T WAS a bulldozer: an enormous, infernal, bright yellow machine that thundered and roared and floundered through the woods with clanging jaws. The men from the village scrambled on and around it like hysterical ants, trying to keep it headed in the right direction. “Jesus Christ!” Sophia shrieked without hearing what she said. She ran behind a rock with the milk can in one hand and watched the machine pluck up huge boulders that had lain in their moss for a thousand years, but now they just rose in the air and were tossed to one side, and there was a terrible cracking and splintering as pine trees gave way and were ripped from the ground with torn and broken roots. “Jesus, help! There go the woods!”

Sophia was trampling down the moss and shaking from head to foot in dread and rapture. There went a bird-cherry tree without a sound. It sank like a sigh, and up came shiny black earth, and the bulldozer took a new hold and bellowed on. The men shouted to each other nervously, which was no wonder since they were renting the machine, and it would cost them over a hundred marks an hour, including the trip from town and back. The machine was headed for the water, that was clear. It paid no attention to the path but pushed right on as straight as a herd of lemmings, for it was building a road to the sea.

It wouldn’t be any fun to be an ant now, Sophia thought. A machine can do anything it wants! She went and collected the milk and the mail and walked back again, not on the path but on the broad, unprecedented road, which was suddenly very quiet. It was bordered on both sides by a sprawling chaos, as if huge hands had pressed back the forest, bent it and folded it like some soft grass that would never rise up again. The splintered white trunks of the trees were running with pitch, and farther from the road there was an immovable green mass; not a single branch and not one leaf was free to move in the wind. It was like walking between stone walls. The stones were drying and the soil that clung to them was turning gray. There were large gray patches on the new road, too. Severed roots stuck up everywhere. In places they formed a thin lacework filled with tiny clumps of earth that trembled on invisible wires as they dried in the sun. It was an altered landscape—breathless, like the silence after an explosion or a scream—and Sophia studied everything as she walked on down the new road, which seemed much longer than the old. The woods were silent. When she got down to the bay, she saw the bulldozer outlined against the water in all of its shapeless bulk. It had pushed its way down to the meadow by the beach and had then slid sideways into a hollow and kicked up a lot of sand. The grassy bank had given way, softly and treacherously, quite inexplicably, and the forest-eating monster lay there in silence at an unnatural angle, a picture of thwarted force. Beside the machine sat Emil Ehrström, smoking a cigarette.

“Where did everyone go?” Sophia asked.

“They went back to get some equipment,” Emil said.

“What equipment?” Sophia said. And Emil said, “As if you knew anything about machines.” Sophia walked on across the meadow, through the strong green mat of grass that storms can’t kill—it only settles a bit and goes right on weaving its tight little roots. Grandmother was waiting by the boat out on the point. What a machine! Sophia thought. She’ll be so surprised. It’s like when God smote Gomorrah. It’ll be a lot of fun to ride instead of walk.