Ingrid wonders whether to put Nelvy in her own bed in the North Chamber so that she can keep an eye on her round the clock and whether she should take her to see a doctor, but she puts off making any decision.

The eider ducks waddle onto land, the black-backed gulls lay their first eggs, which Ingrid and Nelvy test in buckets of water and cover with sand in half-barrels, and these are followed by the smaller gulls. Nelvy enjoys this work, the warm eggs in her hand, and Ingrid has to keep taking her head in her hands, feeling for the lumps and hoping they will soon go.

One day Nelvy says that her parents are dead.

Ingrid doesn’t know what to answer, she asks how Nelvy can know, and Nelvy mounts a weak smile. They make three new eider houses from sheets of slate they collect from the beach in the west and brush clean, two form the walls and one is placed on top as a roof. Then they cover them with peat and fill them with some of last year’s hay, and the following morning they find Nelvy dead in bed.

~

Ingrid lies down beside her and stays there until she is cold, and she doesn’t hear Barbro, who comes in and tries to drag her out of bed and shouts, it stinks hier, th’ girl has messed herself.

Ingrid has experienced this before, not being able to live after someone has died. She gets up later that evening, shoos the others out, carries Nelvy down and washes her in the kitchen, the child’s white body with no lumps, and dresses her in the finest clothes she herself wore when she was a child. Arne and his brothers spend the night making a coffin and Nelvy lies on two trestles in the boat shed until they bury her beside Ingrid’s grandparents in the cemetery by the sea, even though there isn’t a priest in the village; an old sea captain from Finnmark does the honours.

His name is Lukas Wara and in the bright sunlight, which for some reason is shining that day, he holds forth on bounteous mercy and the bane of life, and what is more he also has a pious cough.

They consider writing Nelvy Barrøy on the cross, for it turns out that Arvola is not Nelvy’s family name but Gunvor’s, and in Henriksen’s papers no surname for Nelvy has been entered, but in the end they decide not to. They don’t have a date of birth either, so they also omit the date of death, leaving only Here rests Nelvy in foreign soil, and the year she died.