Storing summer

Storing summer is Ronia and Birk’s answer to the knowledge that their life in the forest cannot remain sheltered from the turning year. They choose to inhabit each summer day fully, then imagine its particular pleasures gathered into a store they can live on when summer is gone. The conceit is both practical and emotional: their days depend on the forest’s food and water, while their shared attention to its beauty helps them face the approaching winter without surrendering the present to fear.

The seasons as lived time

The idea takes shape within a story paced by seasonal change. After a long winter, spring arrives around Matt’s Fort in a rush: snow streams down the cliffs toward the river, whose waterfalls sing, and the pass at Wolf’s Neck becomes a turbulent stream. Matt and his robbers ride out singing, eager to resume their life on the road. For Ronia, spring also means the return of the woods she has missed. Her father has kept her at home while the forests were dangerous, but once the snow melts he lets her go, warning her not to drown in a treacherous pool. Seasonal change is thus more than scenery: it alters movement, work, and the conditions under which people can live.

That dependence is especially clear in the contrast between winter scarcity and life in the woods. Birk explains that his family’s band has lost its goats and sheep since moving to Matt’s Fort; their horses are safe only because they were stabled with a farmer beyond Borka’s Forest. Their remaining flour, turnips, peas, and salt fish are running out, and even water has been difficult to obtain: at times they melt snow because the stream is buried, and hauling a bucket up a rope ladder in a snowstorm is arduous. The winter shortage gives the later abundance of summer its material weight. The forest is not an abstract refuge from hardship; its changing season determines what can be eaten, gathered, and done.

Making a store from summer

When Ronia and Birk are living in Bear’s Cave, they have to make their own arrangements for survival. After signs that harpies have been near the cave, they calmly organize food, weapons, and tools, fetch water from a forest spring, and set a net in the river for fish. They carry flat stones from the riverbank to build a hearth on their platform, and search for juniper wood for Ronia’s bow. She cuts the bow and two arrows, using a length of her leather rope as the bowstring, then practices until she loses both arrows. Their life is free, but that freedom is sustained by work and knowledge of the place around them.

Their food also follows the season. The flour Ronia brought from home runs out; they bake their last hard loaves on heated hearthstones, and the remaining bread will soon be gone. They know they can fish the forest lakes, snare a grouse, and eat birds, while Ronia gathers herbs and edible leaves as Lovis taught her. Wild strawberries are already ripe beside fallen trees, with blueberries still to come. When their mare Lia gives less and less milk, Ronia recognizes that they will soon have to manage without it as well. The imagined store of summer grows against these concrete limits: it is not a denial of hunger or scarcity, but a way to hold on to what the woods offer while it is available.

The emotional turn is named by Birk: “Sister mine, it’s summer now,” he says, and Ronia feels the truth of it. She tells him she will carry that summer in her memory for as long as she lives. In the woods, their ordinary freedom—being warm and well-fed, waking to a bright morning, and living beyond other people’s power to drive them out—can briefly make earlier troubles seem behind them. Their happiness is not presented as proof that hardship has vanished. It is an experience of relief made precious by the knowledge of what they have endured and what may return.

What the imagined reserve contains

Ronia gives the idea its fullest form by describing summer as something she is gathering “in a big lump of summer,” like a wild bee drawing honey. What she means is not an abstract season but a multitude of remembered particulars: sunrises; blueberry bushes thick with fruit; freckles on Birk’s arms; evening moonlight on the river; starry skies; fir trees in the heat of midday; light evening rain; and the squirrels, foxes, hares, elk, and wild horses they know. She adds the experiences they make together—swimming and riding in the woods—so that her store includes both the living landscape and their own movement through it. Birk calls her a good summer baker and encourages her to keep at it, turning her image into a shared practice rather than a private consolation.

They spend the hours from morning to evening in the woods. Fishing and hunting provide what they need to eat; beyond that, they live peacefully among the forest’s other life. They walk to watch birds and animals, climb rocks and trees, ride, and swim in lakes where harpies do not disturb them. The passage distinguishes need from the rest of their life: subsistence requires taking food, but much of their time is given to observation, movement, and coexistence. Summer is therefore gathered not only as a pleasant view, but as a way of inhabiting the world around them.

The limit of the enchantment

The forest continues changing whether or not they speak of it. The sky grows clearer and cooler; one or two cold nights pass, and yellow leaves appear in the crown of a birch beside the river. Ronia and Birk see them beside their fire and say nothing. Later the air becomes sharper, the green woods clearer in the distance, and yellow and red spread until the riverside seems aflame with color. Again they sit by the fire and say nothing. Their silence registers the season they have chosen not to dwell on: they can cherish summer, but they cannot hold back autumn by refusing to name its signs.

Mist thickens over the river, and on an evening when they go down for water, it rises until they are caught in dense fog. Waiting for it to lift, Ronia recalls what Noddle-Pete once said: “When the Unearthly Ones come up into the forest and sing, you know it is autumn. And then it will soon be winter—oh, dear me, yes!” The recollection connects the changing weather to a warning already planted in their understanding of the year. Soon the Unearthly Ones do come into the forest with their laments; summer has died slowly, and stubborn autumn rain begins. For days, Ronia and Birk remain in the cave listening to water splash on the platform. The rain prevents them from keeping a fire; cold finally drives them outside to run for warmth, and they return soaked, wring out their clothes, and sit wrapped in furs watching the cave opening for a break in the weather. The wall of rain makes the approaching winter present in their bodies, not merely in their thoughts.

Storing summer does not make the seasons reversible or promise that memory will spare Ronia and Birk hardship. Its force lies in the contrast: against winter hunger, cold, and confinement, they deliberately collect the sensory and shared substance of a summer lived in freedom. The autumn leaves and the Unearthly Ones’ song expose the limit of that refuge, while making the abundance they have noticed more valuable. Their store is a remembered way of being in the world—attentive to its animals, weather, water, and fruit, and strengthened by the knowledge that they faced its changes together.