She was about to walk on, but as she lifted the nets she caught sight of some brown cloth beneath the snow, wadmal, it seemed. She pulled out a tattered shirt, and some wood shavings fell from it. Attached to the shirt with hemp twine was a pair of breeches, missing half a leg, and specked with more wood shavings. She had never seen clothes like these. She carried them to the fish-drying rack where she hung them up like ordinary washing, went to the quay house and stretched the nets between the pegs on the wall, picked out the seaweed and grass, and decided she had enough, so she could let them hang there and dry, then they were easier to repair.

She wondered whether to put out new nets, but decided she could eat salted fish for a few days yet, after which she made her way home in the lightly falling snow. A man was standing over by the rack looking at her, a man with one leg. Behind him the two eagles were tearing at one of the seals. The man seemed to be watching them too, it was difficult to see which way he was staring, this man with no head.

Ingrid went in, cooked some food and ate it, scrubbed the kitchen floor, the porch and the hallway, wiped down the stairs up to the loft, got out some wool and yarn, darned the hole in her jumper, realising that it hadn’t been made by a nail at the trading post but by the splitting knife. In the morning she would do some baking, bread and lefser and potato lefser, a baking day, fill the house with the smells of a true home – and with bone-grindingly hard work.

She fetched a sack of wool from the barn and set about cleaning and carding it. She moved the spinning wheel into the kitchen and devoted the rest of the day to this. The rhythm. There was no longer any condensation on the inside walls. The smell of damp earth had gone. She had stopped lighting the fire in the sitting room. The calendar hanging from a nail in the larder, the cat she would soon be getting, the wall clock she no longer needed, the yarn running between her lanolin-softened fingers, and whenever she glanced through the window the stranger over by the drying rack was looking at her.

She wondered whether she should allow herself to get used to having him there, like a scarecrow, or else tear down the rags and throw them into the sea, bury them, burn them . . .