Slowly I tried to sit up.

‘Don’t do that,’ said a voice I recognized from the train.

‘I have to get going,’ I said blearily to the reindeer.

The man in the blue snowmobile suit suddenly appeared in my field of vision. Bending down with his head between the animal and me, he looked as if he had antlers.

‘You’re going to have to stay here for a while,’ he said with a grin. ‘Like the rest of us. My name is Geir Rugholmen, by the way. What’s yours?’

I didn’t reply.

I wasn’t planning on making acquaintances during this trip. True, Finse has no road links with the outside world. Even during the summer the historic Rallarvegen is closed to general traffic. In the winter it is, at best, a snowmobile track. With a wrecked train across the railway track on the Bergen line and a snowstorm that to all intents and purposes appeared to be gaining in strength, I still thought it was only a question of time before Norwegian State Railways’ enormous snow ploughs would be able to battle their way up from Haugastøl or Ustaoset in the east, and would move us all safely. I wasn’t going to get to Bergen this time, but none of us would be staying in Finse for very long.

It turned out there were eight doctors among the passengers from the train that had crashed. A fortunate over-representation that could be explained by the fact that seven of them were due to take part in a conference at Haukeland University Hospital on the treatment of burns. I was also on my way there when the train was derailed. Not to the conference on burns, of course, but to see an American specialist on the complications following a broken spine. Since I was shot in the back and paralysed from the waist down one night between Christmas and New Year in 2002, the rest of my body has begun to suffer.