A hand axe, Old Carl’s own that he’d had on the ship. The knife at his belt, a worn blade with a wooden handle that Old Carl had given him when another man was going to throw it over the side. Leif sometimes had missed his father – or perhaps an imaginary thought-picture of him since he had never seen him – as he missed and had never seen his mother. And Old Carl had told him, ‘You have no father to give you a knife so this one you may have from me.’ In addition to the copper pot, there were four fishhooks stuck in the side of a coiled-up roll of corded, braided line, the four-pronged head for a fish-spear or seal-harpoon, two woollen blankets – smelling a thick, almost chewable odour that was a mix of sheep from the original wool, never washed, and the stink of many men, and fish and salt air – and a small leather pouch. In the pouch was a short piece of hammered steel, about as long and thick as a large man’s finger, and an oblong-shaped chunk of black flint with sharp edges – steel and flint to make sparks for starting fires. There was also a pullover anorak, so tightly woven that the lanolin oil in the coarse unwashed wool made it nearly waterproof.

That and the clothes he was wearing – rough, tattered cotton sea trousers and a sailcloth pullover shirt. The fabric, now stiff and uncomfortable from repeated salt-water soakings, was useless at holding body heat. It was summer now, early summer, but autumn would come, then winter, and these thin clothes would not keep him warm.

These clothes, these few tools and supplies – that was all he had.

No, wait. Most important. He was not quite alone.

He had the canoe. And the canoe spirit.

They would be with him. They had found the perfect island for Little Carl. They would help him.

He stood and moved to the canoe but something in him did not want to leave the Little Carl island and he stopped, wondering at his own thoughts, why they kept him.

There was more to do, in some way. Something more.

To sing.

It jumped into his mind as if the thought were pushed.

He should sing a song to honour Little Carl . . .

He turned back to the material of the bundle and took the small pouch with the flint and striker iron. In the woods, away from the sea and behind the cairn, he had seen an old fallen and rotted tree. Too thick and wet to burn, he knew, but under it he would find what he needed.