She had observed how quickly the eagles had torn the seals to shreds, she had seen the blood on the snow, which was covered by fresh snow, and resurfaced like a faint memory. She walked faster, trampled through a pile of seaweed and came across more clothes, rags, brown and wet, with clusters of wood shavings like the stuffing in a doll, though with differing stages of wear, as if they had belonged to different people, with different customs and lives. She spread the garments out on the snow, plus a cardigan and a jacket, and tried to match them as they must have belonged together, making one big person and two slightly smaller ones, and she had one item of clothing left over, half a person, and they were all men.

She stuffed the clothes into the string bag she always carried with her, intending to burn them at the northernmost tip of the island. But they were wet, and they couldn’t be buried in the frozen ground either, so she hung them beside the man already on the rack and decided to walk all the way around the island again.

In the bay where she had found the first clothes, she spotted the eagles again, the white-headed giant and the smaller brown one, perched on a rock in the sea, beating their wings, pecking and clawing at each other as though fighting over prey.

But it was no rock, all around was open water, a hundred fathoms deep, and the rock was moving with the waves.

She ran out to the headland, was about to turn back to get the telescope, but slipped on a stone and caught sight of another rock where there shouldn’t have been a rock either, and it too was moving, disappearing and reappearing like a driftwood log, a whale’s back. And above them both hovered clouds of cackling, angry birds which converged and dispersed, dived and pecked and fought in a swirl of feathers and noise until everything disappeared from view in a fierce snowstorm.

Ingrid covered her eyes with her hands and cried out. Nausea rose and her heart pounded, she had to get down on all fours, unable to breathe as she realised what she had seen.

She pressed wet snow to her face and ran home, passing yet more clothes, two whole outfits and a pair of breeches without a jacket, a torn grey cloak . . . swept them along with her as she ran through the gardens and hung them on the rack, made it to the house and lit all the lamps, also in the sitting room.