Wolverine

The wolverine is the animal image at the center of Johnny Beskow’s campaign of pranks and threats, but its importance is not that it appears as a creature in the action. It arrives as a postcard left at Konrad Sejer’s door, and becomes a persona through which the police and the public interpret a human offender. The animal’s traits—solitude, cunning, predatory power, and rarity—give that persona its menace, while the gap between animal and human behavior helps expose how Johnny turns fear into a public game.

Natural history and the encyclopedia

After receiving the postcard, Sejer looks up the animal in his thirteen-volume 1984 set of the Norwegian encyclopedia, finding the entry on page 495. The text identifies the wolverine as Gulo gulo, the largest member of the weasel family, and notes that in some parts of northern and western Norway it is also called a mountain cat. The physical description is distinctive: a short head, a black-brown coat with a yellowish stripe along its side, a muscular build, and a tail measuring between 25 and 35 centimetres. It stands about as tall as a gun dog. The encyclopedia places it in mountainous country, while adding that researchers believe it was originally a forest-dweller.

The entry also gives the animal a sharply seasonal place in its environment. In winter it lives on reindeer; in summer it preys on sheep and smaller rodents, and it may also eat hare, fox, white grouse, or wood grouse. Females produce an average litter of two to three young in February or March. The den is often made in a snowdrift against a low mountain wall in rugged terrain. The account estimates that there were 150 wolverines in 1964 and says that in southern Norway the species was listed as endangered as far as South Trøndelag. These details matter to Sejer’s reading of the image: the postcard presents not just a generic predator, but an unusual, elusive animal with a specific habitat and a precarious status.

The postcard at Sejer’s door

The image first reaches Sejer in a small grey envelope left on his doormat late at night. The envelope is blank and made of recycled paper. After seeing a slender young man hurry across the car park, Sejer opens it with a knife and finds a small postcard with a glossy photograph of a brown-black animal and a large, shaggy tail. The reverse identifies the picture as a wolverine photographed by Gøran Jansson. Beneath that identification is the short threat, “Hell begins now.”

The postcard makes the animal an emblem before Sejer knows who has sent it or what the sender intends. He examines the picture closely, then consults the encyclopedia rather than treating the image as self-explanatory. Its natural-history language offers a vocabulary for imagining the person behind the message: Sejer wonders whether the sender wants to appear like a rare, endangered animal or a sly and sharp hunter. The contrast between the cheap, glossy card and the elaborate associations it provokes gives the threat its force. It is at once a clue, a performance, and an invitation to interpret.

From animal image to human nickname

As the attacks continue, Sejer’s interpretation hardens into a name for the perpetrator. He tells Skarre that they are dealing with a beast of prey, and identifies the figure behind the threats as “The Beast from Bjerkås.” The label gives an animal likeness to a series of human actions; it does not establish that a wolverine is responsible for them. The animal’s reputation for hunting becomes a way to anticipate further attacks, while its solitude and rarity lend the unknown offender an aura of menace.

The name also travels beyond the investigation. People in the editorial world and the general public begin assigning Johnny increasingly audacious nicknames. Johnny hears others talking about him and takes this attention as proof that he has finally made something of himself and forced people to acknowledge him. He is delighted by what he has set in motion and intends to keep playing the game. His own view of the campaign is less grand than the predator image: while observing ordinary people at home and in their gardens, he wants to push them past their sense of security. The animal emblem thus magnifies the threat, but the attention it brings is itself part of what Johnny seeks.

The limits of the persona

The animal image can make the offender seem like an impersonal force stalking a community. The later discussion of the campaign instead places it within human choices and consequences. Gunilla Mørk recognizes the prankster’s creativity, imagination, and style, and has framed her own fabricated obituary; she nevertheless remains a person affected by the sustained campaign. Her response shows how the image and its accompanying notoriety can persist in people’s lives beyond the moment of the prank.

When Johnny speaks with Sejer after his appointment of a defence lawyer, he admits that scaring people senseless had been fun, but calls it a game and says he had not meant to hurt anyone. Sejer answers that people were hurt badly, perhaps for life. This exchange exposes the distance between the fearsome animal persona and the boy’s account of himself, without allowing the latter to erase the harm. The wolverine remains a potent figure because it condenses the campaign’s mystery and menace into one recognizable image; the novel’s human aftermath insists that behind that image are an identifiable offender and real people who have been frightened.