Sjon - The Blue Fox

In that very instant the avalanche paid the priest a visit. It clapped him on the back and swept him over the cliff. On the way he scraped against the edge, flaying his balaclava up to his crown and tearing a chunk of fat from his neck.

During the fall it occurred to him that there was less risk of injury if his body was limp. When he came down on the slope of Kinnar, he halted for a split second, then was whirled away again twice as fast as before — now head first. Reverend Baldur suspected that this was his last hour but took it for granted that he should resist his fate. So he tried to raise his head above the avalanche, lifting it as best he could.

The priest felt as if he were caught in the midst of a raging storm but there were no further discomforts until he began to have difficulty breathing.

***

Shortly afterwards the priest’s hell-ride down the hard-packed snow came to an end.

What happened was that the avalanche reared up like a wave on a stony shore and when it broke on the glacial moraine it shot the man into a small cave — a kind of elongated hollow that had formed at the end of the last ice age when the glacial tongue lumbered over the mountain root, extracting a thirty-yard long molar of rock.

That is to say, Reverend Baldur came to rest in a hollow under the glacier.

And the avalanche closed it off with its full weight.

He lay on his back, his right leg straight and about a yard higher than his head, his left leg bent and his left arm on his belly. His right arm was also bent and oddly twisted. The haversack had come off his left arm and the leather strap lay about his right elbow, trapping his upper arm.

The priest was not in a good way but this did not bother him as he was dead to the world.

***

Now it was fortunate for Reverend Baldur that he was well wrapped up.

His mother, Nal Valdimarsdottir, had dressed him for the fox hunt. He wore thick, homespun undergarments, so well fulled that they could stand up on their own; a middle shirt of rabbit skin; two woollen sweaters, one light and the other very thick; Danish trousers; three pairs of knitted stockings; and unshaven sealskin shoes on his feet. Over all he wore leather trousers and a leather coat; double-breasted with whalebone buttons.

But, most important of all, Nal had equipped her son with a scarf of her own knitting. He had wound the scarf around his head to make himself invisible to the vixen and this get-up had prevented the priest from losing anything in the first avalanche but the hat that perched on top, a German piece made of kid, while on the second journey the scarf had held the balaclava in place, although it was now half off his head.

On his chest he had the wretched vixen.

***

The rock splits open behind the man. In the doorway stands a young woman clad in nothing but blue knitted drawers and a red tasselled cap. She takes the man’s hand and guides him into a low-ceilinged chamber. There is a well in the middle of the floor with lead shot floating on the water, not sinking, so the surface is grey with shot.

She points at it and says:

‘This is the Well of Life.’

The priest stirred.

The glacier admitted a dim blue shadow into the little rock chamber and by that faint light Reverend Baldur could make out his surroundings. He lay at the foot of a wall, which must be the eastern wall. He had scrabbled a little with his left foot in his sleep, but the right leg was still stuck fast, pointing straight up in the air. He couldn’t sit up or twist round or free himself, however furiously he struggled.

He soon grew weary from his exertions, a drowsiness fell on him and he lost consciousness once more.

***

The man thought he must have nodded off, for when he was startled awake by his right leg falling to the floor with a noisy splash, it seemed to him that the very rainbow itself was shining in through the ice-eye of the cave mouth. He simply couldn’t work out where the colours were coming from, but guessed that it was night outside and the Aurora Borealis sisters had followed him from Asheimar — they were greeting their old friend Baldur Skuggason.

The priest thought this was most obliging of them.

He was feeling rather chilly so he tried to move and that warmed him up again. He drifted off for an hour or so at intervals during the night, shifting position in between times — but not enough to tire himself out. The strap on his haversack grew steadily tighter on his right arm but he couldn’t reach the knife in his belt to cut it.

The man knew that it was possible to survive for a long time in a snowdrift, but expected the glacier to prove a cold bedspread — the advantage was that he would gradually grow wetter from the snow, which was melting around him.

The evening of the second day drew on.

***

Next morning the heat from Reverend Baldur’s bodily engine had told upon the snow by his left arm and head. He was reasonably compos mentis and able to rise up on his elbow. He noticed that the snow was dark where his head had dented it. And at this sight he became aware of a stinging in his neck. He pulled off his mitten, reached a hand behind him and groped his nape: he seemed to have acquired a new mouth where the flesh bulged between neck-bone and shirt collar.

He fumbled this phenomenon for a good while before drawing back his hand. It was covered in blood, which appeared black in the deceptive light of the fissure. Reverend Baldur licked the gore from his fingers; nothing nutritious must go to waste. Then he placed the mitten on the wound and bound the scarf round his neck, pulling it good and tight.

He fell into a deep sleep.

***

Twilight fell, not gradually but abruptly, bringing a black murk.

Around midnight, in all likelihood, he sensed a wetness from the snow, and towards morning on the fourth day there had been such a thaw around Reverend Baldur that he was able to remove his belt, get at his knife and cut through the offending strap. Sitting up, he dragged the haversack to him. There he had provisions: a dried cod’s head.

Dried cod’s head is not merely food fit for a gentleman; it is also a diversion. As he flayed the flesh from the head, putting it in his mouth on the point of his knife and chewing as slowly as he could, to make it last, the man amused himself by naming all the bones and parts of the head:

‘Jawbone, that’s the jaw muscle, shoulder bone, that’s the shoulder muscle, pillow bone, that’s the pillow muscle, raven bone, that’s the raven muscle, gum, that’s the gum muscle, cheek, that’s the cheek muscle, nape, that’s the nape muscle, bell, that’s the bell muscle.

‘And that’s all the bones in this old head!’

Reverend Baldur burst out laughing. He pictured that ancient hag, his mother, with the hook bone on her shrivelled lower lip, mumbling:

‘My little bit, my little bit…’

The priest couldn’t control his mirth. He gripped his belly and laughed. He laughed until he howled with laughter. He howled with laughter until he cried. He cried and his tears were sore.

Yes, he wept sorely for the evil fate that had left him alone, with no one to share the entertainment that is to be had from a dried cod’s head.

***

On the fifth day the priest under the glacier began to fear for his sanity, so he did what comes most naturally to an Icelander when he is in a fix. That is to recite ballads, verses and rhymes, sing loud and clear to himself and, when all else fails, to recall his hymns. This is a failsafe old trick, if men wish to preserve their wits.

Reverend Baldur embarked conscientiously on his programme. He sang and recited all he knew, even the psalms of David. But he had nothing left but Reverend Jochumsson’s ‘big bang’ and a comic verse by his colleague Thorarensen, which he meant to leave out and instead start all over again, when he discovered to his amazement that everything that had dropped from his lips up to this point had been wiped from his memory. Not a single word, not a single letter remained.