“Noah didn’t exist,” I said. “The flood didn’t happen.”

He was silent.

“THE FLOOD DIDN’T HAPPEN!”

“Good, Signe,” Daddy said finally, but his voice was distant.

Shouting didn’t help. All my life shouting had usually helped, but now it no longer had any effect on him, and I didn’t understand why.

The river unfolded before us, a broad piece of fabric that somebody had unwound from a roll of shiny material, I thought, invisible. It could be made into a cloak of invisibility, a freezing cloak of invisibility, and maybe that was the one I was wearing now, without knowing it.

Suddenly Daddy started walking again, quickly. I trotted behind him, on the horrible haul road, just wanting to go home, but I didn’t dare ask, didn’t dare stop.

Farther up the mountainside the road crossed the river by way of a recently constructed bridge that smelled of fresh woodwork, and out on the bridge he finally stopped again and now he looked at me.

“Feel that, Signe, can you feel the water flowing?” he said.

“Yes.” I said.

“Do you feel it?”

“YES!”

The water caused a vibration under my feet, made me shake all over.

“Look around you,” he said. “Everything around you is going to change. A tunnel will be dug here and the water will be diverted away. Down there is where the power plant will be,” he said pointing, “And from there they will install enormous power lines. And the river, it will disappear. In the riverbed, where it’s flowing now, there will only be stone.”

“What about the freshwater pearl mussels?”

“They will die.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Who will clean the water?”

“There won’t be any water to clean.”

Then he started walking again and I didn’t dare ask about anything else. We continued for another hour, maybe two, up a steep incline. My back was sweating—I wanted to ask Daddy to slow down but couldn’t bring myself to do it. He strode along in front of me and all I could see was his back, his narrow shoulders under his knapsack—I couldn’t think of anything except keeping up with him, upward, upward, the whole time upward.

Finally we reached the tree line. I was breathing so hard that my throat was burning, but here the landscape flattened out. Sønstebø’s old summer farm leaned toward the ground, enclosed by a dilapidated fence. The sheep had just been let out to graze, the lambs bleating soft, fragile sounds as they trotted behind their parents. On the horizon I saw Blåfonna, a grayish-white tongue that ate its way into the tussocks of heather, moss, and grass.

The road came to an end in the middle of nowhere and where it terminated, Daddy also stopped for a moment.

“This is where the dam will be,” he said. “Everything you see now will be dammed up, underwater.”

“Everything?” I said.

“Everything.”

He took a few more steps, straight into the patch of heather, but then it was as if he couldn’t take any more, because all of a sudden he sat down on the slope without taking off his knapsack, so it was shoved up his back by the mound behind him, giving him a hunchback.