The Greenlanders

by Jane Smiley

  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 to death. The horses ate what the family ate, especially dried meat and seaweed. One of the servingwomen died from a fall on the ice and one of the shepherds was lost in a storm. It was still unusually cold at egg gathering time, but then the weather broke, and the summer was high and hot. Gunnar was now six years old, and Asgeir spoke of sending Margret down to Siglufjord, to live with Kristin the wife of Thord and learn how women must use their time.

  Thorleif made his ship ready for departure. Early in the summer, shortly after egg gathering, the people from Gunnars Stead went over to Gardar to make a few last trades, and watch the loading of goods onto the ship. Now Ivar Bardarson had the Gardar servingmen remove the east wall of the largest storehouse, both turf and stone, for the first time in ten years, and this took a whole day. Then the servingmen and the sailors began carrying things to the ship. The children stood staring, and the adults soon did, too, asking each other who would have thought Greenland to have such wealth. A hundred and twenty-four pairs of walrus tusks wrapped in fine wadmal of a reddish brown color went in first, for they were ivory, and extremely valuable, said Ivar Bardarson, and formed the greater part of the tithe owed by the Gardar bishopric to the pope for the last ten years. Amongst these went forty-nine twisted narwhal tusks, and then, on top of these, cushioning and protecting them, went the two polar bear hides of Lavrans Kollgrimsson and Osmund Thordarson, and three more that men had gotten in the days before the end of the western settlement. These, too, were very valuable, and would probably go to the archbishop in Nidaros or even to the pope himself. On top of these, from one side of the ship to the other and almost from end to end, were laid coils of walrus hide rope, and on top of these, rolls and rolls of woven wadmal, in many shades. Gunnar pointed out to Margret the distinct Gunnars Stead shade, a deep brownish purple, exactly similar to the color of the clothes they were wearing, and Margret said that some of these lengths had certainly been woven by Helga Ingvadottir and gone as Asgeir’s tithe to the bishopric. Now the roomy hull of the ship was nearly full, so the sailors laid the planking of the deck over the goods. On top of the planking went piles of reindeer hides and sealskins, blue and white fox furs, a cage containing six white falcons, leather bags full of seal blubber and vats of whale oil, leather bags of dried sealmeat, some butter and sourmilk for the return voyage, and wheels of cheeses for the archbishop of Nidaros from the farms at Gardar. In a special place was a large package wrapped in yellowish wadmal that contained, people said, the furs Thorleif brought from Markland that could not be found in Greenland, and finally, the bear was brought with his cage, where he would spend his time on the journey, although he had been largely tamed by one of Ivar Bardarson’s serving youths, who was going along. In addition, a Greenlander from Herjolfsnes was going to learn to be a sailor, and Odd, the brother of Thord from Siglufjord, thought that a fortune might be made with Thorleif. Gunnar asked Hauk if he, too, was going, for Asgeir kept saying that a single man without children would do well to see the world, but Hauk thought little of the world he had heard about, although he said that he would surely go if he could be certain that Thorleif’s ship would be blown off course to Vinland. Thorleif was only three sailors short of a full crew (for in addition to Lavrans and the lookout, two sailors had died of a fever). Skuli and another boy had filled out considerably in Greenland, and so he had few worries. They set out, and many people said good riddance. Ingrid said that in her grandmother’s youth two and three ships would come to the Greenlanders every season, but Asgeir said this could not have been even in those days, when, everyone knew, Greenland was on the shores of Paradise.

  In the summer that Thorleif’s ship went back to Bergen, Margret Asgeirsdottir went with Kristin the wife of Thord Magnusson to Siglufjord, and Hauk Gunnarsson declared that it was high time his nephew Gunnar learned to come upon birds and snare them, for even the bones of birds were useful around the farm for needles and hooks, not to mention their meat, feathers, and down. Hauk sat across the table from Gunnar, looking at him. “The birds about the farmstead are wary enough, not like birds in the Northsetur or in Markland, who come to perch on your arms and head if you sit still long enough. But they can still be caught, with a little care.” Gunnar nodded, but it seemed to him a tedious thing, to walk about, far up into the hills. Not even the dogs accompanied them, for Hauk preferred to hunt without dogs, as skraelings do.

  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, Margret returned from Siglufjord, and the family sat quietly at Gunnars Stead through the winter.

  Now it happened in the spring, some four years after the coming of Thorleif, that another ship arrived at Gardar, but this was not a merchant ship, and it carried nothing except a few presents for Ivar Bardarson, some altar furnishings for the cathedral, and news of England, for the master of the ship was an English monk named Nicholas, who had come to Greenland out of curiosity. At the news of this, there was a great deal of talk about curiosity. The bishop, folk said, wasn’t even curious about his lands or his farms, much less about his flock, for it had now been twenty years since the death of the last bishop, and many who didn’t care to be were surely in a state of mortal sin without knowing it, and a monk could come from England out of mere curiosity, but a bishop could not come to do God’s work.

  Nevertheless, the Monk Nicholas was a charming man with many stories to tell about the Church, and about life in England since the Great Death and in other places, such as France and among the Dutch, for he was a well-traveled man. Some said that his stories were not those of most monks, for he also knew what the women were wearing and how rich men were furnishing their houses. He asked many questions of the Greenlanders, and encouraged Ivar Bardarson not only to tell him everything he had learned about the eastern settlement and the western settlement, but was eager for him to write it down, as he had spoken of, for, Nicholas said, the people of Europe hardly believed that Greenland existed anymore. And this was the beginning of Ivar Bardarson’s project, which lasted the following winter.

  Now it happened one day that the Monk Nicholas appeared at Gunnars Stead, and sought out Hauk Gunnarsson, who was snaring rabbits in the hills, and he was full of questions: How many days’ sail was it to the Northsetur? What was the sailing weather like at this time of the year? Was it true that Ivar Bardarson and some men had rowed a boat to the western settlement in six days? How far to the north had Hauk ever gone? What sort of folk were the skraelings there? Did they speak their prayers backward and recoil at the sign of the cross? Was it their clothing that was furry, or were they themselves covered with fur, like beasts? Where was it that the ice turned to fire in the north, as it must according to old books? And all Hauk said to any of these questions about the northern regions was “I know not. The hunting is good there.” Later, after Nicholas went back to Gardar, Hauk said, “This fellow seems a fool to me. Any man may hunt in the northern regions, and prosper, but these notions of his have no purpose.”

  “You may say,” Asgeir returned, “that the English are often thus: they talk merely to talk, and go idly on great journeys merely to see the sights.”

  Some days after this, Nicholas appeared again, and he found Hauk at his morning meat, and he sat down with him at once, and leaned forward and pushed his trencher aside, although Hauk had just been eating from it, and he said, “Hauk Gunnarsson, it is my fixed intention to sail north this summer, and I desire your guidance.” Hauk laughed, and said that it was too late in the summer for such a journey.

  “But,” said Nicholas, “it is my fixed intention to find the Greenland bottoms, and to see such skraelings as may be found, for that is why I have come to Greenland.”

  Hauk laughed again, and said that he must put off his intention, for it was no one else’s intention to comply.

  And Nicholas returned a few days later, and he said that he had found a crew of Greenlanders who wished to hunt in the old hunting grounds, and the most prominent of these was Osmund Thordarson, of Brattahlid. Eindridi Gudmundsson and Sigurd Sighvatsson were also eager to go, for they had prospered in the north before. Indeed, many folk remembered the prosperity of the old days, when men went north every year and brought back quantities of walrus hide and narwhal horn, and the settlement was rich in items that the archbishop of Nidaros and the merchants of Bergen cared for. Thorleif had carried away what was stored in the bishop’s storehouse, and now folk were hard pressed to pay in sheepskins, cheeses, and wadmal what they had once paid in hides and ropes and horns. Hauk said to Asgeir that Nicholas was like a madman with this project. “The bottoms will be full of drift ice, and soon, anyway, there will be little to see in the dark, whether of ice turning to fire, or skraelings turning to demons.” And now Nicholas came again, with Osmund, and they said that the ship was ready. Osmund walked off a little to the side with Hauk, and he said, “The voyage to the Northsetur is little like a voyage to Markland, for the winds are usually favorable, and there is no lack of provisions. Are there not sheep and goats still in the pastures of the western settlement? Indeed, my friend,” said Osmund, “you are strangely unwilling, when you yourself have often gone off to the north any time of the year, and stayed there.” Now Asgeir came up to them, and he had been talking with Nicholas, and he said, “My brother, will not the sailors be Greenlanders, all except for Nicholas himself? Greenlanders know something about the ways of the ice. And a few walrus tusks and narwhal horns might ease the difficulty of the tithe. It is seven cows we lost last winter, and the sheep cast fewer lambs than they have been doing.” And so Hauk Gunnarsson was persuaded to take ship with the Englishman, and guide it north so that Nicholas could have a look at things.

  Seven days after leaving Gardar, the ship’s crew put in to Lysufjord in the western settlement and rowed to the Sandnes church, where they drew the boat up onto the strand and looked about for a place to rest for a day. The farmsteads were deserted and many roofs and walls had fallen in. The hay in the fields was sometimes thick, but in other places, sand had drifted in. The sheep and goats that the Greenlanders had hoped to find were dead, or had wandered away, but there were many cod in the fjord, and voyagers ate well and bedded down in a large farmstead of many rooms. One man found a spindle whorl and a loom weight where he was sleeping, and he kept them, although many said such abandoned things were ill-omened and would bring misfortune to the journey. In the night, Hauk Gunnarsson, who had said little since leaving Gardar, woke up shouting with an evi
l dream. In it, he said, a giantess with the face of a walrus was found on a piece of ice, dismembering and eating a little boy, although the boy was still alive. At the telling of this dream, many of the Greenlanders declared that the wisest course would be to end their journey and return to the eastern settlement, but the Monk Nicholas scoffed at their fears, saying that not all dreams were visions, and that many dreams were the result of the previous day’s activities, or of something the dreamer chanced to eat. In fact, he said, the coming of the dream in the early part of the night showed that it could not be a vision, for the old books all said that visions could come only toward morning. Nicholas was a man of great learning, and Hauk Gunnarsson declared that he was perfectly willing to go on, and so after another day in the settlement, they rowed out of Lysufjord and began their journey north, away from the settlements and the homes of men.

  They coasted north for some days, frequently harpooning seals or snaring birds or sighting polar bears and reindeer. The Monk Nicholas charted the height of the sun using a peculiar instrument that none of the Greenlanders were allowed to touch, for it was rare and very costly, said Nicholas, and was called an astrolabe. From time to time they sighted the skin boats of skraelings at a distance, but they could not come close enough to the little boats for Nicholas to satisfy his curiosity about these beings.

  Now they came to a walrus island that some of the older men had visited before, and they saw that many walrus were hauled out on this island, piled high on top of one another, males, females, and half grown calves, scores upon scores. It seemed to the Greenlanders that this was what they had come north for, to make a walrus kill, and they began talking among themselves about how to go about this hunt. The case was that only Hauk Gunnarsson, Sigurd Sighvatsson, and Eindridi Gudmundsson had knowledge of walrus hunting, but the others were even more eager to try their skill, and so Hauk gave them a plan, and this is what they did.