The Modern Vikings. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
on, child,” said Sigurd; “it was your brother I wanted to wake up, not you.”
“What is the matter, father? What has happened?” cried Jens, rising up in bed, and rubbing the ashes from the corners of his eyes.
“We are snowed up,” said the father, quietly. “It is already nine o’clock, I should judge, or thereabouts, but not a ray of light comes through the windows. I want Thoralf to help me open the door.”
Thoralf was by this time awake, and finished his primitive toilet with much despatch. The darkness, the damp cold, and the unopened window-shutters impressed him ominously. He felt as if some calamity had happened or were about to happen. Sigurd lighted a piece of driftwood and stuck it into a crevice in the wall. The storm seemed to have ceased; a strange, tomb-like silence prevailed without and within. On the hearth lay a small snowdrift which sparkled with a starlike glitter in the light.
“Bring the snow-shovels, Thoralf,” said Sigurd. “Be quick; lose no time.”
“They are in the shed outside,” answered Thoralf.
“That is very unlucky,” said the father; “now we shall have to use our fists.”
The door opened outward and it was only with the greatest difficulty that father and son succeeded in pushing it ajar. The storm had driven the snow with such force against it that their efforts seemed scarcely to make any impression upon the dense white wall which rose up before them.
“This is of no earthly use, father,” said the boy; “it is a day’s job at the very least. Let me rather try the chimney.”
“But you might stick in the snow and perish,” objected the father, anxiously.
“Weeds don’t perish so easily,” said Thoralf. “Stand up on the hearth, father, and I will climb up on your shoulders.”
Sigurd half reluctantly complied with his request. Thoralf crawled up his back, and soon planted his feet on the parental shoulders. He pulled his knitted woollen cap over his eyes and ears so as to protect them from the drizzling soot which descended in intermittent showers. Then groping with his toes for a little projection of the wall, he gained a securer foothold, and pushing boldly on, soon thrust his sooty head through the snow-crust. A chorus as of a thousand howling wolves burst upon his bewildered sense; the storm raged, shrieked, roared, and nearly swept him off his feet. Its biting breath smote his face like a sharp whip-lash.
“Give me my sheepskin coat,” he cried down into the cottage; “the wind chills me to the bone.”
The sheepskin coat was handed to him on the end of a pole, and seated upon the edge of the chimney, he pulled it on and buttoned it securely. Then he rolled up the edges of his cap in front and cautiously exposed his eyes and the tip of his nose. It was not a pleasant experiment, but one dictated by necessity. As far as he could see, the world was white with snow, which the storm whirled madly around, and swept now earthward, now heavenward. Great funnel-shaped columns of snow danced up the hillsides and vanished against the black horizon. The prospect before the boy was by no means inviting, but he had been accustomed to battle with dangers since his earliest childhood, and he was not easily dismayed. With much deliberation, he climbed over the edge of the chimney, and rolled down the slope of the roof in the direction of the shed. He might have rolled a great deal farther, if he had not taken the precaution to roll against the wind. When he had made sure that he was in the right locality, he checked himself by spreading his legs and arms; then judging by the outline of the snow where the door of the shed was, he crept along the edge of the roof on the leeward side. He looked more like a small polar bear than a boy, covered, as he was, with snow from head to foot. He was prepared for a laborious descent, and raising himself up he jumped with all his might, hoping that his weight would carry him a couple of feet down. To his utmost astonishment he accomplished considerably more. The snow yielded under his feet as if it had been eiderdown, and he tumbled headlong into a white cave right at the entrance to the shed. The storm, while it had packed the snow on the windward side, had naturally scattered it very loosely on the leeward, which left a considerable space unfilled under the projecting eaves.
Thoralf picked himself up and entered the shed without difficulty. He made up a large bundle of peat, which he put into a basket which could be carried, by means of straps, upon his back. With a snow-shovel he then proceeded to dig a tunnel to the nearest window. This was not a very hard task, as the distance was not great. The window was opened and the basket of peat, a couple of shovels, and two pairs of skees1 (to be used in case of emergency) were handed in. Thoralf himself, who was hungry as a wolf, made haste to avail himself of the same entrance. And it occurred to him as a happy afterthought that he might have saved himself much trouble, if he had selected the window instead of the chimney when he sallied forth on his expedition. He had erroneously taken it for granted that the snow would be packed as hard everywhere as it was at the front door. The mother, who had been spending this exciting half-hour in keeping little Jens warm, now lighted a fire and made coffee; and Thoralf needed no coaxing to do justice to his breakfast, even though it had, like everything else in Iceland, a flavor of salted fish.
III
Five days had passed, and still the storm raged with unabated fury. The access to the ocean was cut off, and, with that, access to food. Already the last handful of flour had been made into bread, and of the dried cod which hung in rows under the ceiling only one small and skinny specimen remained. The father and the mother sat with mournful faces at the hearth, the former reading in his hymn-book, the latter stroking the hair of her youngest boy. Thoralf, who was carving at his everlasting pipe-bowl (a corpulent and short-legged Turk with an enormous mustache), looked up suddenly from his work and glanced questioningly at his father.
“Father,” he said, abruptly, “how would you like to starve to death?”
“God will preserve us from that, my son,” answered the father, devoutly.
“Not unless we try to preserve ourselves,” retorted the boy, earnestly. “We can’t tell how long this storm is going to last, and it is better for us to start out in search of food now, while we are yet strong, than to wait until later, when, as likely as not, we shall be weakened by hunger.”
“But what would you have me do, Thoralf?” asked the father, sadly. “To venture out on the ocean in this weather would be certain death.”
“True; but we can reach the Pope’s Nose on our skees, and there we might snare or shoot some auks and gulls. Though I am not partial to that kind of diet myself, it is always preferable to starvation.”
“Wait, my son, wait,” said Sigurd, earnestly. “We have food enough for to-day, and by to-morrow the storm will have ceased, and we may go fishing without endangering our lives.”
“As you wish, father,” the son replied, a trifle hurt at his father’s unresponsive manner; “but if you will take a look out of the chimney, you will find that it looks black enough to storm for another week.”
The father, instead of accepting this suggestion, went quietly to his book-case, took out a copy of Livy, in Latin, and sat down to read. Occasionally he looked up a word in the lexicon (which he had borrowed from the public library at Reykjavik), but read nevertheless with apparent fluency and pleasure. Though he was a fisherman, he was also a scholar, and during the long winter evenings he had taught himself Latin and even a smattering of Greek.2 In Iceland the people have to spend their evenings at home; and especially since their millennial celebration in 1876, when American scholars3 presented them with a large library, books are their unfailing resource. In the case of Sigurd Sigurdson, however, books had become a kind of dissipation, and he had to be weaned gradually of his predilection for Homer and Livy. His oldest son especially looked upon Latin and Greek as a vicious indulgence, which no man with a family could afford to foster. Many a day when Sigurd ought to have been out in his boat casting his nets, he stayed at home reading. And this, in Thoralf’s opinion, was the chief reason why they would always remain poor, and run the risk of starvation, whenever a stretch of bad weather prevented them from
Skees are a kind of snowshoe, four to six feet long, bent upward in front, with a band to attach it to the foot in the middle.
Lord Dufferin tells, in his Letters from High Latitudes, how the Icelandic pilots conversed with him in Latin, and other travellers have many similar tales to relate.
Professor Willard Fiske, formerly of Cornell University, was instrumental in collecting in the United States a library of several thousand volumes, which he presented to the Icelanders on the one thousandth birthday of their nation.