." "I remembered a path that led to a lodge higher up, and down from there into the opposite valley." "That was where I wanted to go." "Lynx!" "Heel!" "Wait, Lynx!" "So now I had examined those valleys" "I could reach without staying away for days at a time." "I could still climb up to the pasture and look out over the landscape, but I couldn't risk going any further into the long mountain range." "Of course somebody would find me if there was no wall over there." "I had to tell myself they'd surely have found me long since." "I could sit quietly at home and wait." "But I kept feeling compelled to do something to counteract uncertainty." "At about 1:00 p.m. I sat down to rest." "The forest lay hazily in the midday sun, and the warm scent from the pines floated up to me." "It was much quieter than in the moonlit night, as if the forest lay paralyzed by sleep beneath the yellow sun." "A bird of prey circled high in the blue sky," "Lynx slept, his ears twitching, and great silence descended on me like a bell jar." "I wished I could sit here forever, in the warmth, in the light, the dog at my feet and the bird circling above." "When I walked on I did so with deep regret, and on the way I slowly changed, becoming the only creature that didn't belong here, a human... troubled by chaotic thoughts, cracking branches with clumsy shoes," "engaged in the bloody business of hunting." "I realize that I never noted down days on which I'd shot game." "Now I remember I found it too revolting to write about." "It was bad enough that I had to do it at all." "I named the little cat Pearl, she was so white and rosy." "In a few weeks I realized that Pearl, an unkempt little thing, was on the point of becoming a beauty." "Pearl was a small miracle, but even then I knew she'd been born in the wrong place." "A long-haired white cat in the middle of the forest is condemned to an early death." "She had no chance at all." "Perhaps that's why I was so fond of her." "If I think back to the first summer, it is shadowed more by the concern for my animals than by my own desperate situation." "Catastrophe had relieved me of much responsibility, but I found, in time, that it placed a new burden upon me." "Once I was able to assess the situation a little," "I'd long since ceased being able to change anything about it." "I don't think my behavior was due to weakness or sentimentality." "I was simply following an instinct that had been implanted in me which I was powerless against if I didn't want to destroy myself." "I can't see what should be dishonorable about bearing the burden we're given, as all animals must." "In the end, we die as all animals do." "I don't even know what honor is." "Being born and dying is not a matter of honor." "It happens to all creatures and has no meaning beyond that." "On the 20th of July I started to harvest the hay." "It took me three weeks to harvest the meadow." "This wasn't only the weather's fault, but also that of my clumsiness and physical weakness." "I was overcome by a wave of despair, and, for the first time, I understood quite clearly the hard blow that had hit me." "I don't know what would have happened if responsibility for my animals hadn't forced me to do at least the most necessary things." "I don't like remembering that time." "It was 14 days before I could pull myself together and start living again." "Autumn was always my favorite season, although I never felt very well physically." "In the daytime I was tired yet wide awake, and at night I lay for hours in restless half-sleep with dreams that were more confusing and vivid than usual." "My autumnal malaise didn't spare me in the forest, either, but since I could hardly afford it, it took a less extreme form." "Perhaps I didn't have the time to notice it." "Lynx was very cheerful, in very high spirits though an outsider wouldn't have noticed." "He was, after all, cheerful almost all the time." "I never saw him stay sulky for more than three minutes." "He simply couldn't resist the urge to be cheerful." "And life in the forest was a constant temptation to him." "Sun, snow, wind, rain... everything was a cause for joy." "With Lynx nearby, I could never stay sad for long." "It was almost humbling that being with me made him so happy." "Perhaps man's delusions of grandeur come from dogs." "Sometimes I even imagined there must be something special about me that made Lynx almost keel over with joy at the sight of me." "Of course there was never anything special about me." "Lynx was, like all dogs, simply addicted to people." "Yes, you're my Lynx." "Yes." "Good Boy." "At times now, when I walk alone in the wintry forest," "I talk to Lynx as I did before." "I have no idea I'm doing it until something startles me and I fall silent." "I turn my head and catch the gleam of a reddish-brown coat." "But the path is empty, bare bushes and wet stones." "I'm not surprised that I still hear the dry branches cracking under the light tread of his feet." "What else would his little dog-soul haunt, if not my trail?" "He's a friendly ghost and I'm not afraid of him." "Lynx... beautiful, good dog." "My dog, it's probably my poor head that makes the sound of your footsteps, the gleam of your coat." "As long as I exist you'll follow my trail, hungry and yearning, as I myself, hungry and yearning, follow invisible trails." "Neither of us will ever capture our prey." "The first snow fell on the 27th of October." "It took only a few days for winter to set in." "Then came the warm wind and licked the young snow from the mountains." "It became disagreeably warm, and the wind hissed day and night around the lodge." "I slept badly and listened to the baying of stags down below for the rutting season." "Both cats were drawn outside into the warm, damp forest." "I lay awake and worried about Pearl." "The baying of the stags sounded sad, threatening and sometimes even desperate." "I only hoped the wind wouldn't last too long, and that winter would finally bring us peace." "The wind only held out for three days, just long enough to kill Pearl." "Pearl was buried, and the wind died down overnight, as if it had accomplished its task." "I haven't forgotten Pearl." "Her death was the first loss I suffered in the forest." "Once, it must have been in the first winter," "I saw a fox standing at the stream." "I could have shot it," "I had the gun with me, but I didn't." "Pearl had to die just because one of her ancestors was an over-bred Angora cat." "From the start she had been destined as a victim." "Was I to punish the beautiful, living fox for this?" "Pearl had suffered an injustice, but the same injustice had also befallen her victims." "Did I have to pass it on to the fox?" "The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me." "And I alone can show mercy." "Sometimes I wish I were not burdened by these decisions." "But I am a human, and I can only think and act like a human." "Only death will free me from that." "When I think of winter, I see the frost-covered fox at the stream." "A lonely, adult animal that follows its predestined path." "It seems that this image means something important to me, as if it's only a sign for something else." "But I can't recognize its meaning." "Yes, my Bella." "Yes, you are beautiful." "Bella had become more rounded, but I still didn't know if she was expecting a calf." "After all we have experienced," "Bella has become more than my cow." "She's a poor, patient sister, who bears her lot in life with more dignity than I do." "In the night I heard the cold creaking in the wood." "I'd put on a lot of extra logs, but was shivering under the blanket and couldn't sleep." "Sometimes a log would crackle, then fall silent." "I felt sick." "I knew it was because I had to keep on killing." "I tried to imagine what a person who enjoys killing might feel." "I couldn't." "The hair stood up on my arms, and my mouth grew dry with disgust." "You would probably need to be born to it." "I could bring myself to do it as quickly and skillfully as possible, but I would never get used to it." "I lay awake for ages in the crackling darkness, thinking about the little heart freezing to a clump of ice in the room above me." "After the great freeze, a wave of damp, warmer air set in." "Bella grew nervous, and I had to see to her 10 times a day." "On the 11th of January, Bella bled a little." "It was after her evening feed, and I decided to set myself up in the barn for the night." "Come on, Bella!" "Hard!" "Hard!" "Come on, Bella, come on!" "So much had happened recently..." "Pearl had been killed, a little bull had come into the world, deer had frozen to death, and the carnivores had had a rich winter." "I myself had had a lot of excitement, and now I was tired." "When I closed my eyes I saw snowy mountains on the horizon, white flakes dropping on my face in a big, bright silence." "I had no thoughts, no memories, there was only the big, silent, snowy light." "I knew this feeling could be dangerous for a lonely person, but I couldn't muster any strength to resist it." "Lynx didn't leave me in peace for long." "He kept coming to me and prodding me with his nose." "Sighing, I got up and set about my daily work." "Now Lynx, my friend and guardian, has ceased to be, and sometimes the desire to go into the white and painless silence is very great." "I must take care of myself and be stricter with myself than I was before." "Lynx was my sixth sense." "Now he's dead I feel like an amputee." "I miss something and will always miss it." "It isn't only that I miss him when I'm hunting and following trails and have to spend hours clambering after a deer I've shot." "It's not just that." "The worst thing is that without Lynx I feel truly alone." "The question of moving to the pasture occupied me more with every passing day." "The task struck me as terribly arduous, even if I were to take only necessities with me and live quite primitively in the pasture." "Once I realized that I'd settled on the move long ago, when I'd first seen the green pastures," "I grew calmer." "And on the 25th of May" "I took my departure from the hunting lodge." "The path was quite well preserved, but it was still four hours before our curious procession reached the pasture." "It was approaching midday." "I was completely exhausted, less from physical effort than from nervous tension." "Something new was beginning." "I didn't know what it would bring me, but my homesickness and anxiety about the future were fading." "I started to realize that the pasture is beautiful, strange and dangerous, and, like all strange things, filled with secret seductions." "It was a strange feeling to have an overview of a wide area unhindered by mountains and trees." "And it was not immediately comfortable and liberating." "My eyes had to get used to it, after a year in the narrow, deep, circular valley." "During my time in the pasture I wrote no diary entries." "I had taken the calendar with me and dutifully crossed out each day, but I didn't even enter important events such as the hay-harvest." "The memory of that time has remained fresh, however, and it isn't hard for me to write about it." "I shall never forge the fragrance of summer, the rainstorms and the evenings glittering with stars." "For the first time in my life I was calm, not content or happy, but calm." "It was as if a big hand had stopped the clock in my head." "Sometimes my thoughts tangle up, and it is as if the forest is growing roots in me and thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain." "Back then, in the second summer, I hadn't reached that point." "The boundaries were still firmly in place." "I find it hard to separate my old self from my new self when I write." "And I'm not sure that my new self isn't being slowly absorbed into some greater whole." "But even then the transformation was starting." "It was the pasture's fault." "It was almost impossible, in the buzzing stillness of the meadow, beneath the big sky, to remain a single, separate self, a small, blind, independent life that didn't want to integrate into a greater community." "Once my major source of pride was to lead such a life, but in the pasture it suddenly struck me as pathetic and absurd, an over-inflated nothing." "On the 16th of October, after my return from the pasture," "I began to keep my diary again." "For almost all of October the weather was fine." "I now made the most of the promising climate and doubled my wood supply." "On All Saints' Day it suddenly grew warm, and I knew that this could only herald winter." "On the 10th of December I find a strange entry," ""Time is passing so quickly."" "I can't remember writing it." "I don't know what happened on that 10th of December that led me to write, beneath "New-fallen snow" and "Fetched hay,"" ""Time is passing so quickly."" "Was time passing especially fast back then?" "I can't remember or give an account of it." "And it isn't true." "Time only seemed to be passing quickly to me." "I think time stands quite still and I move around in it, sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate." "I do something, things race ahead, and I forget time." "And then, quite suddenly, it surrounds me again." "I shall have to get used to it, its indifference and omnipresence." "Since Lynx died I feel this clearly." "I sit at the table and time stands still." "I can't see it, smell it or hear it, but it surrounds me on all sides, its silence and motionlessness is terrible." "At heart these thoughts are quite meaningless." "I pity animals, and I pity people, because they're thrown into this life without being consulted." "Maybe people are more deserving of pity, as they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things." "It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable." "And yet, life could have been lived differently." "There is no impulse more reasonable than love." "It makes life more bearable for loving and loved one." "We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life." "For an endless army of the dead, mankind's only chance has vanished forever." "I keep thinking about that." "I can't understand why we had to take the wrong path." "I only know it's too late." "This autumn a white crow appeared." "It flies a little behind the others and settles alone on a tree avoided by its companions." "I can't understand why the other crows don't like it." "I think it's an especially beautiful bird, but it's repugnant to the others." "A miserable absurdity that shouldn't exist, a white crow." "It sits there until the great flock has flown away, and then I bring it a little food." "It can't know why it's been ostracized, that's the only life it knows." "It will always be an outcast and so alone that it is less afraid of people than its black brethren." "Every day I wait for the white crow and call to it, and it looks at me attentively with its reddish eyes." "I can do very little for it." "Perhaps my scraps are prolonging a life that shouldn't be prolonged." "But I want the white crow to live, and sometimes I dream there's another one in the forest and that they will find each other." "I don't believe it will happen, I just wish it dearly." "Gradually I began to disengage from my past and grow into a new order." "It was May by the time the weather really improved." "Two years had passed in the forest." "It struck me that now I hardly ever thought that someone might find me at last." "I decided to set off soon for the alpine pasture." "By the beginning of June I'd managed to get used to the pasture, but it was never the same as the previous year." "That first summer there was gone irrevocably, and I didn't want a weaker version of it, so I kept myself from succumbing once more to the old magic." "But the pasture didn't make it hard for me." "It had closed itself off and showed me an unfamiliar face." "I often sat, as I'd done a year before, on the bench by the house looking out over the meadow." "It hadn't changed from before, and it smelled just as sweet, but I didn't go into the old raptures again." "I'd stopped making longer expeditions, since I'd drawn up my boundaries the previous summer." "I no longer cared where the wall went." "That summer I quite forgot that Lynx was a dog and I a human." "I knew it, but it had lost any distinctive meaning." "Lynx too had changed." "Now he had so much of my attention, he had grown calmer and didn't seem constantly afraid" "that I might vanish into thin air as soon as he went off for five minutes." "Thinking about it today," "I believe that was the only big fear in his dog's life, being abandoned, on his own." "I too had learned a lot more and understood almost all his movements and sounds." "Now, at last, there was a silent understanding between us." "I carried Lynx to the hut and laid him on the bench." "He'd suddenly grown small and light." "And then, as if from a great distance, I heard Bella roaring." "She was beside herself with fear." "I tried to calm her down." "Only then did I remember the man." "I knew he must be dead." "He had been such a big target that I couldn't have missed." "I was glad he was dead, it would have been hard for me to kill an injured person." "Yet I couldn't have left him alive." "Or maybe I could, I don't know." "I didn't want to leave him in the meadow not beside the dead bull, in the virgin grass." "So I picked him up by the legs and dragged him to the lookout point." "There, where the rocks fall steeply to the scree-slope and alpine roses blossom in June," "I let him roll down the hill." "I dug a grave for Lynx in the evening." "I dug the hole deep, laid Lynx into it, covered him with earth and stamped the grass down over it." "And then I was very tired, more tired than ever before." "Then I sat down on the bench and waited for the long night." "It was a bright, starlit night, and the wind drifted down coldly from the cliffs." "But I was colder than the wind and didn't feel the chill." "At first light I got up and left the pasture with Bella." "The next day I resumed my usual work." "October came and I harvested potatoes and fruit." "The straw needed cutting, but that took only a week, and finally, physically beaten and broken," "I stopped my pointless escape attempts and confronted my thoughts." "Nothing at all came of it." "I would like to know why the stranger killed my animals." "I shall never find out and perhaps it is better that way." "Now I am quite calm." "I can see a little further ahead." "I can see that this is not yet the end." "Everything goes on." "Bull, Pearl and Lynx will never exist again, but something new is coming, and I can't avoid that." "The memories, the grief and the fear will remain, and the hard work, for as long as I live." "Today, on the 25th of February," "I shall end my report." "There isn't a single sheet of paper left." "It's now around 5:00 in the evening, and already so light that I can write without the lamp." "The crows have risen and circle screeching over the forest." "When they are out of sight" "I will go to the clearing and feed the white crow." "It is waiting there for me."