Strange Shores

54

Erlendur walks in silence behind his father as they slog up the hill to the moor. He pays little heed to where they are going. Bergur, lagging behind, breaks into a jog to catch up. Soon the distance between them opens once more and Bergur is forced into a trot again. Erlendur himself is walking hard on his father’s heels, trying to tread in his footprints, though this is tricky because they are too far apart. At times he has to quicken his pace to avoid being left behind like Beggi.

They continue like this for a good while, until their father decides it is time for a rest. Not for him; for the boys. The higher they climb, the deeper and more of a hindrance the snow becomes, especially for short legs. Raising a pair of binoculars to his eyes, their father scans the landscape for the lost sheep.

‘Wait for me, Lendi,’ Beggi calls. He pretends not to hear.

Beggi calls him ‘Lendi’, ‘big brother Lendi’. His mother occasionally addresses him as ‘Lillabob’, which infuriates him, though she only uses it nowadays to tease him. But his father only ever calls him by his given name. ‘Erlendur,’ he will say, ‘pass me that book, will you?’ Or, ‘Time you were in bed, Erlendur.’

Beggi catches up. He notices that Beggi is struggling with his gloves and discovers that he has brought along his toy car. He has freed his hands so he can extract the car from his pocket to check if it’s all right. Then he pushes it inside one of the gloves and tries to put his hand in after it, so that he can hold the toy.

‘I can’t see them,’ their father announces. ‘We’ll climb a bit higher and see if we can find their tracks.’

They resume their journey, their father in front, Erlendur in the middle and Bergur bringing up the rear, fiddling with the little car inside his glove and trying to keep up. Their father sets a steady pace, lifting his binoculars from time to time and heading first one way, then another. Before they know it they have reached the high moors. To a half-comprehending child’s eye, everything then happens very fast. Events arrange themselves into a series of brief snapshots. Their father glances at the sky. Beggi is lagging behind. Snow has been falling for some time but now heavy, black storm clouds pile up with alarming speed over the mountains. The sky grows dark. Their legs sink into the snow and Erlendur, who has paid scant attention to the weather, now feels a cold breath of wind on his cheek. He can no longer see down to Eskifjördur Fjord through the thickly falling flakes. Bergur is some distance behind and Erlendur calls out to him but he doesn’t hear. Erlendur goes back to fetch him and loses sight of their father when out of nowhere a blizzard strikes, reducing visibility to zero. He shouts again to Bergur, who has fallen over in the snow, then yells his father’s name, but receives no answer.

Beggi gets up again but drops his glove which is immediately snatched away by the wind. He starts off after it with Erlendur in pursuit. The glove is lost in an instant in the blinding snow but they do not give up the chase. Erlendur comes close to losing Bergur who is oblivious to everything but his glove. Their mother has taught them to take good care of their clothes. He grabs hold of Bergur’s jacket to slow him down. Bergur is holding the toy car in his bare, raw hand and stops to put it in his pocket.

‘I want my mitten!’ His cry is whipped away by the wind.

‘We’ll find it later,’ Erlendur tells him.

He has to yell to make Beggi hear. He heads back in the direction where he thinks he left his father. Running after the glove like that has muddled him, but he is fairly sure he knows the way. It is terribly difficult to make any headway against the wind and freezing pellets that sting his face. The force seems to intensify with every step he takes until he can scarcely open his eyes. He doesn’t seem to be moving at all and can see nothing but whiteness. Everything happened so rapidly that he hasn’t even had time to feel frightened. It’s a comfort to know his father is nearby. He shouts and Beggi joins in, but there is no reply.

He no longer knows which direction to take, can’t tell if he is going up or down. He believes he is climbing towards where he last saw his father, but perhaps this is wrong? Perhaps he shouldn’t look for him at all but try to get back to the farm, concentrate on saving Beggi and himself?

He begins to feel afraid now and Beggi senses it. ‘Will we be all right, Lendi?’ he asks. He has to shout into his older brother’s ear.

‘It’s all right,’ Erlendur reassures him. ‘We’ll be home soon.’

He takes off one of his own gloves, intending to give it to Beggi, but fumbles and drops it, and it disappears in the storm. Beggi takes hold of his hand.

Erlendur doesn’t have a clue where he is going. He hopes he is heading downhill but is too disorientated to be certain. He tries to persuade himself that the weather will improve once they get low enough. Beggi keeps tripping over in the snow, slowing them down, but it doesn’t cross Erlendur’s mind to let go of his hand. Their fingers are numb with cold, yet Erlendur takes care not to lose his grip on his brother.

The blizzard pummels them from all sides, buffeting them to and fro, knocking them down into the snow and making it ever harder to stand up again. They can’t even see their hands in front of their faces and before long both boys are exhausted and freezing. Erlendur keeps hoping they will bump into their father, but in vain, and they are making no progress in descending to the farmlands.

Then it happens. He can no longer feel Beggi’s hand in his own frozen one, as if they had been parted some time ago without his noticing. His fingers are locked in the grip he had on his brother, but he is holding thin air. Turning round, he tries to run back but stumbles into a drift. Rising, he yells Beggi’s name over and over, but is knocked down again, still shouting and screaming. He is weeping now and the tears freeze on his cheeks.

Utterly bewildered, he squats in the snow, overwhelmed with fear for himself, for his father but most of all for Beggi. He feels it is somehow his fault that Beggi ever came with them on this journey, and can’t shake off the thought that if he hadn’t interfered, Beggi would have stayed at home.

The roar of the storm has intensified by the time Erlendur gets up on hands and knees and begins to crawl, rather than walk, confused and aimless. He has read about people caught in bad weather and knows that an important survival technique is to dig yourself into a drift and wait for the worst to pass. And you must on no account fall asleep in the snow because if you do you may never wake up again. But he can’t bear to abandon his search for Beggi. He hopes fervently that Beggi has managed to get down from the moors and is on his way home or even now in their mother’s arms. When he reaches Bakkasel, no doubt Beggi will come to meet him with their father, and everything will be all right when their mother flings her arms around him. He’s worried about her, knowing she must be desperately anxious.

He has lost all sense of time. It feels as if night fell hours ago. His strength is rapidly flagging. Yet refusing to give up, he toils on through the falling snow, half crawling, half walking, in the feeble hope that he is heading in the right direction. The cold pierces his clothes but his teeth have ceased their chattering and the involuntary shivering that had seized his whole body has also stopped by the time he finally topples headlong and doesn’t move again.

He falls asleep the moment he hits the snow.

The last thing he remembers is Beggi battling through the storm, placing all his trust in his big brother.

‘Don’t lose me,’ Beggi had shouted. ‘You mustn’t lose me.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ he had said in reply.

It’ll be all right.