The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [18]
The sight of the bear, and the prospect of roast meat, quieted all voices. The cub Hauk gave to Thorleif, who poured the water out of his largest cask and put the bear cub in it. And that is how it happened that one last tamed bear cub came to Bergen, and ended eventually in the Castle of Mehun-sur-Yevre, for the Duke of Berry was a collector of wild animals, and this bear, it is said, lived for many years, and died long after Hauk Gunnarsson himself.
From Bear Island it is six days sail to Greenland, but Thorleif was thrown off course by two storms, and the trip took twice as long. Nonetheless, Thorleif was happy enough to get there with his ship in one piece, for, he said, “With a ship, Bergen is a little closer than it is without a ship.”
Hauk cured the hide of the she-bear, and threw it over his bedstead, and this bear hide stayed with the Gunnars Stead folk for many years. Ketil’s bones and skull were buried near the grave of Sigrun at Undir Hofdi, and the bones and skull of Lavrans the sailor, as well as the runestick of the drowned man, were interred at Gardar. Many were shocked at the death of Ketil, for he was a prosperous man who had always had pretty good luck. Some said that it was always ill luck to name a child for a living man. Nevertheless, the man Ketil was dead, and the child Ketil Ragnarsson was said to be weakly and ill-favored. After Erlend returned, the farm woman Vigdis remained at the farmhouse with her child Thordis, and she and Erlend lived together as husband and wife, although no priest married them. Erlend, who was cross-grained by nature, became even gloomier, and no one saw the Ketils Stead folk from season to season.
Hauk Gunnarsson had little mind to hunt that season, although he prospered on the autumn seal hunt and snared plenty of birds. For the first time in many years, he helped with the autumn farm work, and with the gathering of seaweed and berries for fodder and storage. He did not prepare for a winter voyage to the hunting grounds, and when the hay was in and the cows were sealed up and the sheep were down from the hills, he sat sometimes with Gunnar and Olaf and looked over their shoulders at the reading books. At Yule, Gunnar took to sleeping in Hauk Gunnarsson’s bedcloset and became less friendly than he had been toward Margret and Ingrid.
After Yule, the weather, especially around Gardar, grew very fierce, and there were deep snows so that the sheep could not paw down to the grass. Even the huge stocks of hay that Ivar Bardarson took off his fields were rapidly depleted, and many were glad at a sudden and profound thaw. Asgeir, however, shook his head suspiciously, and indeed, the thaw was quickly followed by a hard frost, which turned the fields to ice and drove the sheep toward the fjords in search of seaweed or other fodder. Many of them lost their footing on the icy cliffs and fell into the sea, where they were drowned or swept away. Ivar Bardarson estimated that he lost a quarter of the Gardar sheep in this way, and two or three of his best horses. Other farmers lost more. At Gunnars Stead, the blizzards were so thick that five sheep suffocated with the snow driven into their mouths and nostrils from all directions, and when the fodder gave out, and even the oat hay from the second field, four cows starved