The Greenlanders (6 page)

In the morning, Thorleif said, “If this place called Vinland is so rich, it may be that such poor folk as ourselves will want to trade it for Bergen, where many Germans are getting themselves in, or Gardar, even, though Gardar is said by the Greenlanders to be next door to Paradise. But we cannot make this trade until we see the famous spot, can we?”

“It seems to me,” said Odd of Siglufjord, “that we would do well to finish our work here and return to Gardar. Only yesterday we considered ourselves rich men, for all the furs and timber we have gotten. And these tales of the skraelings do not make me want to encounter them.”

Thorleif looked at Hauk Gunnarsson, but Hauk said nothing, so Thorleif said, “This morning we are poor men again. We are like folk who have gobbled up a lot of rich meat and then hear that a better feast is laid elsewhere.”

Osmund pressed them. “We have seen no signs of skraelings in this district, and though men have died seeking Vinland, what sort of men are we if we don’t take a look? It is said that the waving grass is as high as a man’s waist, and wild grapes are only the best of all the berries to be found there. The cove is full of swimming fish and shellfish of all kinds, and the reindeer herds take days to move past. And all the sorts of timber needed for building a ship grow together in one place.”

Erlend said, “Leif the Lucky found himself the Garden of Eden, and that’s a fact.”

But Odd said, “No priest has ever been to Vinland itself, only to Markland, and so it is not easy to know about the Garden of Eden.”

Now Thorleif looked at Hauk again, and Hauk looked at him, and said, “I would like to see it.”

So they stacked the piles of timber and buried the furs against scavengers and set out, and for the first day, the sailing was easy and swift. On the second day, however, a storm blew up so suddenly that they had no time to put in among the treacherous islets and chains of rocks, and they were caught. The storm lasted well into the night, the ship was thrown against many rocks, and its planking was dented and cracked. The mast came down, and Ketil Erlendsson and a sailor, Lavrans with the black beard, were killed outright. The lookout was thrown into the sea and drowned, and another sailor was thrown by a wave against the side of the ship with such force that his arm was shattered.

After this misadventure, there was no peace within the group. The lookout had been a sharp-sighted and well-liked man, and Lavrans was related to some of the other sailors. They were not pleased with his death. Ketil, the sailors said, had gotten his deserts for instigating this ill-omened trip to Markland, and for having raised such a flirtatious daughter in the first place. Erlend, they said, was a troublemaker, and it was like the Greenlanders to be influenced by such a person. Thorleif did not put a stop to these arguments, but for himself, he only said, “I am not the first man to seek good fortune and find ill.”

The land was well wooded, and materials for repairs were not far to seek. While the sailors went about this business, the Greenlanders lashed together a large vat, filled it with water, dismembered the corpuses, and set to boiling the flesh off the bones so that they could be carried back to Gardar and buried in consecrated ground. Two sailors explored the shore, but the body of the drowned man did not appear, so one of the Greenlanders carved him a runestick, and put this in the sack with the others’ bones for burial at the church. By the time the ship was repaired, the Greenlanders and the sailors had little to say to one another.

Thorleif sailed north along the coast, putting in from time to time to look for game or fish, but everything seemed to have vanished, as if by some curse. When, after six days, they found the timber and furs they had gathered, these treasures now seemed somehow of little worth and yet cumbersome. Hauk and a few men went snaring game in this spot, but had no luck. After some debate, because of the lateness of the year, the ship set out with few provisions, only some fresh water and a bit of dried meat. The sailors taunted the Greenlanders, saying, “Tell us your tales, now.” But the only tales the Greenlanders knew were of ships that had missed Greenland entirely and found themselves in Iceland, or, worse, Ireland, after weeks of drifting. Had not Thorvald, a mighty Viking hero who sailed with Karlsefni on his famous voyage, been swept to Ireland and enslaved there?

After three days of slow and careful sailing, Thorleif brought them to Bear Island for the night, and here a fight broke out between two of the sailors and two of the Greenlanders, a man from Herjolfsnes and Erlend Ketilsson. Erlend lost two teeth. Osmund tried to prevail on Thorleif to stop the fight, but Thorleif said, “A stopped fight must start again, when men are angrier. If they break each other’s bones now, they must kill each other later.” In the morning, the travelers awoke, hungry again, to discover that Hauk Gunnarsson had disappeared.

Of all the people on the voyage, Hauk Gunnarsson was friendly only toward Odd from Siglufjord, whom he had known from boyhood. The others he rarely spoke to or even looked at, and the Greenlanders, familiar with Hauk Gunnarsson’s ways, did not take this amiss. The sailors, however, spoke ill of Hauk, and accused him of being haughty. One man, especially, named Koll, whose temper was inflamed by the death of his cousin Lavrans, seemed to take great pleasure in baiting Hauk at mealtimes and times of rest. The humor of this fellow Koll was not improved by the diminishing food stocks, but Thorleif exerted no restraint, for that was not his way. Now Koll began suggesting that they would not soon get another wind as good as the one then blowing, and they had better set forth, for obviously, Hauk Gunnarsson had been swept away, or lured away by trolls. The Greenlanders scoffed at this, and replied that Hauk was no doubt hunting.

And, indeed, Hauk Gunnarsson had seen a wealth of birds flying around the cliffs of the island, and had set out to snare some, the work of a morning, but once he was away from the ship, he saw many signs of bears. The tale of his hunting trip is a famous one, for after men ceased going to the Northsetur, the hunting of bears grew rare in Greenland, and few men knew how to come upon them, lure them into the water, and kill them as they were swimming, for unlike the skraelings, the Greenlanders were not adept with skin boats, and did not especially enjoy ice hunting, or sea hunting. Hauk Gunnarsson was crouched down, setting a snare for a bird when he smelled the odor of bear, and then a small she-bear and her single cub came over the cliff near where he was hidden in a cleft. As he stood still, the bear came closer, neither smelling nor seeing him, and he silently removed a loop of walrus hide from his belt, tossed it over the bear’s head, and quickly wrapped it around a protruding rock, jerking the bear’s head backward. Then he quickly grabbed his short spear and drove it down into the bear’s breast, and so quickly did all of this happen that the she-bear made no noise and the cub, foraging farther down the cliffside, did not even look around. After that, Hauk waited behind the she-bear for the cub to return, and when it did, Hauk took the loop of walrus hide, and dropped it over the neck of the cub, as with a dog. The other end he tied to the paw of the she-bear, and then the cub followed along when Hauk dragged the she-bear back to the landing spot, where it was nearly nightfall, and the Greenlanders and the sailors were disputing about whether to sail or not.

The sight of the bear, and the prospect of roast meat, quieted all voices. The cub Hauk gave to Thorleif, who poured the water out of his largest cask and put the bear cub in it. And that is how it happened that one last tamed bear cub came to Bergen, and ended eventually in the Castle of Mehun-sur-Yevre, for the Duke of Berry was a collector of wild animals, and this bear, it is said, lived for many years, and died long after Hauk Gunnarsson himself.

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.