But I finally reach it, finally I see the glacier. Dear, dear Blåfonna.

All glaciers melt, I know that, but it’s something else witnessing it. I stop, just breathe. The ice is still there, but not where it used to be. When I was a little girl, I walked from the edge of the glacier almost all the way to the mountain cliff where the waterfalls disappeared below, where the glacier and the waterfalls were connected. But now the glacier is located high up on the mountainside. It’s a long way, one hundred meters perhaps, between the cliff and the blue tongue. The glacier has moved, as if trying to escape, get away from humans.

I continue climbing through the heather. I have to feel it, have to walk on it, touch it again.

Finally I have ice under my feet, every step makes noise, a slight crunching sound. I keep going and now I can see the extraction area, the gouges in the grayish-white glacier, and deep gashes in the blue interior, where the ice has been cut away. Beside it there are four large white bags that are full, ready for pickup. They use chain saws, I’ve read, chain saws that are not lubricated, so the pieces of ice won’t be sullied by oil.

Nothing should surprise me anymore, all the things human beings do. But this, this tears something open inside of me, because Magnus must have sat at a board meeting and smilingly approved this, maybe even applauded it.

I walk closer. I have to climb to come right up against it, as the gouges were made where the glacier is the steepest. I take off one mitten and place my hand against the ice—it is alive beneath my fingers, my glacier, a huge, calm animal that sleeps. But it is a wounded animal and it can’t roar—it is being drained minute by minute, second by second, it is already dying.

Too old to cry, too old for these tears, but nonetheless my cheeks are damp.

Our ice, Magnus, our ice.

Have you forgotten about it, or did you perhaps not even notice that the first time we met it was with melting ice from Blåfonna in our hands?

I was seven, you were eight, do you remember? It was my birthday and I was given a present of water, frozen water.

All life is water, all life was water, everywhere I turned, there was water. It gushed from the sky as rain or snow, it filled the small lakes in the mountains, lay in the form of ice in the glacier, it flowed down the steep mountainsides in thousands of small streams, accumulated into the River Breio, formed a flat surface in front of the village in the fjord, the fjord that became the ocean when you followed it west. My whole world was water. The ground, the mountains, the pastures were just tiny islands in that which actually was the world. I called my world Earth but thought that it should actually be named Water.