Before darkness fell she wrapped up, went out and felt them, they hung stiff in the frost, as if nailed there. Two dark patches in the snow, on the beach, where the seals had been. The eagles were nowhere to be seen. But she heard their cries, of other birds too, pulsating clouds of cosmic noise, which followed her into the quay house where she saw that the nets were dry and ready to repair. The cries of the birds followed her back home too, but now it was night and the man on the rack could no longer be seen.

5

To survive on an island you have to search. Ingrid had been searching since she was born, for berries, eggs, down, fish, shells, sinker stones, slate, sheep, flowers, boards, twigs . . . an islander’s eyes are always searching, no matter what their heads or hands might be doing, restless glances across islands and the sea which fasten onto the slightest change, register the most insignificant signs, see spring before it arrives and snow before it daubs ditches and hollows with strokes of white, they see the signs before animals die and before children stumble and they spot the invisible fish in the sea beneath flocks of white wings, sight is the beating heart of the islander.

But when Ingrid went out this morning and saw from the weather that she wouldn’t be rowing to the main island today either, she had a sense she was searching for something that couldn’t be found, however hard, however intently she stared, it was like the feeling of making a mistake before you make it; and only the same jagged blankets of cloud gliding across the sky, releasing squalls of rain here and there over the restless sea, no life to be seen.

She walked south along the beaches in the east and found no seals and no clothes and was filled with a growing unease, which commanded her to talk aloud because sooner or later we need to hear a voice, even if it is only our own, every islander knows this, so she said out loud that she had to get this cat at all costs and started in surprise at the unfamiliar sound, repeated the words until they became ordinary and comforting, then she was stricken by further unease, the sense that she had lost her way on her own island, or that she was on a different island, or something even worse: the sense that she wasn’t alone on this island of hers.

~