Snowmobile

The Snowmobile is both a means of crossing Norway’s isolated winter terrain and a source of evidence in the investigation surrounding the avalanche. Its engine, tracks, and sudden silence shape what characters can hear and where they can go: the machine first carries Kaja Solness through an immense snowfield, then becomes the object of a difficult search for a possible route to the avalanche site.

Crossing the Winter Landscape

During a journey with Kaja Solness aboard, the Snowmobile cuts through a landscape where wind and snow have smoothed away almost every contour. The immense Hallingskarvet rises from the white expanse like a threatening wave. The comparison makes the terrain feel less like a road than an open, featureless sea, while the machine supplies the only clear direction of travel across it.

The ride is powerful but not effortless. The soft snow and the vehicle’s weight dampen movement, while the monotonous engine roar and the uniform landscape lull Kaja toward sleep. She rubs her nose and cheeks to check that they remain sufficiently warm, aware of what even mild frostbite can do to a face. The machine therefore offers passage through dangerous country without making that country safe: exposure remains a bodily risk even while the vehicle keeps moving.

Then the engine dies. Kaja’s first thought is that they are stranded at least forty-five minutes from civilization. She tries to measure that distance in another mode of travel, wondering whether skis would make it a three-hour or five-hour journey, but cannot tell. The abrupt stop exposes the Snowmobile’s dependence on its motor: what had made the wilderness traversable can, if it fails, leave its passengers uncertain how to get out. The contrast between the long, steady ride and the sudden silence gives the machine a role in the scene’s suspense as well as its movement.

A Possible Clue in the Avalanche

After the avalanche, snow obscures the circumstances of the disaster. A search party has inspected the exposed slope, but the wind has erased any ski tracks that might otherwise have recorded movement there. Kaja Solness says that she may have heard a Snowmobile before the avalanche came down. The sound is not certain evidence by itself, and there is a delay between the noise she recalls and the slide. Harry Hole reasons that a rider might have parked farther away to avoid being heard. The machine thus enters the investigation first as a possibility suggested by a witness’s memory, not as an established explanation.

That possibility gives the searchers a practical task: look for Snowmobile tracks. They obtain a machine for the search, along with a map and climbing and rescue equipment, and set out before more snow is expected. The investigation now depends on the same kind of vehicle that may have been involved in the events they are trying to reconstruct. Snowmobiles can carry people across terrain where ordinary access is difficult, but their passage may leave a trace that survives when ski marks do not.

Reading the Track

At three o’clock, Harry Hole and Mikael Bellman find a Snowmobile track about a kilometre from the edge of the avalanche’s release area. It lies between two enormous, tooth-shaped rocks that provide some shelter from the wind. The impressions at the edge of the track suggest that the machine had been left there long enough to sink into the snow. The detail makes the track more than a fleeting line across the landscape: it records a stop, although it does not by itself establish who stopped or why.

The searchers follow a mark running down the middle of the left ski groove. They think it may have resulted from an accident, and use it to confirm that they are following the same Snowmobile. Its route shows that the rider turned and continued northwest. These small physical distinctions—the settled track, the turn, the recurring mark—let the investigators reconstruct direction and movement where the open snow has erased other signs. They remain clues, not proof of the rider’s identity or purpose.

Search, Risk, and Limits

Following the track requires the searchers to advance in short, uneven stages, never more than a hundred metres at a time. They clear snow from the groove with a broom before moving on. In some hollows and on wind-exposed rises, the mark is clear enough to make faster progress possible; elsewhere, it demands careful attention. Harry Hole twice warns that they have come dangerously close to an abyss. As the afternoon darkens, Mikael Bellman switches the headlights on and off according to the snowfall, while Harry studies the map without being sure of their position. They are moving farther from Ustaoset, and the return journey weighs differently on them: Harry worries about it, while much of his attention is absorbed by the pursuit.

At half past four, they lose the track. The Snowmobile has therefore yielded a route but not a complete account of the avalanche. Its traces narrow the search and support a reconstruction of movement, yet wind, fading light, and difficult terrain limit what can be recovered. Across the two scenes, the machine embodies that tension: it opens a path through remote country, but its disappearance into the snow leaves investigators to follow a fragile mark whose meaning remains uncertain.