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By Root 2014 0

the snow melted and the grass greened in the spring, Asgeir had the south end of the cowbyre torn down. The cows were carried out into the homefield. This spring there was no hay left at all, but the grass turned early, and a few of the younger cows were able to stand up almost as soon as Asgeir and Hauk set them down. Others were not so sturdy, but Asgeir said that they would eat their way back to health, and put Gunnar and some of the other boys to pulling the moist grass and carrying it to the leaner beasts. After four days all the cows but one old one were on their feet and grazing in the homefield. That was not much of a loss for one winter, and the sheep and goats, too, had lasted well, without sickness. Skuli Gudmundsson said that his father, and other farmers in his district in Norway, did not hold with walling up the cows for the winter, and Asgeir was surprised at this, for it is well known among the Greenlanders that in addition to winter grass being unsuitable for a cow’s stomach, winter light hurts their eyes and has been known to blind more sensitive beasts. Skuli said he had never heard such things.

Margret was extremely fond of her uncle, Hauk Gunnarsson, and in this spring, as Hauk was not going often to the wastelands, they spent a good deal of time together in the hills above the farmstead. They were of like temperament, and sometimes they went for an entire day without speaking. Such days were a relief to Margret, for the nurse Ingrid was always chiding her to speak up, or to adopt softer ways, for soon enough she would be wanting a husband, and it was good to develop pleasing habits early.

Hauk’s hunting prowess was well known among the Greenlanders, and Asgeir had joked more than once that he was not going to be the one who probed into what skraeling tricks his brother might have taken up. There was no telling what a Christian man could learn from the demons in the north. Nor did Margret ask questions, but she watched with eager, though veiled, curiosity, every time he set a snare or a trap, every time he fingered a bit of a plant, or plucked it and put it in his pocket. She followed in like manner his gliding, calm, and silent gait, and emulated the utter stillness of his posture when he paused to listen for the sound of a hare or a fox in the underbrush. She had seen him, in other times, bend suddenly and pick up a hare by the leg or a fox by the neck, but he denigrated his own skills—skraelings, he said, could stand still as a stone over a seal’s breathing hole, sometimes for two days and nights, and even then have the wit to sense the seal rising through the water and fling a harpoon suddenly downward to make the kill. A skraeling man could walk over ice in the fjord so quietly that the seals swimming below would not hear him, sharp as they were. “It may be,” he said, “that we Greenlanders, with our sheep and our cows and our great stone churches are not so well off as we think, and the skraelings, with their howling dogs and everlasting moving about are not so badly off as we think.” And that was all Margret ever heard him say on the subject.

One day, the sailor boy, Skuli, came up to Margret and handed her a bird cage that he had made from willow withes, and he told her only that her uncle had asked him to make it, and showed him the proper shape. Margret thanked him for his work, and her uncle came up behind her, and nodded at it, but he did not say what it was for. Some days later, when Margret was in the hills with Hauk, and he was laying snares for ptarmigan, she saw him do a thing that she had never seen a man do, and that was to reach out to a lark perched on a branch of birch and take the bird in his hand. Then he closed his other hand gently over it, and put it in his pocket. When they returned to the steading, he took it, still living, out of his pocket, and put it in Margret’s cage. “Now,” he said, “when the bird sings to you, think of his song as your uncle telling you a tale, for if it had been up to me to choose a shape to be born in, I would have chosen such a shape as this.”