Just then, a noise makes her look up. A distant rumbling. She moves forward, her bare feet stepping into the cool water. Though the mists make it difficult to see, she knows that the sound is coming from the field directly opposite, a green slope that drifts down to the other side of the fjord. A splash. Her breath catches in her throat. She squints, tries to see through the fog, but she already knows what it is. The thundering hooves of reindeer.

As she wades into the water to get a closer look, the fog thins, and she sees the white and black bodies funnelling down the slope towards the water, antlers rising from their heads like a tangle of tree branches against the moth-light.

Already several are in the water, and she wonders whether they’ve not seen the edge of the land and have fallen in. She glances behind her. Is Tom here? Maybe they can call someone. She’s not sure what to do, or what she can do. She watches as the view clears, the mists divide and buttery sunshine funnels through pearly clouds to reveal the scene in its tremendous, mythic spectacle: hundreds, maybe thousands of reindeer charging into the water. Aurelia would almost not believe her own eyes were it not for the ripples that are gathering now around her calves, sent from the cascading herd in front of her. The light strengthens and she lifts a hand to shield her eyes against the sun. Antlers and snouts bob ahead, about a quarter of the way across the fjord. They are swimming. She gives a shout, a laugh, to witness this. Reindeer migrating across bodies of water was something her grandfather Gunnar had told her about, but she’d thought he was making it up. She begins to wade out, her clothes ballooning in the cold water, towards the meandering causeway of fuzzy, bloodied antlers and white faces, their long, strong legs striding through the water.

It’s a long distance from one side of the fjord to the other. She swims out to a small island and wraps her arms around a black boulder, treading water as she watches the line of them zigzag across the fjord. For the most part they swim so close to one another she fears they’ll hook antlers and drown each other. The formation begins to curve towards her so that she can make out the steam of their breath rising in the air, the snorts and grunts and splashing and the bobbing white tails, like rabbits’. Most of the bulls are grey with black snouts, the females – cows, she remembers, not does – are pure, majestic white, unantlered, and there are calves, too, mostly swimming alongside the cows.