Nursed at the breasts of a giantess, Hadding grew swiftly and strongly. Before long he was eating the same fare as the rest: meat from the hunt, fish from the waters, milk and cheese and butter from the cows, bread from grain that mother Haflidi grew in a clearing and ground on a quern as big as a man. Roots, leaves, sedges, mushrooms, and grubs were food to pick up along the trail. In their seasons came also nuts, berries, and the honey of wild bees. Vagnhöfdi brewed ale and mead, but Hardgreip taught Hadding that every spring and every stream had its own taste, its own magic.

Much else did he learn from the thursir. Going by himself rather than with the hounds, he became a keen hunter, wily trapper, patient fisherman. He could flay a quarry, cut it up, cook its meat, tan its skin, find uses for guts and bones. He could make and wield a fire drill, weave branches together for a shelter, read clouds and winds to foreknow weather, find his way by the heavens both day and night, bind up a wound or set a broken limb. He shaped stone and iron into tools for which he whittled the hafts. The iron itself Vagnhöfdi found in bogs and brought back to wrest from its ore with his overhuman strength.

The wilderness was Hadding’s home, which he came to know through every depth and every change. He wandered through the quick rains and quickening leaves of spring while returning birds darkened the sky with wings and filled it with clamor. He was out in the long days and light nights of summer, green growth and sun-speckled shade, warmth and thunderstorm and the manifold smells of life. He ghosted under trees gone red and yellow in fall, his feet rustling nothing, and from hilltops looked into hazy farnesses or down at drifting mists. He ranged through winter on skis and skates, unheeding of cold, not only beneath the low sun but after dark if it was clear and the stars gleamed in their hosts above the snow.

Yet always the waters drew him most, above all the biggest lake thereabouts. As often as ever he could, he sought its banks and gazed over its shining reaches. When a wind ruffled it, something thrilled in him and the lap-lap of wavelets was a song. He would strip off his clothes, wade out through the reeds, and swim for hour after hour like an otter. In a dugout boat he kept there he could spend a whole day dreaming more than fishing. Besides a paddle, he used a mast and sail he had made, awkward though the rig was. He wondered mightily about the sea of which he had heard. Someday he would go seek it. The longing waxed as his body lengthened.