When we were not set a task or chore, shoveling out the stable, picking up trash, stacking bales, we’d ride around up to the mountain and each day was an adventure, we went on a mission out into peat landslips looking for fossils, we looked for nests and recorded the birds we’d see, if we saw or found something important, for example the time we found a dead Eurasian woodcock in the woods, then Kiddi rang Hálfdán from Tvísker and gave him the account, I found it incomparably more fun learning the difference between an Amami woodcock and a Eurasian woodcock than shoveling shit from the outbuilding. It was big news in Öræfi the time Kiddi saw the white dove flying over the mountain slopes and heading east over the outbuilding, a great wonder, no one had ever seen a white dove in Öræfi before, we immediately decided to try to catch her, and found it wasn’t enough to throw a coat over her the way we caught the pigeons down by the pond in Reykjavík before taking them home by bus; the white dove was afraid and kept itself a fair distance from the farm, we each grabbed the blade of an old plough, hurried over to the storage shed, applied ourselves diligently to using the grinder, sparks flying as we sharpened our blades deliberately to razor sharp tips at the top, and then we went on the prowl, fishing about in the low willow bushes. We saw a white dove flutter out of a thicket, arc around the barn, and land somewhere in the low grass beyond; we were filled with tingling anticipation as we crawled along the ground, all the way around the barn where we reckoned our prey had landed, almost in ecstasy we saw a flash of white in a bush close by, I trembled all over with excitement, Kiddi sprang to his feet and launched the metal spear with all his strength, I jumped to my feet too, and saw the spear had stabbed through the dove which lay motionless in the bush, dead … we looked on, amazed at what had happened, Kiddi had managed to harpoon the dove, in that great shot’s time the world had changed, it was like we could do anything, this world was not such an uncontrollable force after all, we ran over in silence, celebrating only internally for now, trying to act like professional hunters though we couldn’t contain our joy, and it turned out to be a white can … a white can in the bush, it was like someone was silently baiting us, I thought God was tricking us, but I was afraid to say the word God aloud in this situation, that's not what hunters do, the iron spike had gone through the can and pinned it to the earth, Kiddi took the can out of the bush and for a long time we looked at the way the spear had punched through it, although we had unintentionally stumbled on the can, we were still filled with awe, we were still great hunters, we looked around us, saw a dove on top of the barn, it took off and flew east along the mountain, perhaps it would visit Hálfdán from Tvísker? She’d get a milder reception there than from us; we ran home and Kiddi asked if he could use the phone and he rang Hálfdán and said he should expect a visitor.
Out past the mire beyond the hayfield, almost all the way out to Skeiðarársandur, Kiddi and I went past a skua nest where an Arctic skua flung himself down at us to protect the eggs; it was light-colored, a variant on the true Nordic variety, much rarer than its dark-feathered cousin, this would be great for you to taxidermy, said Kiddi, I picked up a stone, threw it at the bird as he dived on us, my shot went wide, I threw another rock the next time he dived, it also went past him, it was easier said than done, hitting a bird with stones while he flung himself at us at high speed, screeching, and this went on for such a long time, the skua hurtled at us, I threw stones, the skua dived, I threw stones. Belatedly, when patience was running out and we were about to set off back home, I took a big rock and threw it angrily and hopelessly in the air toward the skua, a dismal thump could be heard as the stone struck its chest, the skua fell to the ground, still alive, we ran to him in a hurry, I was super excited and said we needed to wring its neck right away, so it wouldn’t suffer, I’d learned from Kiddi that one should always try to kill animals quickly so they don’t suffer unnecessarily, and there was the skua on the ground suffering because I had thrown a boulder-sized stone at him, how do I wring its neck, I asked Kiddi in a frenzy, quick! show me how to wring its neck so he isn’t in pain any longer, I cried, Kiddi said it would be best to strangle him, it would damage the skin to twist its neck, I didn’t know quite how to do it, do it for me, strangle it, strangleitforme! and Kiddi went in front of me and picked the skua up and I looked on in confusion while Kiddi strangled the skua, it black eyes stared at me in terror, its beak open, its tongue stuck out, its life taking a long time to fade away. The skua’s gaze has followed me ever since; sometimes I think that from that moment I brought a curse upon myself, some evil. This moment will be on my conscience forever, The Regular said in the car park at Skaftafell, finally he was dead, Kiddi handed me the bird, we went back past the mire, it was a half-hour walk to the meadow where people were making hay, we were shirking our duties, I held the skua in my arms like a small infant, I was simultaneously happy and sad. You’re holding it too gently! said Kiddi indignantly as we walked into the meadow, I grabbed it by the feet and tail and dangled it nonchalantly the way a real hunter does, we were embarrassed that we were slacking and not helping farm. I put the skua in the freezer until we could get to the taxidermist at the Icelandic Natural History Museum near the bus station, Hlemmur. It cost a fair bit, and those conscripted into child labor as part of the farming life didn’t get paid—but to gather funds we hunted mink. The country magistrates and farmers encouraged children and teenagers to hunt and kill all minks and foxes to protect sheep and the Icelandic ecosystem; we were the watchmen of the natural republic, we received 1,500 krónur for a tail, which was a lot of money in those days. I paid the taxidermist 2,500 krónur for his work on the skua, Kiddi and I had hunted four adult mink in the summer, you got nothing for pups but they were numerous so we killed a few by striking them on the head with a stone, the magistrate gave each of us 3,000 krónur for our four minks, I dropped 500 on treats at the Skaftafell Visitor Center where there was a store, I bought a hamburger and ice cream and cigarettes which Kiddi and I shared that whole summer.
Kiddi and I wanted to kill Great Skuas, The Regular said in the carpark, we borrowed the jeep to go over the sand out to Ingólfshöfði, a really hazardous journey across quicksand and deep ravines, guided only by stakes standing up from the water, we had to keep on their right side and gun the gas the whole time so as not to sink into the sand, it was part of the culture back then to kill Great Skuas and gulls, ideally in late summer when the young were typically almost adults but not yet fully fledged, but fat and lazy, we took clubs with us and knocked the young dead under the fierce air raids of their parents, the skua grows big and is a daredevil, fierce and bold, no one can wander the sands during mating season without its attention, the skua is large and powerful, stout-chested, it throws itself at you at high speed and drives you away with fierce strikes of its claws, sometimes with its whole torso, many tourists come off the sand bloody having risked entering the territory of the Great Skua during breeding season, they are stitched back up at the Visitor Center, at other times the bird prefers to winter out on the wide ocean, being a seabird and eating everything he comes across, carcasses and all, he chases and kills any bird he has a mind to and a variety of animals far up into the country, I had a big kitchen knife strapped to me with haybale binding, I felt I looked the part of the hunter, ready for anything, you had to keep your eyes open, you had to look out in all directions, each time a Great Skua flung himself at you you had to throw yourself down between the tussocks, the whining over your head indicated how narrowly you had escaped his strike, once I jumped up and threw the kitchen knife after a skua as he wheeled back toward me, preparing his next dive; the shaft pierced him but the skua did not yield ground, he kept turning and descended again and struck his talons on my the forehead so that I was thrown back and stuck fast between tussocks, I yelled to Kiddi, mortally wounded, bloody in the face, that I had almost hunted an adult skua with a knife! … in from the skua nests on Ingólfshöfði, Great Black-backed Gulls also laid eggs, the beneficiaries of the Great Skua’s military-style
patrols, a gull would sometimes fling himself at you, but only in a shallow arc, not coming close but orbiting instead, screeching, hoping that God and the skua would scare the child-murderers away from the breeding ground, we killed seagulls too, it was a dying tradition in the country, nobody ate seagulls any more except Kiddi and me, we plucked them and singed them and baked them whole inside the oven, getting a lot of attention for our seagull-feast, but usually finding ourselves sat alone at our banquet table. One year we came back from the sand with a jeep full of birds and brought food to the whole farm, The Regular said in the carpark at Skaftafell, but Kiddi and I were the last of the 1100-year-old tradition in Öræfi of hunting skua and gulls for food, Ingólf Arnarson began that when he was based on the promontory but Kiddi and I were the last. We stopped once we got interested in girls in Reykjavík and all those things that put a stop to a man’s culture.
Now the bus was leaving, said Bernharður, wrote Dr. Lassi, and Kiddi and The Regular and Worm Serpent were stone surprised that I was going to stay in Skaftafell, Kiddi had a newly-built farm in Hálsasker with partitioned rooms on all floors, there’s plenty of room for everyone, but I was stubborn and wanted to be left alone, the night before had been quite enough social life for me, I told the entourage, now they were all hopping mad that I wanted to be where the tourists were, hardly any Öræfings go into Skaftafell any more, said The Regular, only tourists, Skaftafell is no longer Skaftafell, it’s a distortion, come with us! There’s a chieftain’s place in Svínafell, where Flosi lived, your friend from Njáls Saga, it’s not right for a chief like yourself to stay on the campsite at Skaftafell, a chieftain, an aristocrat, a prestigious scholar from Vienna, in Hálsker you’d have your own private room with views out into the infinite, it is absolutely doomed being on a campsite where you can’t see a thing but the next person’s ugly tent, with us you’d have the whole of Öræfi to yourself. I’d already decided to stay in Skaftafell and would not change it.
You don’t want to stay in Flosi’s cave? asked Kiddi, there’s a view of the entire Skeiðarársand and you’d have the whole ocean and the sky as your property.
It’s a tempting offer, I said.
This is an appalling trunk you have, said Worm Serpent, he’d had a drink or two and had stopped stuttering, it reminds me of my grandmother’s trunk, but I have to admit that it’s many times larger, and with off-road wheels!
Don’t you have any bags? I asked Worm.
Just my jacket, said Worm, it’s all I have, baggage is spiritual, my baggage is an affliction, two large canvas sacks full of the past and my afflictions … Oh, Ö-Öræfi inside me, an empty city, ruins and sorrows …
I bid farewell to the men at the bus stop and said I would stop by Hálsasker on my way east, but for now I needed to attend to my studies.
Well and good! The Regular said, loud and clear.
A man is composed of everyone who’s shared his path, I told myself, overwhelmed by my weighty trunk, an extension of my body, but it’s nothing compared to Captain Koch’s luggage, I tried to cheer myself with that, the trunk on its sturdy tires nonetheless rolled gently forward, at the campsite I found a secluded spot, inside my trunk I had a comforter, a camp stove, pots and pans and plates and cutlery, a whetstone, a compass, matches, a telescope, wool clothes, stationery, notebooks, diaries, papers, study books, dictionaries, books that I couldn’t travel without according to The Regular, the travelogue of Eggert Ólafsson and Bjarni Pálsson, the travelogue of Sveinn Pálsson, the travelogue of Ólaf Olavius, the travelogue of Þorvaldur Thoroddsen, the travelogue of Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, it is obvious that one cannot stuff such tomes into a backpack so you need a cumbersome trunk for your journey. When we went to Bragi’s bookstore, The Regular made a list of the materials I had to have on a research expedition to Fingurbjörg in Mávabyggðir on Öræfajökull on Vatnajökull in Öræfi in East Skaftafell district in Iceland, as he put it, The Regular said those words firmly to Bragi, the bookseller, told him I was going on a toponymical research expedition to Fingurbjörg in Mávabyggðir on Öræfajökull on Vatnajökull and he wanted me to take without fail every issue of the journal Skaftfellingur, all the volumes of the history journal Blanda: Knowledge Old and New, the complete magazine Goðastein which the civic leaders in Skógar have put out for a half a century with distinction, the region’s culture would be impoverished without them, Bragi arranged this all with one move and made me a big package and many little ones, miniature constructions of great beauty and quality, wrapped in construction paper and tied together with hemp rope and netting and placed in this hellishly large and cumbersome trunk which I’d had to leave outside because it wouldn’t fit into the store, which was too crowded with books and knowledge, I’d parked the trunk in a parking space and put a ten-krónur piece in the meter, then I returned with the additional purchases of many publications Bragi and The Regular deemed necessary for me to bring to Öræfi, Findings of the Alþing, forty volumes, Government News, fifty volumes, Broadcast News, 100 issues, Anthology of Charters, 200 issues, the complete magazine Weather, I tipped the whole lot into the trunk and Bragi was glad to be rid of them, he danced and sang amid his stacks and waved his snotrag so that mucus flew out of it in all directions, I said goodbye but the cumbertrunk belched horribly as it digested all these books, as if threatening to vomit them back up over Bragi.
Oraefi Page 18
