The light seemed to come into, through him. He swore he could feel it, would swear all his life that he had felt the light in his body, shining through him, and he sat for a time he would not measure, dancing with light, wanting to sing with light, wanted his spirit to be the light. To be light.

Then, as if everything had been holding, waiting for him, he was besieged with the sudden noise of seabirds and the crack-splash as another chunk of ice – smaller now, but enough to make sound – fell off the wall. It made a wave as it hit the water of the bay and Leif saw the wave come out around both sides of the large piece of ice floating in the middle of the bay and close in on him.

He braced his knees and held the side of the canoe to stabilize it but the wave was fairly small and did not pose a danger.

But if a bigger wave were started . . .

This is not a safe place.

And the thought made him smile. There’d been lots of places that were not what anyone could call absolutely safe. All his life, he thought, his smile widening, had not been a safe place.

Still. Sitting in the middle of the fjord opening exposed him and what if a huge piece of ice broke loose, like the one the size of a ship? What kind of wave would that make?

He thought of Old Carl suddenly, talking of the sea and boats. ‘The ocean is so big,’ Old Carl had said, almost in a singsong, ‘and my boat is so small . . .’

The prudent thing, he knew, was to leave and head back out of the fjord. That was the safe thing to do.

And yet.

And yet he wanted to stay awhile in this place, this place of beautiful magic and blue light that danced around and through him and he found a small depression, a dip really, in the shoreline well off to the side away from the ice wall. Wasting no time – he did not want to get caught in the open if a large section of the ice wall fell – he worked the canoe up into this small cove and tied off to a small tree that stuck out over the water and stepped ashore on the rocks.

There weren’t many small bushes – he guessed that they had been scoured out by moving ice – but he saw a single patch of blackberries and marvelled at how they seemed to be in every possible place. He picked them clean and ate them with cold salmon and then sat.

Just sat on the shore and absorbed the ice wall, the grandeur of the place – it seemed like a giant theatre with the sound of birds and moving water circling around and above in the swirling shafts of light and he thought that even with all its beauty this was not a place to live. To spend time.