Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

‘And what if we do find a hand in the ice?’ exclaimed Alvar. None of them knew the answer to that.

The people in Kaanneq treated Igimaq coldly, as usual. The women gave him the evil eye and the men greeted him only by lifting their chins slightly. One of them actually called out to him and asked whether it wasn’t too late for him to move back in with his wife, now that all the men had used her. The hunter ground his teeth but did not turn around, acting as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Whoever said it was a coward; no one with a trace of self-respect would say such a thing to a man whose back was turned. A real man either spoke his mind to your face, or kept quiet and let the womenfolk gossip. Igimaq recognized the voice and knew perfectly well who the man was. It was one of those sheep, a man who had allowed himself to be debauched by alcohol and now let the system provide for him. Like Naruana, his son. Still, their fates were not comparable, nor was the man’s as tragic. He had had nothing to offer, had been a poor hunter with the stamina of a little boy. He’d been skinny his whole life and conditions here weren’t suited to that build, as you could see from the creatures that thrived in this place.

His son, however, had been blessed with all the qualities a good man needed. He was sturdily built, tenacious and unflappable. He had done the hunter’s ancestors proud, until he started to slip down the slope of misfortune. The boy had lost everything that drives a man: pride, enthusiasm and perseverance. From being self-sufficient and having enough to spare, he became like that wretch who shouted insults at people. Hopefully Naruana had not yet sunk so low – still, he had fallen far enough. Igimaq hoped he would not run into his son. He wouldn’t be able to bear it and he feared losing his self-control and hitting him so hard that the young man’s remaining teeth would be knocked out. But realistically there was no danger of seeing him. It was still too early in the day for his son to be on his feet. His time was the night; his behaviour that of the scavengers that hung around the heels of superior and more resourceful animals. Memories of the lessons when the hunter had held his son’s soft hand in his rough palms piled up. The stump where his index finger had been ached.

The hunter’s finger had been frostbitten. At the start of a seal-hunting expedition out on the ice he had clumsily cut a hole in one of his gloves with a small knife inherited from his father, and instead of turning back and waiting until the next morning he had allowed himself to be lured by the great catch the day promised. The ice had been thick and uncracked and the weather the best it could be for hunting. When he returned home that evening with a sledful of seals, his finger was useless. He cut it off before he went to sleep and asked his son to take his place on a sled trip he had promised to lead with a group of Westerners. He wanted to repair the glove before he went back out into the cold, and that’s how his son became acquainted with brennivín; he sat drinking with the group at the end of the trip and never looked back. The loss of his finger had cost the hunter much more than the effort it took to train his middle finger to pull the trigger of his rifle easily and securely. Naturally it took several months for the young man to plunge to the bottom, but all the signs of what was to come appeared immediately after he returned from the trip. He stared at the beer cans in the hands of people they met in a way that was embarrassing to see. Then he started disappearing night after night and always returned home late, until the day came when he did not return. The hunter’s wife went the same way soon afterwards, and that’s when he left. Now he lived in a tent, like his forefathers, far enough from the village to ensure that no one would disturb him. The only ones who visited him were the old men, who appreciated the ancient values and understood his decision and the pattern of his life.

No, the hunter had other things to attend to than meeting up with the disgrace that was his family. He had come to speak to the man considered to hold the most power in the village, a childhood friend of his who had been involved in casting his son and wife to ruin. The hunter did not look forward to it, but their conversation had to take place nonetheless. This former friend of his had to listen to him – he owed him that, having cost him his daughter. He took no pleasure in watching his friend grovel and count the minutes until their conversation ended. Far from it. However, the hunter had to warn people, and this was the way that he felt would be most effective. He wasn’t about to start going from house to house to tell people that hanging over them was the same fate met by the first residents of the town. No one would listen to him that way. Besides, it was only this former friend of his who knew the story and so would hopefully understand the gravity of the situation immediately. Unless he had lost his connection with his roots.

Two little girls with tightly plaited hair walked past and quickened their pace when they saw him. Their mothers had doubtless warned them about him, told them that the man in the tent would take them and eat them if they didn’t behave themselves. He never saw any boys here any more, which hurt him more than the loss of his own son. Perhaps this conversation wouldn’t matter. The town was marked for death anyway if there were no men left in it to hunt.

Thóra felt terribly sunburned on the tiny bit of her face that was exposed. The snow magnified the weak winter sun, which had risen slowly as they drove to the site. She felt relieved when they put down their shovels and went back into the shed. Still, their efforts had been successful; beneath the heavy snow they had found an irregular hole in the apparently bottomless ice layer, but Friðrikka said that it did not fit with any procedure the drillers were supposed to carry out. It was the correct location for their drilling, but according to her the drill had been applied in an extremely unusual manner, and there were peculiar marks left by ice axes and shovels. If the proper procedures had been followed, facing them now should have been a single black borehole the same diameter as the drill shaft, but instead there were many holes scattered about, none of which penetrated deep enough into the ice to be useful for gathering core samples. All of these peculiar holes had been made in one larger pit that appeared to have been dug with a shovel, but when they cleared it of snow it turned out to be empty. The pit was up against a cliff wall at the foot of a mountain rising high above them a bit further north. Directly behind the pit appeared an arched line of stone in the cliff, which rose up through the ice and formed a sort of halo. At the edge of the pit Matthew had caught a glimpse of something in the ice, and they decided to try to get whatever it was out in the hope of gaining some idea of what the ice might have contained before the drillers started working. With great difficulty they managed to scrape out an extremely unusual object, the likes of which neither Thóra nor Matthew had ever seen before. After removing most of the ice from it, it turned out to be a bone that had been polished, with holes drilled in two places in the middle. A leather strap had been tied to it at both ends, meaning that above all, it resembled a giant’s armband.

‘Does anyone know what this is?’ Matthew passed around the object.

‘No idea,’ said Friðrikka. ‘It’s something Greenlandic, but what it’s for I don’t know.’ Alvar took the bone and looked it over, but he was equally unable to provide an explanation for it and gave up trying to guess what it was. He handed the object back to Matthew with a shrug.

‘Maybe the villagers can provide us with an answer,’ said Matthew, grabbing a dirty tea towel from the back of one of the chairs in the shed. He wrapped it around the bone and stuck it in his pocket. They were hungry and ready to head back to the camp. Thóra hoped that someone had had the sense to put together lunch for the group, but she doubted it. Neither the doctor nor Eyjólfur appeared likely to be very domestically minded, and she knew Bella well enough to recognize that she would be the last person to have prepared them a meal.