The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [20]
The two left Vatna Hverfi and hiked westward, up into the mountains behind the church, taking their meat for the day; Hauk refused to carry Gunnar as Margret had, and made him match his own pace as well. When Gunnar was not a little annoyed by this, Hauk met his complaints with even-tempered silence, so that they fell off, and then ceased altogether with the speed and effort of the walking. Once Gunnar yawned. Just then, Hauk said, as if to himself, “All the farm folk will be out in the fields, spreading manure and forking it into the ground. There is a back-breaking day’s work, in my opinion.” Gunnar plodded behind him.
Soon they had reached barren pebbly ground above the low bilberry bushes that Gunnar knew from his walks with Margret. Here and there, in clefts, grew low birches and scrub willow. Hauk settled himself in one of these clefts without a word, and began fashioning bird snares out of seal gut. These he lay on the ground, covered with pebbles and leaves and neatly attached to bent willow twigs, then he moved Gunnar away, to another cleft, and sat patiently amongst the underbrush. Gunnar, who did not dare speak, fell into a doze. After a while, he was aroused by a loud cackling chorus, and he lifted his head to see his uncle wringing the necks of four brown ptarmigan and lashing them together with a strip of walrus hide. Then he picked up the other snares and beckoned Gunnar to follow him to another spot. Once Hauk said, “Seal gut is the best to use for making snares.” Sometime after that he said, “Ptarmigan are good in the winter only for starving men, because their winter flesh is bitter and unappetizing.” Gunnar nodded and yawned. He looked with longing at Hauk’s pouch of food, for he had seen Ingrid fill it with goat’s cheese and dried meat.
When they returned late that evening, Asgeir and Ingrid had already gone to their beds. Hauk hung his thirteen ptarmigan from the eaves of the farmstead, and Gunnar fell asleep on the bench over his evening meat. And so it went on in this wise for four more days, until Hauk told Asgeir that Gunnar had little bent for hunting, and was clumsy and noisy about even the simplest tasks. Although Asgeir did not talk about this, the farm folk said among themselves that he was very angry at the way in which Gunnar was growing up, for Olaf, too, had had no luck in imposing learning on the child, and he was hardly industrious around the farm. He kept to himself, and refused to play with the other children. Nor did he make friends of the horses, as children sometimes did. His early loquacity had vanished, although he could sometimes be heard in Hauk’s bedcloset, relating stories to his uncle in an excited tone. All in all, he was lazy and unsociable and he and Asgeir stayed far from each other. Asgeir often had Olaf with him, for Olaf was now grown into a heavyset, low-browed fellow, not much to look at, Asgeir said, but with a natural farmer’s touch, especially with the cows. Asgeir was in no hurry to send him back to Gardar and see him become a priest, and Olaf himself did not often speak of Gardar, where, it was said, the priests had to make do without butter, and without milk to drink, while at Gunnars Stead there was plenty of meat of all kinds, and cheese and butter and gathered berries and herbs. At the end of the summer half year,