She sat up, thrust her feet into the woollen lugg boots and went downstairs, but not into the kitchen, instead she put on a jumper and went out to fetch wood. The sky was grey, the light snow was falling gently, not a boat to be seen on the sea, but still the sound of birds, and again the screams, they came from within.

She went into the kitchen and the smell told her she would have to wash him once more, she took her time lighting the stove while he watched through a veil of fever and kept repeating the foreign word in a voice that was strangely deep for such a young man, now at least they were human sounds.

When at last she dared to look straight at him he stretched out the hand lacking only nails, and hid the other. She sat holding it until his eyelids drooped again. Then she washed him the way a human should be washed, it took time, she cried, ate, waited, the silence outside, the snow was becoming thicker and thicker, and he slept peacefully.

When it could be deferred no longer, she wound three scarves around her face and went to the south of the island with a sheath knife and one of her father’s old spritsails, followed the sounds and found the first one by the Russian tree trunk, he looked no more human than the body she had found on Moltholmen. She chased the birds away, cut a chunk off the sail and covered him, placed rocks on the corners and wondered what she would do if she found a woman.

The next was on the headland where she had stood watching the moving rocks. She covered him with sailcloth as well. The third lay directly south of the mooring line she used for the nets. She covered him with sailcloth and rocks and walked past the fleet of nets without looking down into the sea and found the fourth outside the Swedes’ quay house. In her schooldays Ingrid had read about mission fields and dreamed of saving the living, now she was saving the dead, husks emptied of their contents by maggots and birds. She wondered what made them float, supposed there must have been a shipwreck, some disaster, that day she was in her grandfather’s room, her ears filled with a sound she had never heard before, which stirred a strange fear in her because she nevertheless knew what it signified.

~

She went to the boat shed and pushed out the rowing boat, gathered the earthly remains in a netting bag and towed them to the quay, winched them up amidst a tornado of birds, then dragged them into the new quay house, where she covered them with old hemp sacking, wondering what would happen if there were prolonged mild weather and what she would do if she found a woman.