Lars accidentally kills his twin brother Odd

Lars accidentally kills his twin brother Odd when he picks up Jon’s gun and fires it at close range. The death follows a chain of ordinary actions—a hunting trip, a hurried return home, a forgotten safety check, and children turning an admired brother’s weapon into a game. The scene’s force lies both in its suddenness and in its refusal to treat the fatal shot as destiny: the gun was left loaded, Lars pulled the trigger, and Odd was struck in the heart.

Circumstances and the Gun

The previous day, Jon had been hunting hares, a familiar pursuit at which he had become notably successful. On this occasion he returned with two hares, each dangling by an ear from a cord. He was pleased with his rare success: he had fired twice and hit twice. His mother was away visiting friends in Innbygda, and his father was in the forest. In his eagerness to show his catch, Jon did not stop to check who was home, although he was responsible for looking after the twins.

Jon’s gun was not an unfamiliar or carelessly kept object. It was the only thing he owned of value, given to him by his father for his twelfth birthday with strict instructions about its proper use. Jon had cared for and polished it as if it were a baby. His usual routine was to put it at half cock, remove the cartridges, and hang it on a high hook in the closet. But, remembering that the ten-year-old twins were alone, he put the gun down in the hall instead. The departure from his careful habit left a loaded weapon within reach.

The Shot

The twins had spent the morning playing in the basement with cast-off clothes and worn-out shoes. When they came upstairs laughing, they found the hares hanging from a peg and the gun leaning against the wall. They knew it belonged to Jon, their big brother and hero. His actions could be copied and made into play, and Lars reached the gun first, swinging it around as he imitated him.

Lars called out, “Look at me now!” and pulled the trigger. The report and the recoil sent him to the floor with a shriek. He had not aimed at anything; he wanted to hold the gun and become, for the moment, the brother he admired. The shot might have struck nearby objects: the woodbox, the small window over the steps, a framed photograph of their grandfather, or the bare light bulb kept burning so that someone outside in the dark could see the house. Instead, at close range, it struck Odd in the heart. The gap between a child’s game and a fatal wound is measured in one pull of the trigger.

Responsibility and Consequence

Jon heard the shot while searching for the twins. He had first looked through the house and around the yard, then gone down to the river to search the banks. When the report came from the house, he understood that he had forgotten to make the gun safe and remove its last cartridge. His customary precautions make the lapse concrete: this was not a weapon that he normally left ready to fire, but one he had set down in haste after remembering his responsibility for the children.

Jon ran back from the river. Halfway to the house he saw his father come running out of the forest, a sight so frightening that Jon stopped and sank onto the grass. He felt it was already too late and knew he did not want to see what had happened. His father came out of the house carrying Odd. Jon remained huddled on the meadow, confronted with the result of the forgotten cartridge and the shot his younger brother had fired. The scene gives no suggestion that Lars intended to hurt Odd; its tragedy is precisely that an imitated gesture, made without aiming, has an irreversible consequence.

Memory and the Rejection of Fate

The account gives the shooting the shape of a story in which fate might seem to have written the victim’s name on the cartridge or in the stars. But it explicitly refuses that explanation. The narrator sets the language of destiny against the physical sequence: Jon left the gun loaded, Lars picked it up, and the bullet struck Odd. The only book in which Odd’s name could not be crossed out was the church registry. That image marks death as final without pretending it had been ordained in advance.

The episode reaches the reader through Trond Sander’s reconstruction of what his father told him. Trond acknowledges that his father could not have supplied every detail and that the scene may have been filled out in memory over the years; nevertheless, the central facts could not be disputed. This framing makes the vividness of the remembered scene distinct from certainty about every detail, while preserving the event’s hard outcome. In the narrative, the accident becomes a lasting account of how responsibility, imitation, and chance meet: the fatal direction of the gun was not inevitable, but once the shot was fired, Odd’s death could not be undone.