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By Root 1911 0

own eyes. Now when they had all been sent to separate bedclosets, Gunnar came to Birgitta in great anger and complained of the uproar, and of Gunnhild especially. Birgitta took a deep breath, and glanced about the room, at her father sleeping by the fire, and the smoky lights cast by the lamps against the turfing of the walls, and at such cloths and tapestries as they had put up to help keep out the wind. A few stools were stacked in the corner and the floor was a heap of moss and much else that didn’t bear looking into, and she saw these things, it seemed to her, with Solveig’s eyes, and Gunnhild’s, and she sighed. Then she turned to Gunnar and declared that as a child of but fifteen years, Gunnhild could not be asked to keep two things in her mind at once, namely the Thjodhilds Stead way and the Lavrans Stead way. And since one had to make way for the other, it was necessary that the old go out and the new come in. The result of this was that on the feast of St. Stephen, Gunnhild and Gunnar went on skis across the fjord and over the hills to Thjodhilds Stead, and Gunnhild stayed there, as a maiden, and came home no more. And this was also the case, that in the disorder of departure, she never once looked over her shoulder, nor did she see her brother and sisters and mother waving after her, but she only went forward, looking for her new home, and this came to Birgitta as an unaccountable grief, no matter how she prayed and told herself that this was the pain of bearing daughters, and folk must always accustom themselves to it. At midsummer, Bjorn Einarsson declared that he was becoming intolerably restless, and had made up his mind to return to Iceland and Norway. And, as his decision was so sudden, there was no time for Gunnhild’s wedding feast, but Solveig promised that she should have a brilliant one in Iceland.

And one thing that happened after Bjorn Einarsson, Einar, Solveig, the baby, Gunnhild, and the others left in their four neat ships was that the farmer Orm Guttormsson agreed to take some of Bjorn’s ewes and lambs in trade for a number of sheepskins equal to the number of ewes, but it happened that his seal nets became fouled together, and he was unable to make the trip to Thjodhilds Stead until the day after Bjorn’s departure. When he got there, he expected to find the sheep folded, and he did, but before taking them home, he made up his mind to look about the steading and see if anything else had been left behind that might be useful, for Bjorn and his family had a great quantity of belongings. And he did find something, a nicely carved lamp, of small size, good for lighting, though not for heat. And he also found something else, the corpuses of the two skraeling children who had nursed Solveig’s baby. It seemed to Orm that they had climbed an outcropping overlooking Thjodhilds inlet, and pitched themselves into the fjord. The boy’s corpus floated in the shallows, catching on the strand, and the girl’s was caught by the headdress on some rocks. Orm did not quite know what to do with these corpuses, and so he fished them from the sea and put them in the cowbyre, then a day or so later, he came to Sira Pall Hallvardsson and told of his discovery. These children had been baptized with the names of Josef and Maria, and so Sira Pall Hallvardsson went with Orm and Gunnar and another man and found the corpuses. There was some talk about whether these two children should be buried at the church or not, for it was the law among the Greenlanders that this was prohibited if they had done away with themselves. And so the men spent the greater part of a day walking back and forth around the steading, and looking at the places Orm had found them, and hearing Orm tell his tale over and over.

“Perhaps,” Gunnar said, “these children merely ran into the water, and were seized by the cold,” for Kambstead Fjord was close to freezing at all times of the year. But no, it was apparent that their bodies were broken from falling, as Orm had said.

“Perhaps,” said Hakon, the fourth man, “they merely climbed upon the rock to get a