He got as far as “Thó thú” before a snapping Doberman on a long leash bolted past the old man who answered the door. The dog snapped out years of pent-up aggression and caught Burr’s cuff. He kicked free, and the Icelander didn’t say a word. He let out more leash until Burr was running back to his car with the dog howling after him. With windows rolled up, he listened to the dog bark back all Burr’s quotations, all his puns. He decided that was it, no more pedantry. No more grave robbing. No more obfuscation. No more association. It was up to him and the radio.
He had cash for maybe two tanks of gas. He stayed west of Akureyri, chiefly because that was the radio station’s range, and Nimoy, Elaine, and the Wolfman were his only friends in this world.
Then a break. So far as Burr could tell, it was Nimoy who broke the story. Burr could understand about a quarter of the proper nouns they said, half when he was parked and looking at a map. All he understood from Nimoy’s broadcast was “Odin,” “Dalvík,” and “Tröllaskagi.” Two of those were places and one was a Norse god, which was why Nimoy chuckled. Several hours later, the Wolfman laughed through a report of the same story, this time with a recorded interview from an eyewitness. It wasn’t until Elaine told the story in English—there were dozens of reported sightings of the Norse god Odin wandering through valleys just outside the town of Dalvík—that Burr headed farther north to the troll’s peninsula, Tröllaskagi.
Ástríður recollected the events for her father while he dressed his wounds in the kitchen and later for the national news. At first Ólafur attributed her account to an unhealthy obsession with the Sagas, but the carnage outside was real and a reminder that these stories came from Icelanders living in the same wild land.
Ástríður first thought the bear was another bale of hay. She looked past it and chased the sheep until it lifted its head and sniffed the air. It shambled over like an old cat. The sheep, always skittish, bolted for the highlands. Most got snared by the barbed wire fence or fell in the cleft separating the pasture from the road. The bear jogged toward the densest mass of sheep and struck four dead in as many seconds. He then batted sheep caught in the fence, but appeared to have no interest in them once they were dead on the ground. The bear bit into the loin of the shorn sheep and tore off its leg. It plunged back into the animal and soaked its white coat red.
Their black dog had been sniffing the air and barking furiously. Now that the bear turned his attention to Ástríður, the black sheepdog sprinted between them, snapping at the bear. With one swipe, the bear flung the dog farther than she could throw a stone. Seeing the dog in the air unfroze her. She sprinted for the door.
Ólafur, eyes completely white, ran right by her directly for the bear. He lowered his shoulder to bowl it over. He was still five feet away when the bear hit him with a furious right paw, clawing through his jacket and tearing open his chest. Ólafur’s neck snapped back when he hit the ground, knocking him unconscious. The bear sunk his canines into Ólafur’s calf and dragged him toward the sheep carcasses.
Ástríður ran upstairs to the painting studio and carried a chair to the wall. She pulled down her grandfather’s shotgun from the mount. She breeched the gun. Both barrels were empty. In his desk drawer she found different boxes of shells, one black, one red, and grabbed a handful of each. She ran back downstairs and saw the now red bear dragging her father by the leg not twenty feet from the porch.
She put two black shells into the still-breeched gun and took aim from the rail of the front porch. They hadn’t shot since last year because she was simply too small for their only gun. The weakest shot had almost taken her arm off. She had been warned that the black shot did the same thing to her father’s arm that the birdshot did to hers. This was going to hurt. She might not be able to take a second shot. She aimed for the biggest part of the bear, the part farthest from her father.
The report echoed up over the scree slopes. The bear sat down before letting go of Ólafur. Then it stood back up and returned to the ram it had been picking at earlier. The slug thumped squarely in his rear leg, in the biggest part of the bear, but the fur didn’t redden with blood. The bear shrugged the shot off like a bee sting.
The gunshot was the first thing Ólafur heard. He imagined that he heard a thump as the bullet lodged in the bear’s leg, but he didn’t tell that to the press. He scrambled to a crawl, his right leg shattered, and hobbled to the house. Ástríður was crumpled against the wooden wall, holding her collarbone and whimpering.
Ólafur took the gun from her feet and the two huddled in the house and locked the door. He called the police. Twenty SUVs were in his drive within the hour. Two police cars were right behind. The bear was slinking around the scree mountain, a stone’s throw from the decimated pasture.
Burr had hiked himself into a dilemma. The scree slope he’d slid down was too shifty for him to scramble back up. He stood on a moss-grown ledge that looked like a reef at low tide. Before him, a valley that stretched into the walls of two mountains. Beside him, a sheer cliff carved by the millennia of ice cap melting into the stream that drained in the dale. He unbuckled his hip belt and dropped the pack on the gravel embankment. The pack was stuffed with all of his gear, then stacked so high with boil-in-bag meals and fuel canisters that it didn’t close properly and extended above his head. It weighed even more than when the employees had stuffed it with sandbags to get a fit. He massaged his shoulders. After a few breaths he peered down the cliff. The stream was at least thirty feet down and littered with boulders that could tear him in two.
The paracord in the lid of his backpack was designed for this very situation. Burr unspooled it all, knotted it to the handle of his pack, and paid out rope, inching it down one rope burn at a time. Halfway down it snagged on rock. He tried to free the cord, but almost lost his footing. Until now, the descent had seemed reversible. He would have to let it drop. Burr dropped the pack and realized he would have to follow it down the wet rock.
He didn’t hear anything crack, but it was stupid not to house the canister stove and, more importantly, the canisters of fuel. The whole pack could have exploded. Burr had seen enough of that sort of thing.
He looked over the edge he was about to descend without ropes. Does one face forward or backward when climbing down a rock? How foolish to have wasted his lifeline lowering a bag he could have easily carried, or dropped.
He looked down again and tried to plan a route.
It was no use. The rocks that looked stable obscured the rocks behind them. He dropped to his knees, looked around at the melting snowcap, the stretching greens of twilight, the slick black rocks, and thought, if one had to, this would be an acceptable place to die. But it would be a legendary place to not die.
He rolled onto his stomach and tapped his feet for the first rocks. After deep breaths, then quick breaths, he transferred his weight to his legs. He traded his grip on the ledge for a grip on the rock and was thus attached at four points. His short-lived rule for Owen on playground ladders was three points of contact at all times. Had he made that up? There had to be an underlying truth there. It was canonical today, because that was the first and only thing he knew about climbing: three points of contact at all times.
He found a ledge for his left foot. Four points of contact with the rock face. Now he could free his right leg. As soon as he transferred his weight to his left foot, the foothold crumbled away. A divot of moss dropped to the black rocks below. Burr quickly kicked for a new foothold and realized that he would have to test each purchase before abandoning his holds. This entire rock face was covered in moss from ledge to slick slope before the stream. It was impossible to tell what was an untouched clump of moss and what was a millimeter skin over a solid grip of rock.
Shaking with the strain of every grip, Burr picked his way down until he was faced with a completely smooth rock wall. He was out of footholds. In the past half hour he had descended about fifteen feet and was still another ten, at least, from the streambed. He didn’t have the ener
gy to climb back up. Spidering along the side was beyond his level of competence, and besides, the smooth black U extended the length of the wall. He would have to slide and hope that he was able to slow himself enough to avoid the jagged rocks in the streambed. He assessed the situation. Rolling an ankle would be a fatal injury in a place like this. He could see fifty miles, and there was no one. The moss suggested that no one had climbed this rock for quite some time, if ever. If he rolled an ankle and couldn’t hike out, it would be decades before someone found his body. He breathed deeply. His hands were shaking from stress and from strain. If he didn’t do something, his muscles were going to give out, or his heart was. He let go.
His toes skidded down the smooth black wall, his fingers clawing for anything, his nose never more than an inch from the rock while his forearms protected his head, down to the bottom of the slope and stopped, less than a foot from a crippling black rock.
It took him a minute to realize he was stable. He hyperventilated. He was light-headed. That could have cost him his life, and it was over in a blip. It was past. Shaking, Burr looked out at the flooded valley below. Hundreds of sheep on the grassy slope echoed the ice caps. The smoke over the fjord caught the long waves of twilight. What a place to survive. And what a story for his son.
Across the stream, cantilevered stone shaded the wet grass. Burr removed the scuffed trekking poles strapped to the side of the pack, hoisted his backpack, and picked his way over the three-foot stream from slippery rock to slippery rock, taking a series of delicate steps where a leap might have sufficed. He collapsed on the far side, his pack his pillow. Looking up at the weathered rock, he spotted a cave. He knew Owen would have done the same.
This was the second valley he had hiked into and the first cave he had seen. Burr climbed up the opposing rock until he could see the back of the empty cave, which was no more than a rock shelter.
Burr made a thankful camp next to the stream. His wrist alarm woke him at six the next morning. By seven he was eating trail mix, his boots were laced, and every stitch of gear was ready for his hunt for more caves.
By noon he was hiking into the third valley on the eastern side of Tröllaskagi. It cut deeper into the mountain and wound away from the lowland pastures. There were no outcroppings here, only glacier-worn scree. As he turned the final bend, he heard the report of a gunshot. He took off his electric blue jacket and pulled the grey rain cover over the red accents of his backpack. He doubled his pace over the rocks. After a half hour of scrambling, he turned to see where the shooter could be positioned. It sounded as if someone had fired at him from the next valley; the shot was certainly from a long way off. And there was only one. He scanned the heights.
The only anomaly in the uniformly grey talus was a small black mouth in the mountain at the end of this valley. He hiked another hundred yards to get a different angle and saw that the mouth of the cave was much larger, but camouflaged by a blue tarp weighed down with gravel and moss.
He stopped to think. There had been no follow-up shot. Only the one. There was nothing to hunt up here, so the shot must have been meant for him. It sounded too faint to have come from the camouflaged cave. The cave seemed no more than sixty yards away, but in Iceland he had no sense of perspective. He’d be exposed on rock the entire time. But the only way was up. He chanced it.
Burr scrambled up the scree and grabbed a rock when it got steeper. He took a big step and slid. He settled a few feet lower, hands gripping the slab that had just been under his feet. He ground in the toes of his boots an inch deeper, to the firmer rock beneath the gravel, and pulled himself back to the slab. He angled into the rock and listened for another shot.
His approach had been too direct. The rock threatened to crumble with every step and take him hundreds of feet down. To get up, he’d have to kick steps and take a switchback route. His trekking poles were more of a liability than an asset—whenever he put weight on the uphill pole, the rock slid down and threatened to sweep him away from the cave in an unfightable riptide. He telescoped down his aluminum poles and lashed them to his pack.
Inch by inch, kicking in his boots and testing each step, Burr angled up the hill, certain at this point that if the shooter was in range, he would have been hit by now, or at least heard a shot. He heard nothing but his breathing.
Every tenth step a slide.
After a half hour, he’d completed the forty-foot scramble to the surety of boulders. He sipped from the dromedary attached to his pack and looked down on the runnels of black rocks each of his slides had upturned.
Burr looked up again to the cave. There was no motion, no sound in the bunker. He pushed hard with his upper legs on the tested holds, certain that if he missed a grip and skidded back down, he wouldn’t have the energy to repeat the ascent.
The ledge was no more than a foot wide and at eye level. He reached high and caught the ground with elbows like axes. Gravel bits burrowed into his fleece and hands as he hauled up his stomach, then his hips, then tilted forward and dangled his feet in the air.
He found his knees in well-worn gravel. Grooves cut from traffic back and forth.
He pulled back the tarp at the mouth of the cave. Rock bits rained down and settled between his shoulders and the pack. A stream of light edged into the cave.
Dawn on his son, asleep.
Burr ducked in and unharnessed his pack without waking Owen. He wanted to collapse and grovel, but summoned the strength to breathe and hold himself up. He had never seen Owen with a beard. He had never seen Owen gaunt. Burr dropped at Owen’s feet.
He tugged Owen’s toe.
Owen rolled on his felt blanket, turning to face Burr and wiping away sleep with the base of his palm.
He looked at his father: backlit shoulders, a golem in grime and chalk, two streaks of mud across his brow. Owen reached out and took his father’s hand.
Burr crawled to Owen’s side. He swept back Owen’s crisp curls and looked at the bad eye, no longer covered by an eye patch. He placed a firm hand on Owen’s shoulder and then tilted his son’s chin to the light, making sure this wasn’t the inflamed mess the doctor had prepared him for. He squinted back tears.
—Thank God you’re okay.
Owen sat up and embraced his father, not quite sure what he was seeing. Head on his father’s shoulder, he caught sight of the pack in the corner and realized this was real.
Burr buried his cheek in his son’s chest, then patted Owen’s cheeks with his gravel-chalked hands.
They sat in silence, laughing and shaking their heads.
Owen hadn’t spoken in weeks. He was only able to find one word:
—Dad?
Burr unlaced his boots and dumped out a fishbowl’s worth of gravel. He filled his stainless steel canteen, handed it to Owen, and collapsed at his son’s side.
—You’re safe. We’re safe.
They sat in silence until helicopter blades snapped the sky. The rotors whistled toward them, then away.
After a minute:
—You heard the shot? I think that was meant for me.
—What? What the fuck, Dad?
—I’m in some trouble. But we’re fine, because you’re fine.
They sat together on a bench Owen had constructed from driftwood and blue jugs of sun-bleached plastic he’d collected from the black beach of Heðinsfjörður. If there was anything redeeming about the travesty of one of the most remote beaches in the world littered with ghost nets, bobs, and nurdles, it was how salt, sun, and grinding through the gyres had tumbled these plastics into colors faded richer than their machine-pressed brightness, now turquoise where once they were industrial blue, now coral where once fuel-can red. Owen’s father looked the same, weathered and blanched, but with a glow amid the scratches.
Burr looked around the cave at Owen’s tiny home.
—I don’t think I brought anyone to your cave.
—It’s more of a lean-to.
Burr’s enthusiasm dropped.
—No, no. It
’s a cave.
Owen took his eye patch from the trekking pole. It was now so overstretched that it sagged across his brow.
—North Iceland was a hell of a landing spot. You know half the farmers in the country think you’re the ghost of Odin.
With the lone trekking pole, eye patch, and battered suit, complete with gaiters stuffed and bound to his shins, Burr saw how his son could be mistaken for the ghost of a pagan god.
—That’s not why they’re hunting me. That sounds like another helicopter making a pass.
They listened to a chopper buzz the cliff and then circle back to the sea.
—That’s not for you.
—Whatever you heard isn’t true.
—I am positive that you’re not a fugitive. You’re not guilty of anything, not anything that would make helicopters chase you, at least. I, on the other hand—
—That’s not in any way reassuring.
Burr wanted to impress Owen with his celebrity and daring, but he needed to comfort his son. He placed a hand on Owen’s back.
—No, you’re fine. Kurt didn’t . . . die. He was severely hurt, however. He cracked his T-4.
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Page 32