The tackle is simple. Line, sinker and a curved piece of steel with a dual hook. The seasoned fishermen have already dropped their hooks into the deep, plumb to the bottom, and their faces have assumed a distant stare. Fritz is young, it’s his first long voyage. Jegvan and the cousins are practised. They cast their lines and slip effortlessly into the rhythm. Their eyes turn glassy. They stand there like men taking a piss, feet patiently apart as they await the tension on the line, the jerk, the release.

Bjørnøya, Bear Island, over there—is there anywhere on Earth where humanity is less welcome? Fritz doubts it. The weather is clear, only a slight haze, but from the shore the fog comes crawling across the surface of the sea.

Now, as the shoal passes, the conversation dies down.

Each man has his fixed place and fishes for himself. They stand a cold metre apart. When two lines do get snarled up, the result may be animosity, accusations of sabotage and jealousy of the other man’s catch, or the disentanglement may be thin-lipped, adroit. Afterwards they start from scratch.

Fritz minds his own business. He doesn’t look at the island. Instead he stares at the lumps inside the skin, his hands. It’s tough, the work. The leaden sinker pulls at his shoulders and back.

Sometimes there are phantom bites. A sense that something’s nudging cautiously at the line down there. Solicitously, almost. It feels like a discreet enquiry. Are you 36cold? In need of a moment’s rest, perhaps? Of sleep? Here, in this expanse, this softness?

Fritz raises and drops the line. He doesn’t believe the tall tales he’s been told and tells the village children in his turn. The sea witch. The sea ghost with its overlong thighs, which creeps onto the beach and sits shrieking on the rocks. All he wants is to be the contraction and measured release of his muscles. His pumping blood. His frozen beard. Those stories are for scaring children; they belong indoors. Not here, in the wide open unknown.

The best fishermen have a knack for luring cod. They have their magic words and rituals. Fritz has only rudimentary skills. He feels the hush on deck. That the men are paddling in it. One shifts his feet and creaks like an old marionette. Another gets a bite.

The cod writhes furiously on-board. The man, a cousin, takes it by the barbel, cuts off the tongue and lets it flop into the box at his feet. The scraps of flesh are clumped in with the quivering filaments. Every week they’re counted up like tokens. This keeping of accounts is as sacred as the Sunday service on deck. One man counts another’s catch, supervised by a third. There are those not above stealing their neighbour’s scraps.

Fritz is dispirited. Shame folds him around the work.

To hell with this water, anyway.