Ingrid is standing on the doorstep one strange evening. What is strange is that it isn’t evening but the middle of the day. She sees the milk boat put in, allowing Fredrik and Hans to come ashore, they are home from school, it is Saturday. But she doesn’t go down to meet them as she normally does, it is enough to see them racing to be first up to the house. She also spots a figure down by the boat shed, it is Lars.

She asks the boys how school was, but doesn’t hear the answer, instead she walks down and sees that Lars has herded the sheep into the boat shed. She asks him why.

He looks at her, and the child, strokes Kaja’s cheek, as if this has anything to do with her.

Ingrid sticks her hand down behind the child, takes the letter from Arne and gives it to him. Lars reads and says:

“Tha gave ’em money?”

Ingrid says yes, she had put Malmberget’s leather wallet in the small compartment in the trunk they took with them, the Hans Barrøy 1831 trunk, which Arne thanks them for in more effusive terms than necessary.

“Hva did A say?”

Ingrid shrugs and says nothing.

The letter says that the brothers made it home and found everything in ruins, and pitch black, as expected, since then they had lived in some former barracks in Honingsvåg, and after that in some other barracks in Hammerfest, and were now in Tromsø, at a hospice run by nuns, thanks to the nuns’ kindness and Ingrid’s money, and they don’t know what to do while they wait for spring and the light.

Lars waves the letter and says:

“Hva does tha think?”

Ingrid says:

“Tha needs baiters th’ comen’ winter.”

Lars fixes her with his eyes.

“We’ve got enough of ’em.”

“Tha can change ’em.”

“Th’ one-eyed lad?”

Ingrid decides again not to answer. Lars says:

“Ca’ they bait?” Ingrid says:

“They ca’ fish.”

“We’re rowen’ on th’ seaward side.”

“Arne ca’ fish thar, the young uns ca’ do the baiten’.”

Lars gives this some thought, then says blankly that she should write to the brothers and tell them to go to Lofoten and ask for a job at Conrad Hartvigsen’s trading post in Reine and tell them to stay in Lars Barrøy’s fishing shack over Christmas until he and Felix go north at the beginning of January.

Ingrid looks down at Kaja, who blinks her long, black eyelashes, and she can’t bring herself to say “thank you”, her eyes wander around the boat shed, and she repeats her question about the sheep.

Lars says:

“Is tha goen’ blind?”

He turns his back on her, strides out into the murky day and walks south on his new path to Karvika, it is almost a road now, he is busy.