From the marker on the last rock she steered a course, maintaining the angle between the boat’s wake and the swell until she reached Oterholmen an hour or so later. The island was to port and it should have been to starboard. She adjusted her course, proceeded at a new angle between the swell and the twisting wake and reached Barrøy half an hour after she had lost sight of Oterholmen.

She unloaded her things, opened the boat-shed doors and hauled in the boat with the winch her father had installed when she was a child, straightened her back and looked around, the houses in the grey mass up on the island’s humped ridge, visible at a distance of fifteen to twenty sea miles in clear weather, now just small, black boxes beneath a thin layer of milk, no light, no tracks in the snow.

She lifted the yoke onto her shoulders, hooked on her provisions and walked uphill. The boxes turned into houses and homes, surrounded by trees resembling charred fingers. She let herself in and went from room to room lighting the lamps, fired up the stoves in the kitchen and sitting room. She couldn’t be here, either. She went back out, down to the boat shed, checked it was locked and moved the trestles to the leeward side, as though she hadn’t done all this when she arrived. The bouldered harbour moles and the criss-crossed log skids in the green water, Oterholmen came into view and disappeared again. Not a boat to be seen. Not a bird. She turned and gazed at the houses, one with two yellow eyes, then she walked uphill for the second time, so now at any rate there were three sets of tracks in the snow.

2

The kitchen was warmer now. Ingrid took off her gloves and hat, ground some coffee and placed the pot on the stove, stocked the larder with her provisions, fetched more firewood and by now the coffee was ready. She took off her coat and drank the coffee, sitting in her own chair by the casement window, peering out at the shadows to the west, Moltholmen, Skogsholmen, Lundeskjærene and the sleepy shore, well into this day which would never come to anything. Still she did not eat. She looked around for a place to start, under the stove or the table, in the corner by the larder?