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By Root 2038 0

this and that, but Birgitta stepped heavily, and her spirits were not lifted, for it seemed to her that this heat boded no good. Nevertheless, all of the goods were dry and sweet-smelling by dusk, and Helga and Birgitta began to remake the beds. When she was just finishing, spreading the white bearskin over Gunnar’s bedcloset, Birgitta was suddenly seized by a fit of weeping so that she could not stand, but fell on the floor beside the bedcloset. Helga, coming into the steading with an armload of clothes and unstitched wadmal, put down her bundle at the door and ran and lifted up her mother’s head. Now Birgitta wept for a long while, and when she had subsided, she said to Helga, “It seemed to me when I put my hands into Gunnar’s bearskin that I saw myself as a child in this very bedcloset, and my mother had not died yet, nor did I expect her to, but only expected that my infant pleasures should go on and on, and I remembered this one that I have not thought of in thirty-five or forty years, the feel of plaiting her hair, of lifting the heavy strands and twisting them into each other, not as I do now, without a thought, but as I did then, painstaking and diligent, because I wanted greatly to learn the patterns. And the weave of her dress and the brownish color of the wadmal, and also the slope of her shoulder and the look of her neck seemed to press upon me, and I seemed to hear the sound of her voice, for it was the case that she spoke in a round, low tone that is not as I speak, or as you speak, and so is lost. And it seemed to me that I was a dupe and a ninny as all children are, as I still am, going from day to day with schemes and prospects. It seems to me that we have come to the ending of the world, for in Greenland the world must end as it goes on, that is with hunger and storms and freezing, though elsewhere it may end in other ways.” Now she looked into Helga’s face, and she saw there fondness, but not understanding.

The next day shone clear and sunny, and the day after that and the day after that, and on the fifth day, Kollgrim, Olaf, and Gunnar returned from Herjolfsnes with the whalemeat in a net in the cold water beside the boat, and Birgitta hurried to dry it and to seethe it, for it is the case that whalemeat goes off more quickly than other kinds of meat, and then cannot be eaten without certainty of illness. Birgitta kept to herself; her spirits did not lift, and Gunnar blamed her greatly for this throughout the summer.

One day Finn and Kollgrim returned from a hunting trip with a pair of beautiful big seals, although the time of the seal hunt was over, and Finn admitted that he had received them from some skraelings at the mouth of Isafjord, in exchange for a set of cunningly made arrows of Finn’s own design. Gunnar was pleased with the meat and hides, but indeed, the price was high, for a set of such arrows, made in pieces and fitted together so that they could break apart inside a bird and come out without tearing the flesh, took almost a whole winter to make. The skraelings, Finn said, had had many seals with them, and had been fat and well clothed besides, but of all Finn’s gear, these arrows were the only things the demons cared to trade for, so it was these or nothing.

Now the autumn seal hunt came around, and after the men went off, Birgitta and Helga went to the storehouse to count up provisions for the winter so that Birgitta could estimate how many sheep would have to be slaughtered. The whalemeat had given them just enough relief, so that with the two seals traded from the skraelings, and a reasonable result from the autumn seal hunt, the folk at Lavrans Stead would come to Easter with cheese in their mouths and sheep in their byre, but Birgitta knew that this would not be the case with some of her neighbors. Now she went out and began to count the ewes and half-grown lambs, although in fact she counted these over and over as the year went by and always knew just how many she had and where they were. Even so, she went among them, and saw at once the larger Vatna Hverfi sheep, for these stood