Chapter II: The Whale

When the whale came ashore at Watersness, Thorgils heard of it first. He went down to look at it, and found it was upon his land. It lay there, a mountain of distress, and the flies about it were as thick as a snowstorm. At home that night he spoke of it to his mother, and said that one of them must set to work cutting it up next day, or all would be spoiled. It was late autumn, very close, still, and hot, as it often is before the weather breaks up. Dalla said: “Cormac will never go to such a work. He hates to foul his hands.”

“Then I must do it myself,” said Thorgils; “but I had been going on to the fells to round up the sheep. It is fully time.”

“Send Cormac after the sheep,” Dalla said, “and let Toste go with him, and send some of the hands.”

Just then Cormac came in. They heard him whistling outside in the dusk. He stayed there a good time whistling, singing scraps of songs, then came in and looked at them, scowling from under his black brows. He looked as if he had been expecting to find nobody and was annoyed by a sudden roomful of people. But they took no notice of him, and his face cleared. It was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. He threw his head up and laughed richly and snugly, as if to himself.

Dalla heard him. “What are you laughing at?”

“You,” he said, and she asked:

“Why so?”

He came and kissed her. “Because I love you, I think.”

“That’s an odd reason,” she said, turning up her sightless face.

“No, it’s not,” he said; “it’s a very good reason. Whenever I come upon something I love, and find it, all closed in and ready to my hand, it tickles me. I laugh and think to myself, ‘There’s that pretty thing, snug against when I want it.’ And then I go away and do what I’ve got to do, and remember that it’s there all the time.”

His hand was stroking her face, and she moved about to get the feel of it. She was very pleased. “Your brother here thinks you a madman; but I understand you,” she said.

“So does he, when he wants me,” said Cormac, and sat down to his supper.

“I shall want you in the morning,” Thorgils said after much reflection, and told him about the whale. Cormac made a sour face.

But he took a long draught before he spoke, and then he said: “That will be a dirty business, Thorgils. Can’t you give me one more to my liking? You know I do ill what I have no taste for.”

Thorgils said: “Well, you can round up the sheep on the fells if you please. It matters little to me. These things have to be done. There’s snow coming when the wind changes. It is banking in the north-west even now.”

This was a long speech for Thorgils, who had no more to say after it, and soon went to bed. Cormac sat up, telling his mother tales or listening to her stories of his father when he had been seafaring in Ireland; and before he himself went to bed he must needs go out of doors again. There was a full moon shining in splendour over the firth, and the sky was wonderfully clear. You could see over the fells to the white cap of Eiriks-jökul gleaming in the Southern sky like a dome. Below that, and three days’ journey short of it, were the fells where the sheep lay, and Cormac must be betimes in the morning. He would go with Toste, who was the Melstead reeve and worked the dogs.

But though he shortened his night by it, Cormac nevertheless walked about the shore under the glory of the moon; and many a verse he made and sang to himself as he looked over the full, flowing water or marked the ducks bobbing about like a fisherman’s floats in the broad path of light.