50 pages • 1 hour read
Per Petterson, Transl. Anne BornOut Stealing Horses
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses Nazi persecution of Jewish people and the accidental death of a child.
In early November 1999, Trond Sander sits in the kitchen of the small, dilapidated house he recently purchased in the remote woods of eastern Norway, where he lives with his dog, Lyra. His house is near a river, and there is a cottage whose lights he can see from his doorstep where another man and a dog live. Trond hears small birds called titmice repeatedly banging into his window and wonders what he has that they want. His days at the house have settled into a routine where he reads the newspaper, takes Lyra for a walk, and works on fixing up the cabin and enjoying his solitude. He thinks about the nearing millennium and how all he has left is time.
He recalls being awoken the night before by a loud noise and seeing his neighbor out in the dark looking for his dog. He goes out to help and meets the man, who introduces himself as Lars Haug; Trond feels awkward, and the meeting reminds him of awkwardness at a funeral he attended with his father in the woods many years ago. The dog, Poker, is disobedient and growls at the two men. Lars says he has shot a dog once before and does not want to have to shoot this one—his brother was away at sea and his step-father was out selling timber, so his mother assigned him the task of shooting an Alsatian that was roaming the edge of their property.
After Lars manages to get Poker to follow him home, Trond goes home to bed, feeling disturbed. He can tell winter and heavy snow are on their way, and he dreams of summer. The dreams disturb him, as he recalls a summer he has not thought about for many years.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
In 1948, Trond is awoken in the cabin where he is spending the summer with his father. His friend Jon is at the door asking him to go “out stealing horses” from a man named Barkald, who is the wealthiest landowner around (17). The boys are pretending and only plan to steal a ride on the horses. Though Jon and Trond are best friends, Jon will not come into his house or look at his father, and Trond avoids telling his father what kind of adventures they get into. Trond recalls that he should have noticed something different about Jon that morning, in the way he spoke or the fact that he did not carry his gun for shooting hares.
The two teens cross the river in a rowboat and walk through woods and meadows at dawn until they reach Barkald’s farm, climbing a tree to get over the barbed-wire fence. Jon sets the horses running, and Trond jumps out of the tree onto a horse but lands hard on its back and is thrown over the fence after a short gallop across the clearing. Sore and nauseated, with a cut from the wire on his forearm, he gets up to walk home with Jon. As he limps along, he remembers a recent incident where his father asked him to cut the grass, and he had been afraid to go near some stinging nettles. His father pulled them out by hand, telling him, “You decide for yourself when it will hurt” (30). Trond remembers this and forces himself to walk normally as though uninjured.
Jon says there is something he wants to show Trond, and they climb a tall tree together. Jon shows him a nest of tiny goldcrest eggs, the second brood of them, he says. Trond is awed by the tiny eggs and talks about their potential to become something that can just fly away, prompting Jon to tear the nest from the branches and crush it so the eggs fall like snow. As they walk and then row home, the sunny day turns into a torrential downpour. When Jon says goodbye, he has a look in his eyes Trond knows he will never forget.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Trond explains that he and his father had come out to the cabin in the woods from their home in Oslo, where they left his mother and sister. He recalls the bus trip, his father’s interest in books on anything technical or related to machines, and how they had looked at the river flowing out of Sweden on a short route through their location in Norway before looping back into Sweden.
After returning across the river with Jon, Trond enters the cabin, where his father warms him and gives him breakfast. When Trond says they were out stealing horses, his father appears shocked until Trond explains that it was pretend. Then, his father asks how Jon was acting and explains what happened the previous day: Jon had been out hunting hares and had forgotten he was supposed to be home watching his twin 10-year-old brothers, Lars and Odd. Not finding them after returning to the house, he went to search the woods and, in his panic, forgot to secure his gun. The twins, who had been safe in the house all along, found it, and Lars accidentally shot Odd through the heart. Jon’s father rode to Innbygda to fetch their mother where she was visiting friends, leaving Jon alone with Lars and Odd’s body. When his mother arrived, Jon realized his father had ridden the whole way with her and not told her what happened.
Trond remembers three things from Odd’s funeral: His father and Jon’s father did not look one another in the eye, though they shook hands; Lars broke away from the crowd as his brother was lowered into the ground and ran in circles; and he knew he and Jon would never go out stealing horses again.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Trond describes the land around the cabin where he and his father stayed: a forest of spruce, a gravel road into town, and a bridge that crosses the rushing river. He recalls his father’s urgent desire to chop down the spruce forest to sell as timber. With his mother and sister back home in Oslo, Trond notices that his father is different and thinks that he needs “time and the peace to plan out a different life from the one that was behind him […] in a different place with a different view from the one we had where we lived in Oslo” (55). However, he finds his father’s hurry and determination to fell the whole forest and send it downriver to Sweden strange, as it is the wrong time of year for it, and there are closer places for selling the timber. Barkald asks the two men to help with haymaking at his farm, and Trond’s father is impressed when Trond bargains with Barkald, offering their labor for the use of one of his horses, which will be able to pull the timber to the river for them.
The haymaking begins, a laborious process that takes many days and requires the cooperation of many people. Jon’s mother is there, and though she is still grieving, Trond notices her beauty for the first time, calling her “luminous.” The work exhausts Trond, but his father’s praise is enough to keep him moving. Neither Jon nor his father attend the haymaking, and Jon’s mother rows home every afternoon to make lunch for Lars. Trond describes the haymaking process in depth and reflects that no one makes hay in this way anymore, which makes him feel old.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Trond’s first-person narration in the opening chapters sets the tone and establishes the themes of the novel. As he describes the remote cabin and his desire to live alone in the woods as he nears the end of his life, his interest in Finding a Sense of Place in Nature and Solitude and Time for Self-Reflection become apparent. There is a mournfulness to Trond’s insistence that he has always wanted to be alone; despite his efforts to see peace in nature, his first description of the setting is unsettling, a foray into the “coal black” woods where he is menaced by his neighbor’s growling dog. His insistence that he has come to the woods for solitude is belied by the explanation he gives for getting up in the middle of the night to help Lars look for Poker: “He ought not to be alone like that. It was not right” (10). The setting and the encounter create tension for Trond, which he is only able to explain by exploring his memories. Through the first chapter’s closing line—“I have enough to do, thinking about this summer, which begins to trouble me. And that it has not done for many years” (16)—and its transition into the first line of the second chapter, Per Petterson introduces the narrative structure of events in the present prompting memories of the past.
The opening paragraph of Chapter 2 begins to provide context for the novel’s title, and Trond’s lapse into his memories introduces The Pivotal Role of History in Shaping Identity. The account of his morning with Jon presents Trond as a boy out pretending to do grownup things, as “stealing horses” is merely a euphemism for stealing a ride, but it also marks the moment when he must grapple with adult issues of life and death. Jon’s destruction of the defenseless goldcrest eggs forces Trond to contemplate the fragility of life and marks a careless violence that parallels Odd’s accidental death, emphasizing that a single moment can change one’s life forever. Trond recounts Odd’s death, an incident he was not present to experience, from a third-person omniscient perspective. He explains, “My father could not have told me all this, not with all the details; but that is the way it is printed in my memory, and I do not know whether I began filling out this painting at once, or if it is something I have done over the years” (49). This choice is characteristic of Trond’s narration throughout the novel, as his own memories are interspersed with stories others tell him.
Through the introduction of key characters and motifs—including birds, doubles, and crossroads—Petterson builds foreboding and tension in Trond’s recollections. Trond recalls the awkwardness between Jon and his own father as well as Jon’s father’s habit of disappearing whenever Trond arrives at their farm, noting “something there I did not understand” (21). Most of Trond’s impressions of his father are tinged with foreshadowing, such as his unclear motivation for felling trees at the wrong time of year and when “he walked round looking things over and smiling a secret smile and patting the trees, and sitting on a big stone on the river bank, his chin in his hand, looking out over the water as if he were among old friends” (23). These descriptions, along with Trond’s admiration for Jon’s mother during haymaking, establish relationships that build throughout the narrative and provide the source of its most potent emotional conflicts. By closing Chapter 4 with Trond’s contrast between the communal and harmonious haymaking practices from his youth and modern practices where there is “one man alone on a tractor” (66), Petterson emphasizes the dissonance between Trond’s happy memories of the past and his solitary state as he faces old age in the present.
