by Jane Smiley
Some little while before high tide, but after dark, they rowed the boat up to the island and clambered onto the ledge, which stood about two ells above the surface of the water, but would stand about eight ells above the water at low tide. The walruses were in their autumn humor, which is phlegmatic and inattentive, but even so, a few of the bulls would be raising their giant heads and gazing about at all times, so the Greenlanders got down upon their stomachs, and slithered from the shore into the group, and they went without speaking, and were still if any nearby bull lifted his gaze.
Now it happened that the men had spread out, and had their longest spears ready in their hands, and they looked to Hauk, who gave them a signal, and when he gave this signal, the men leaped up and began to run among the walruses, spearing them in their chests and drawing forth their heart’s blood, for this is the way a walrus must be killed, not with blows to the head, like seals, for every walrus has a head like a stone, and is invulnerable there. And as soon as the first blows were struck, the walruses all roused themselves and began to heave about, with a great bellowing and scraping of flesh over rock. Some of these beasts did go toward the water, and the men made sure to stay out of their way, but other beasts, in their confusion, went away from the water, and the men pursued them and speared them and the wet rocks were soon slippery with blood. And it was the case that Sigurd Sighvatsson stumbled and fell in front of two bull walruses, and he was speared with their tusks and crushed with their weight, but all of the other Greenlanders kept their feet and no other men were lost.
Now the sun began to come up, and the men began to parley among themselves about the butchering of the beasts, for though a good length of walrus hide rope is a valuable thing, folk get it only at the cost of great inconvenience, at the cost of bathing in the blood of these animals. On the other hand, men may quickly go among their kill and chop off the tusks and faces of the beasts, and half of the Greenlanders wished to arrange things in this way, while others wished to take the rope. Now Hauk Gunnarsson said, “We may butcher until the tide rises again, and take the tusks, or we may butcher until the tide rises the second time and take some of the rope, but by the time of the second high tide, we will expect company, and so we must set lookouts on the shore to watch for bears,” for it is the case that in the north, bears come together for one thing only, and that is to eat the walruses that men have killed for them.
But the Greenlanders could not decide, and wasted time wrangling among themselves, and so the first high tide passed before all of the tusks had been cut off, and then it seemed just as well to take some of the hide, so three men stripped down and went among the walruses in their undergarments and began to slice off the skin. And the blood poured forth, and steam rose around the beasts, keeping the butchers warm enough, and soon the men were red and gory from head to toe. Hauk Gunnarsson did not help with this work, but stayed near the shoreline, watching after bears, for he thought he might kill one in the water, but in this he had no luck. Now the tide rose again, and bears began crawling out of the sea, and the men took what trophies they had gained, and went to the boat, and jumped down into it. But when all the men were in the boat, and they had begun to pull away from the shore, it was discovered that the bones of Sigurd Sighvatsson had been left behind through greed for walrus trophies and fear of bears. And this was considered very ill luck, to leave the corpus of a man as food for bears, and to take none of his bones back to Gardar for proper burial.
Nicholas wanted to go farther and farther north, even though the Greenlanders assured him that soon the ship would come to the land at the foot of the Greenland bottom, and they pointed out to him the way that the shore turned westward, and the western shore, too, could be seen in fine weather. And it did seem that they had reached the end of the ocean fjord, and Nicholas was about to turn back, when one morning they awoke to find themselves in a wide fjord or riverlike body of water with a strong current. According to Nicholas, the direction of this fjord headed due north. But night had returned to the land by this time, and the Greenlanders were hesitant about entering far into this northward-tending fjord. When it was time to sleep, Nicholas took Osmund aside, and spoke with him for a long time, keeping him awake, for Nicholas, it appeared, needed no sleep, and was again like a madman about his project, and he harried and chattered at Osmund and Hauk and the rest of the Greenlanders, until they finally agreed to go a day’s sail to the north. And that day, many narwhal were sighted, and in addition four polar bears, and so the Greenlanders thought that hunting might be good here.
They moved forward, avoiding the drift ice, hunting one day for every day that they sailed, and the Greenlanders were pretty well satisfied, and at last they came into open sea, and Nicholas said that they were at the top of the world, judging by the stars and the sun, but the Greenlanders were inclined to think that they had merely found another large bay. Here the ship turned around and began to head southward. Now, although it was only a few days after their northward sailing, the fjord was much fuller of pack ice, and leads between the floes opened and closed in a matter of moments. Ice, as every Greenlander knew, could suddenly begin heaving and exploding into the air as if flung up by the curses of witches and trolls. From time to time the men had to get out of the ship and drag it over the ice to open water. It was on one of these trips that they encountered a group of skraelings in sledges drawn by packs of wolves. These people could not be approached because of the howling of these wolves, until one skraeling went amongst his pack and beat at them with a bone club. The skraelings were carrying piles of narwhal hides and tusks, which the Greenlanders eyed enviously, but only Hauk Gunnarsson consented to approach them, for, he said, he knew some of their devilish tongue from earlier journeys to the north. In the end, the skraelings traded a considerable number of horns and some seal blubber for two iron-tipped spears and three of the Englishman’s iron-bladed knives, and they appeared to consider themselves well repaid. One of these knives had a tempered blade and a silver handle with the figure of St. Matthew on it, and some of the Greenlanders laughed at the thought of a skraeling with such a knife. Nicholas grumbled that Hauk would have traded away all of his astronomical instruments, but nevertheless he appeared well pleased with his look at the devilish skraeling peoples, and declared them certainly to be denizens of hell, as the old books said. He made the Greenlanders promise to have the narwhal horns blessed at the cathedral as soon as Gardar was reached.
Now the Greenlanders were anxious to return home, for the days were shortening quickly, but the ship got among some islands that none of the Greenlanders had ever seen, where the currents were strong and the ice thick and deceptive. The ship was fog- and icebound many times, and the travelers began to despair of their lives at the approach of winter. Only Nicholas and Hauk Gunnarsson were confident, the one because of the mercy of God, for which he prayed loudly and long every day, and the other because he had wintered in the north before, and knew that there would be much game, even in the dark of the long winter night. But the others were not as confident, and pressed for continuing the journey south at every possible opportunity.
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 pointed out that Gizur Gizursson, the lawspeaker who lived at Brattahlid, who had allowed Ivar to take care of the business of the eastern settlement for twenty years, was much older than Ivar, too old, it was said, to remember much about the law or about settling disputes. And now there was much more grumbling about the failure of the archbishop to send a bishop to Gardar, for there was no one in the settlement who could take a strong hand either in behalf of the Church or in behalf of the king. People began to notice how the churches were in disrepair and how the precious altar furnishings were tarnished and bent or broken in many of the churches, and this was because Ivar Bardarson had come only to husband the goods of the bishopric, he had been given no right to expend them. In the same way, it was said, the souls of the folk were tarnished with sin and bent from improper practices, and broken with despair that a new bishop would ever come, and some threatened to return to the old religion of Thor and Odin and Frey, although their neighbors laughed at them and said that those beliefs were in even greater disrepair. And so it continued for the Greenlanders, with some good years and some cold ones, for six more summers, and then a ship arrived from Norway, and on it was Bishop Alf, who had come to take over the see at Gardar, and rectify those errors the souls of Greenland might have fallen into.
Asgeir was among the first of the farmers to go to Gardar after the arrival of the new bishop, and he carried many gifts: a pair of narwhal horns he had held in reserve from Hauk’s last trip, many thick sheepskins in a number of shades, rolls of fine wadmal, and an excellent cup carved by his father, Gunnar Asgeirsson, from a walrus tusk in the time of the last bishop. The bishop, he reported, accepted these graciously, saying that the Greenlanders had brought him handsome items for his household.
Alf was an older man than Asgeir had expected, almost as old as Ivar Bardarson would be, but taller and thinner, with cheekbones like red knobs, and eyes the pale color of the spring sky above the fjords. He did not, Asgeir told Ingrid, have the easy ways of a man much accustomed to good fellowship, and talked of Greenland as if it were at the end of the earth, or as if the Greenlanders were trolls of some sort. When Asgeir made a joke about men returning to the old faith in Thor and Odin, the new bishop had thought he was serious, and Asgeir had felt awkward and had fallen to making explanations. In addition, the ship that had carried him was a small one, and had few goods, only some pitch and some oatseed, and not enough of either for all the farmsteads in Eriks Fjord, much less the whole settlement. There were also some wheel rims, and hubs and axles that Asgeir had his eye on, but a number of farmers had been there, and all had seen the dearth of goods.
Nonetheless, the bishop did have some young priests with him, properly ordained by the archbishop himself, and all properly trained, with only one of the three an older man who had been rushed into the priesthood after the Great Death, for the plague had returned again to Norway and England and the rest of Europe around the time of Ivar Bardarson’s departure, but no one was able to tell Asgeir whether his friend had fallen victim to it. He had also asked after Thorleif, for now the Greenlanders often talked of Thorleif and his wondrous ship, his bottomless store of goods, and everything exactly what was needed by every man, but no one had heard of Thorleif, either, or Skuli, or any of the other sailors anyone could remember.
These young priests had brought many books with them for the Gardar library, and it was said among everyone who visited the new bishop that Gardar would soon be a busy, bustling place, as it had been in the time of the old bishop, and, Asgeir said, soon Olaf Finnbogason would have to go back, because people there would suddenly remember him and wonder where he had gotten to. Olaf laughed at this, but the farm folk said he was little minded to spend his time puzzling over books he had never read with strangers he had never met.
Margret was now twenty-three, tall and fair in coloring, and she had been well taught by Kristin in her summers at Siglufjord all the skills of a good farm wife. She went about in shoes and stockings and gowns she herself had woven, dyed, and sewed together, with her hair held in bands she had fashioned in the evenings out of brightly colored yarns. In addition, she had learned of Ingrid many of the uses of herbs and plants, for childbirth and for the curing of the springtime bleeding disease and many things besides. She worked every day with the other women, spinning and weaving and making cheese and butter, and there was no reason why she had not been married, or even betrothed, but she was not. It was true that Helga Ingvadottir had reached the age of twenty-four before coming to Greenland with Asgeir, but she had been a stiff-necked, opinionated woman, and unpleased by the men she knew. Kristin told Asgeir that Margret did not know how to be alluring, and Asgeir said that his wealth should be alluring enough, but indeed, everyone knew that along with the wealth and the capable wife must come the son.
Gunnar was now sixteen, and although he was tall and handsome, he was entirely useless around the farmstead, as he had always been. He could be put to chinking fences or manuring the fields, and he did this simple work cheerfully but slowly, always tempting whoever was working with him to do Gunnar’s share as well as his own. He slept long nights, even in the height of summer, and sometimes fell asleep during the day. He was never taken hunting because he could not be quiet or still. He spent many of h
is days sitting with Ingrid by the fire, for the nurse was extremely old now, stiff in the joints, almost blind, and close to death, and Gunnar was her only friend, and only he took pains to make sure that her meat suited her and that she was warm. Many days they spent mumbling between themselves while the others were in the storehouses or in the fields, and Gunnar even resorted to spinning wool, like a woman, in order to earn his place at the table, for Ingrid said that he must do something. Asgeir said that all men do what they do and seek their own fate, but others in the settlement said that he had ill luck in his children. The servingfolk treated Gunnar as if he were weak-minded, always laughing at him or speaking to him in loud voices, and this was so much the custom that Asgeir did not object, nor Margret, nor even Gunnar himself.
Among the priests who came to Greenland with Bishop Alf was Pall Hallvardsson, who was sent to Vatna Hverfi to assist Nikolaus, the priest at Undir Hofdi church, who, like all the other Greenland priests, was now rather old, although still hale and outspoken. Sira Pall Hallvardsson was not Norwegian, but Flemish, although his father had been an Icelander and had traveled to Greenland once himself, as a boy on a trading ship, in the time of the last bishop. Few priests, Pall Hallvardsson told Asgeir, actually requested duties in Greenland, and so when he had spoken of his wishes, the archbishop had been happy to grant them. Pall Hallvardsson had studied at Ghent, and had been in the care and service of the Church since the death of his mother of the plague shortly after his birth.