The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [167]
Kollgrim replied, “Do you wish that he will?”
Now Finn smiled, showing lots of teeth, and said, “You are no trouble to me, however you seem to folk from other districts.”
“It may be that folk from other districts will not insult me and threaten me again.”
“Or it may be that they will be led by mischief into doing whatever they please. Folk from other districts often act in unaccountable ways.”
“Even so, this hunting life is agreeable to me. I wonder that my father and Olaf don’t like it.”
And so Finn put Kollgrim out of the boat on shore some distance from the Lavrans Stead jetty, and told him that he would return shortly, and so he did, in other clothes, and bringing clothes for Kollgrim as well. And when Kollgrim climbed into the boat, Finn tied his hands to the gunwale and they rowed in silence back out the mouth of the fjord, and this detour had taken them but a short while, and Finn caught up quickly to the line of boats that was herding seals into the islands at the mouth of Eriks Fjord, and he didn’t speak of what he had found at Lavrans Stead, although Kollgrim looked at him with curiosity and eagerness.
Now they brought a pod of seals to a very good bay, wide at the mouth and then narrowing sharply and ending in a low sandy beach. Only a few boats were needed to drive many seals out of the water and up onto the strand, where they would lie, mildly awaiting the strokes of the Greenlanders’ spears. But even so, the wide mouth of the bay was deceptively deep, and men who had hunted before never speared seals in the water here, for they were sure to sink at once, and carry spears with them. Now it happened that someone in a boat near Finn’s boat succumbed to the temptation of the boiling seals around him, for a man could reach out and touch their slick bodies, and he poked his spear into the back of the seal nearest him—a succulent, half-grown beast. But the seal now twisted and pulled the spear out of the man’s hands, and without thinking, the man reached for it, and was pitched by his leaping boat into the water, among the seething of the pod of seals. And this disturbance seemed to arouse some of the seals, and more than half of the pod turned and broke through the line of boats, and made for the open sea, so that the catch was considerably diminished, and in addition to this, the man and his spear were lost and his boat was tossed against a rock by the swimming of the seals, and caved in.
In the midst of this, Finn leaned forward and untied Kollgrim’s hands, so that he could balance himself better in the boat, and when they had driven the seals up onto the strand, Finn handed the boy a short spear, and so Kollgrim went among the prostrate beasts and stabbed them in their throats, and the blood spurted out over his spear and his hands, so that the spear grew slippery and hard to grasp, and Kollgrim seized a large rock and began smashing this weapon down upon the heads of the seals, large and small, white and brown. After he was finished, Finn and another hunter came to him and praised him highly, for he had killed some twenty-five beasts, enough for the farmstead to live on through the autumn at least until Yule. And now Finn said, “So it is become true, what I told Gunnar Asgeirsson this morning, that you are more a help than a hindrance on the trip.”
The next day they followed the seals to the most northerly of the settlements, where men lived very poorly and depended almost entirely upon seals and stranded whales for sustenance, and had few dogs, and no church at all, and the next day after that, they returned to Hvalsey Fjord with some fifteen beasts, in the boat and in tow, not so many as folk had hoped there would be, but indeed to Kollgrim it seemed that he was mired in blubber and lost in a mountain of sealmeat. Finn told Gunnar that Kollgrim had caused no trouble and attracted