Paradise lost in an Arctic snowstorm
As the story opens, Bárdur, a strikingly handsome young man with brown eyes, and the boy are walking home from the village. They are the youngest of the crew, fishing for cod from a six-oared open boat, and better educated than their shipmates. The boy writes letters home for his companions, and both are keen readers. It is March, and the weather is bad; the walk is “a two-hour trudge through the snow”.
Part of their route skirts a cliff edge on a narrow track beside a cable fastened to the rock face, sheer mountainside above, and a sheer stone wall and the surging sea below. Once they pass this without the cable breaking, or an avalanche from above killing them, they near home: a huddle of remote fishermen’s huts. The fishing crews have been ashore for two weeks due to storms so bad that some days they could not even walk from one hut to the other. But by the look of the calm evening sky, Bárdur, the elder of the two, reckons they will be rowing out that night in pursuit of cod.
