We’re going out stealing horses

“We’re going out stealing horses” is an invitation whose meaning changes with its speaker and situation. In the summer of 1948, Jon uses it to summon fifteen-year-old Trond for an imagined criminal escapade; six years earlier, Trond’s father had spoken the same prearranged words at Franz’s door as a signal connected to his Resistance work. The phrase turns an adventure between boys into an echo of a hidden adult history, and its later return allows father and son to meet, briefly, in the language of their shared summer.

An Invitation in the Summer of 1948

The phrase first enters the story as Jon’s announcement at the cabin where Trond is spending the summer with his father. Trond is fifteen; it is early July 1948, three years after the Germans have left Norway. Jon appears at the door and asks, “Are you coming? We’re going out stealing horses.” Trond’s account immediately narrows the apparent expedition to its real scale: it means Jon and Trond, as usual. Jon would have gone alone if Trond had refused, but the outing would have been no fun, and stealing horses alone would be impossible.

The grand language gives an ordinary summons the charge of a shared secret. It is not a plan announced to a group: Jon comes specifically for Trond, and their companionship is already established through repeated excursions. He has often arrived at all hours to take Trond shooting hares, walking through the forest, fishing for trout, or balancing on floating logs in the river. They keep these activities from Trond’s father, although the river can be seen from the kitchen window. Against that history, the phrase sounds at once playful and consequential: the boys call themselves criminals before they have done anything that would justify the word.

As they leave the meadow path and walk toward Barkald’s land, Trond feels that their new identity is visible. He imagines the law of cowboy magazines, a hanging for horse theft, and the terrible finality of being caught; even the house on the edge of the forest seems threatening, its dark windows seeming to watch them. Their fear is shaped by stories as much as by circumstance. The phrase makes the journey feel like a crime before the boys have reached the clearing, turning a familiar road and forest path into the setting of an outlaw adventure.

The Words as a Prearranged Signal

The phrase has an earlier history, which Trond learns when Franz recounts his first meeting with Trond’s father. In 1942, his father had come through the forest looking for a place near the Swedish border where he could take cover while carrying papers, letters, and sometimes films for the Norwegian Resistance. He needed a place he could use repeatedly, returning after missions and obliterating his tracks. To the people he met, he explained that he wanted somewhere to think. Franz alone understood the real purpose.

The two men knew of each other but had not met until Trond’s father climbed the steps to Franz’s door and knocked. He spoke the prearranged words: “Are you coming? We’re going out stealing horses.” Franz explains that he knew what Trond’s father was going to say, because the message had come by bus from Innbygda. The words thus do more than introduce a joke or describe an outing. In this encounter, they are the agreed sign by which one man identifies himself and begins a meeting whose true purpose cannot be stated openly.

The contrast rests on the words remaining recognizable while the circumstances alter their force. Jon’s invitation belongs to the boys’ private summer and its make-believe danger; the same phrase, spoken at Franz’s door, belongs to a carefully arranged clandestine operation. The novel does not need to explain the difference in a separate declaration: the journey to the border, the papers and films, and Franz’s knowledge of the prearrangement supply the context. What sounds like child’s play in one episode is revealed as language that once carried real risk.

Recognition, Repetition, and the Father

When Franz tells Trond what his father said, Trond asks, “What did you say he said?” The question registers his surprise at hearing the familiar phrase attached to his father. Franz repeats that the words were “We’re going out stealing horses,” while admitting that he does not know who devised them and supposing that Trond’s father probably did. He adds that he took to Trond’s father at once. The recollection makes the phrase a point of contact between two kinds of knowledge: Trond has lived its youthful meaning with Jon, while Franz can explain its earlier function in the father’s life.

The phrase returns in a different key during the 1948 summer. Trond sees two horses grazing in the meadow—the same bay and black horses he and Jon had ridden—and then sees his father coming from the shed with a saddle. Trond calls out, “Have you been out stealing those horses?” His father stiffens for a moment before realizing that Trond is joking. He smiles and calls, “Get yourself out here on the dot.” Trond answers, “Aye, aye, chief.” The scene does not establish that the father has stolen the horses; the joke depends on the earlier phrase and on the sight of the horses and saddle.

Here repetition changes the relationship carried by the words. At the cabin door, Jon’s phrase draws Trond away from his father into an adventure kept from him. In the meadow, Trond turns the phrase back toward his father, and the father responds by inviting him out. The old signal is no longer being used to identify a Resistance contact, nor is the boy imagining a hanging. It becomes a private joke and a call to join his father, linking the guarded history Franz has disclosed with the visible intimacy of the summer.

The Title and the Story’s Double Meaning

The words also give the novel its title, Out Stealing Horses, so their shifting meanings extend beyond the two scenes. The title recalls the boy’s literal-minded adventure while carrying the knowledge that the same words once opened a meeting between men involved in resistance work. The echo does not make the two situations equivalent: the boys’ imagined criminality and the father’s wartime secrecy have different stakes. Instead, it places them beside each other, letting a phrase move between play, danger, concealment, and family memory.

Its force depends on belated recognition. In 1948, Trond hears Jon’s invitation as the beginning of an outing; only when Franz recounts the 1942 meeting does the phrase disclose its other use. Later, Trond’s teasing question shows that the old words have become available for affectionate play between father and son. Across these returns, the phrase preserves the secrecy of the father’s earlier mission while also giving Trond a way to approach him in the present of the summer. What began as a signal between adults survives as a line the boy can make his own.