The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [25]
Now they were having to pull the ship out of the water and across the ice many times in a day, and in the white waste it was hard to tell which way was safe to go, although because of Nicholas’ astronomical instruments, they always knew which direction was south and which direction was east. Two men would walk a distance ahead of the ship, where they could be seen but not shouted to, and where they could see but not shout to each other, and they would test the stability of the ice and look for leads between floes. Each man except Nicholas had to do this, for the Monk Nicholas knew nothing about ice. This worked well for many days, and the Greenlanders began to be hopeful that they would find open water and make their way back to the eastern settlement. One of these times, when Hauk Gunnarsson was walking ahead and Njal Ingvason to his left, two slabs of pack ice shook, then smashed together and apart, and Hauk Gunnarsson disappeared. A day later his corpus was found, and it had been thrown by the impact some three or four ells high on an ice cliff, so that men had to climb to it, and carry it down. Shortly after this, the travelers found the ocean, and were able to sail south, first to the western settlement, and then to Gardar, and Hauk Gunnarsson’s bones were buried at Vatna Hverfi, close under the southern wall of the church.
Concerning this summer there was another tale about the people at Gunnars Stead that was repeated around the settlement, although not in the hearing of Asgeir Gunnarsson, and this was that one morning Gunnar rose early, although it was his custom to sleep as long as possible, and then he spent a great deal of time pulling the furs and cloaks off the bed and putting them back on, until they had been arranged to his satisfaction. That evening after the meal, he went to the bedcloset he shared with his uncle and seemed to go to sleep, except that when the others went to their rest, they could hear him talking excitedly, as if to Hauk, but of course, Hauk was with Nicholas in the north. The next day everything was as usual, and Asgeir did not ask the boy about his night, nor did the boy volunteer any information, but when the ship returned with the dead man, Gunnar of Gunnars Stead seemed in no way surprised. After this, the great prosperity of Gunnars Stead was diminished, for Asgeir was not an avid hunter, and he had to depend more and more on the wealth he could raise on his land. But indeed, he had a great deal of land, and even now considered himself a lucky man.
The Monk Nicholas stayed with Ivar Bardarson during the winter and the next, and all of this time he was making measurements and notations with the instruments he had brought. The English sailors thought little of the Greenlanders at first, and especially disliked the meat and other foods they had to eat, for, they said, dried meat was no substitute for bread, and milk was no substitute for wine and beer, which the English sailors were much accustomed to. Folk said that they grew fat enough on the Greenlanders’ food, anyway, and at the end of the second winter they were not loath to take away as much as they could load into their small ship. After they had left, not a few pointed out that the Greenlanders had made a poor bargain with this particular churchman, for they had received little more than a few items for the cathedral in exchange for almost two years room and board, and in addition, the monk’s foolish quest had cost the settlement two good men it could ill afford to lose—a third if you counted the departure of Ivar Bardarson the priest, who, after twenty years at Gardar overseeing the bishop’s farm and the cathedral, had decided to return to Norway.
Nicholas’ talk, he told Asgeir, had given him a great longing for Nidaros, where he had spent some years in his youth, and for Bremen, the scene of his schooling. He was getting to be an old man, and soon he feared he would be too old ever to leave Gardar, and so he left. Many people