A Norwegian Tragedy

11

Rescuers

Heroism on the Tyrifjord

Of the sixty-nine people who died in the Utøya massacre, sixty-five died on the island, two on the jetties across the water from the island, one at Ullevål Hospital in Oslo and one in the Tyrifjord. Almost all died of gunshot wounds. The boy Ida found in the water died of injuries he incurred when falling down the cliffs. Only one person drowned, a boy who had been weakened by an infection.

The air temperature that afternoon was 14–15°C. It was windy and raining. According to the camping ground staff at Utvika, the water temperature was 15–16°C. Cold water drains body warmth about thirty times faster than cold air. If the water is colder than 16°C, the body becomes cold relatively fast. Symptoms of hypothermia such as unconsciousness or total exhaustion will normally occur after one to two hours, but the body loses heat much more quickly when swimming or treading water. When the body exerts itself, blood is pumped out to its extremities – arms, hands, legs and feet – and cools quickly. For people swimming, in this case as fast as they can, the loss of heat will therefore be considerably greater, and hypothermia and exhaustion will set in faster. This is why it is difficult to swim long distances in cold water. Among the survivors from Utøya, many had swum fast straight out from the island. When they were out of range, they slowed down. Staying still in the water limits the loss of warmth and extends survivability. The disadvantage, of course, is having to depend on somebody coming to help before it is too late.

Both Ida and Stine were good swimmers, they were both among the oldest members of the AUF, and they both saw fleeing into the fjord as suicide. Stine started swimming only after having survived the massacre at the pump house, when she saw the boats in the water off the island. True, both Ida and Stine were at the back of the island, on the western shore. It was not as far to land from the eastern side of the island or from the northern and southern ends, but the distance even from the other sides was still at least 600 metres. For good swimmers, the Tyrifjord was a possible escape route, depending on where they swam from. The first swimmers reached the jetty at Utvika at around 17:35 or 17:40, after having swum for twenty minutes. They must have been fast swimmers. For many of the young people there, perhaps the majority, the cold fjord was extremely dangerous. Normally Ida would have been right that swimming away was tantamount to drowning. Anders Behring Breivik had planned that the fjord would be his ‘weapon of mass destruction’: he would kill the AUF members by chasing them into the water.

That did not happen. If Ida was mistaken, it was due to the spontaneous civilian rescue operation started by the residents of Hole and the campers from Utvika as soon as they realized what was happening on the island. Many lives were taken on Utøya. Perhaps just as many lives were saved in the Tyrifjord afterwards.

The people who had organized the meet-and-greet day at the camping ground at Utvika a few hours earlier redeployed at about six o’clock, becoming for a couple of hours a key part of one of the largest-scale rescues ever carried out in Norway. The rescue bore the hallmarks of their energy, speed and co-operation. Some of the boat drivers put themselves in danger. From her position at the entrance to one of the grottos, Ida saw one of the boats being shot at while it participated in the rescue operation.

Allan Søndergaard Jensen

Allan Søndergaard Jensen and his partner, Reidun, looked across at Utøya in bewilderment. The MS Thorbjørn had just vanished from sight, and now bangs could be heard coming from out on the island. Muffled thuds. A cloud of smoke rose up from the green trees like a reddish ghost, slowly drifting out towards the calm waters. ‘That's silly of them to be shooting off fireworks now,’ said Reidun.

The small boat from Utøya, Reiulf, was in the water. It was slowly gliding towards land to the south of the camping ground, with long oars sticking out on each side. Behind it, they glimpsed ripples in the water. There were people swimming from the island far out into the fjord. The cabin door suddenly opened and somebody yelled at them. ‘You've got to come!’

There was one of the other residents standing in the doorway. ‘They're calling for help,’ she said.

Allan had a 17-foot Kegnæs plastic dinghy with a 30 hp outboard motor moored at the camping ground jetty. A nutshell of a boat with an echo sounder. He jumped into the boat at almost exactly the same moment as two of his neighbours from the camping ground. The German Marcel Gleffe was already on his way out in his little red Pioner dinghy. A boy stood dripping wet on the jetty, his flesh bare and bright. He had swum from the island and reached land some twenty minutes after the shooting had begun.

‘They're saying that a policeman is shooting them out there,’ one of the neighbours shouted. Firing could be heard from the island, as single shots and salvos: thud, thud, rat-tat-tat.

Perhaps acting more on instinct and impulse than with careful consideration, Allan started the outboard motor and swung the boat out into the Tyrifjord. The grey water looked like molten lead, and the sky came down over the fjord like a headache. In the gap between the water and the mist, the green July shades of the woods on the opposite shore were visible only as a distant dark shape. Utøya rose up in front of him like a cat arching its back as he approached it. What appeared flat and green from a distance turned out at closer range to be steep and multicoloured, difficult to describe in a single word.

The ripples in the water were pointing towards land. The pin-sized heads at the end of the ripples seemed motionless. They were as small as ducklings on a mountain lake. Allan steered towards the small dots, and it was as if the rest of the world disappeared. When Allan slowed down in front of the first head in the water, he saw that the boy was wearing a life jacket, presumably thrown out to him by Gleffe. Allan made the same judgement as the German and steered onwards. More dots in the water ahead of the bow. He turned towards the southern tip of the island. There were many people heading across the water from there in the wake of the Reiulf.

Two heads turned towards him in the water ahead of the prow. Their eyes were like black holes in their white faces. Their gazes became etched into Allan's mind. He knew that they had seen death at close range.

‘Who are you?’ one of them asked.

Allan explained that he wanted to help them. The AUF members stared at Allan and his boat distrustfully. Eventually one of them grabbed hold of the stern. It was as if the boys were paralysed as soon as they caught the railing. Allan had to haul them onto the boat. Two young men in their early twenties. They threw themselves down on the boat's deck. ‘He's shooting!’ they shouted. They wanted Allan to get down too.

Gasping, the boys told him about a policeman going round the island firing a gun. Allan did not know much about weapons, but he wondered whether it might be a shotgun the killer had. The wheel was in the middle of the boat, and the steering column also contained the echo sounder he used when fishing. If it was a shotgun, he thought, perhaps he could take cover behind that small veneer box if the policeman appeared on the shore. Allan knew that a shotgun was not particularly effective at long range. It was just that the salvos from the island did not sound as if they were coming from any shotgun.

Next, Allan picked up another two boys from the fjord. One of them sat like a zombie in the boat, speechless and looking blank. He took them back to the ferry landing at Utvika. A towering figure stood over them at the Thorbjørn's pier, wearing a bullet-proof vest and a helmet with the visor up like a halo above his head. The policeman was fully armed. He gestured towards Allan. ‘Go to Storøya,’ he ordered him. ‘The Delta Unit needs boats. Take more boats with you.’

Allan steered north along the shore. People obey the police, after all. By the jetty at the camping ground at Utvika, he stopped and called to one of his neighbours who was with his boat by the shore. Each in their own boat, they carried on together towards the island of Storøya, which is connected to land by a bridge. The wind hissed, and the rain lashed at Allan's face as he accelerated. Allan's neighbour had a more powerful motor, and his white boat pulled ahead. In a sinking inflatable boat ahead of him, Allan suddenly spotted a group of policemen wearing the black uniforms of the emergency response unit, Delta. Their red rubber boat was drifting slowly and helplessly towards land, with the policemen almost down in the water.

The neighbour's white boat passed the MS Thorbjørn, which had landed in a small cove, and reached the policemen first. Their rubber boat was now completely still. The policemen went over into the pleasure boat, took their equipment with them and set off about a minute later. The neighbour's boat lay low in the water and went more slowly after having taken nine policemen on board. As for Allan's neighbour, he was left floating in the police's red inflatable boat.

Allan steered his boat towards the end of the bridge on Storøya. Blue lights were flashing in the bushes that obscured the road above. Policemen dressed in black stood by the crash barrier. As he slowed down, he could hear the sirens of emergency vehicles on the roads, some quite near and others far away. The whole dark green ridge was rippling with sirens and blue lights, and a helicopter roared overhead. Had World War III started? Both the E16 road and the other main road were pulsating with activity. An enormous policeman jumped on board Allan's boat. Another immediately followed, and then another. Eventually there were six dark figures in the boat, with guns and bags. ‘Out!’ one of them said.

Allan clambered ashore and saw the boat head off. From a distance, the policemen looked like cormorants on a rock, stooping forward, concentrating, focusing on the island's distant silhouette ahead of them. Allan was left standing on the shore, suddenly helpless. He was out of the tunnel, suddenly on the other side, and the cold afternoon on the fjord re-emerged. Now and then the sirens fell quiet. A woodpecker carried on indefatigably hammering at a tree on Storøya. The willow warblers chirped but fell silent when the rain started again. The clouds drifted along the hillsides on both sides of the fjord.

Half-way out into the fjord, the police climbed out of his boat and into a faster one. A few minutes later, Allan's boat came chugging in towards the shore by the foot of the bridge. There was a woman at the wheel. Allan jumped back into the boat impatiently. He took his neighbour with him and quickly headed back to the rescue operation. The pin-sized heads were still in the water, but there were more boats in the fjord. The two campsite neighbours picked up three boys who were in the water to the north-west of the island and went back to the ferry landing. The neighbour got off there and Allan continued alone.

He filled his boat twice with young people from the water to the south of the island. The next time he was out on the fjord, he could not see any more people in the water, but there were many of them waving to him from the island. Allan went in by the cliffs to the rear of the island and fetched seven wet youngsters who had been hiding in caves and beneath overhanging rocks. The boat lay low in the water as it headed back towards land. His mobile phone vibrated. It was Allan's father calling from Denmark. ‘What on earth is going on up there in Norway?’

Allan tried to explain that he could not talk very much just then. He hung up and lent his mobile to a girl and then to a boy.

‘Does anybody else want to call home?’ he asked, but the other young ones just sat motionless in the boat, like five statues.

When Allan arrived at the jetty by the camping ground, six of the youngsters went ashore. The seventh one was injured, and a policeman in a Pioner dinghy shouted to Allan that he should take the injured to the ambulances at Storøya. Then the boy began to scream. ‘No fucking way!’ he protested. ‘I want to go ashore. Now!’

This was the third time the police had given Allan an order, but this time he did not obey. People on the pier helped Allan to haul the boy over onto the pontoon jetty.

Allan went back to the island again. He had little fuel left, he was cold and his clothes were soaking wet. There were many boats circling Utøya now, and there were no more heads to be seen struggling in the fjord. He steered slowly round the island. Young people stood along the shoreline waiting for transport. Some of them waved, but Allan did not stop. As he slipped around the southern tip of the island, he saw young people lying completely still on the rocks. Not piles of clothes, but people, some of them in strange, unnatural positions. Others were stretched out peacefully, like sleeping children. Many of them were barefoot.

There was a group of bodies on the flat stony beach at the southern end of the island and up towards Nakenodden. Some of them were down in the water; others had their upper bodies and heads hidden in the light green hazel bushes. Pale skin stood out brightly on the bodies of those who had got undressed to swim, but who either had not managed to get out into the Tyrifjord or had turned back to the island. His own children were fourteen, nineteen and twenty-three years old, the same ages as the dead bodies on the rocks.

Allan turned round the steep end of the island. There was a youngster drifting in the water under a rock wall, with his head down. He carried on past the tallest cliffs. Light-coloured crags gave way to dark coniferous forests. The pump house was a square of breeze blocks under a pitched roof of black tarred felt, in a small clearing among the lush woods. A few white birch trunks on each side lit up the dark, steep shore. A pipe led out of the building and down into the Tyrifjord. Along the wall on the side of the pump house facing Allan was a cluster of bodies. It looked as if they were leaning against one another, holding onto one another. Down towards the shore there were more of them. There was dark blood on the cliffs. Clothes were left among the rocks, red and blue spots against the dark stone like letters on the bare crags.

At the top of the island, at the rock called Stoltenberget, the bodies lay separately. A heavy-set young boy wearing jeans and a brown jacket sat a few metres above the waterline, leaning against the rock wall. A metre below his feet, a girl lay horizontally at the water's edge, her skinny legs in black trousers and her upper body partly hidden among the rocks. Five metres further out towards the tip of the island was another body. Then it was another 5 metres to the next body, and two more young people lay a couple of metres away and a little further up the cliff – one in a black jumper and one in a red jumper, together in death. Their faces were unseen and the boys were often indistinguishable from the girls. Allan thought he counted between twenty-five and thirty bodies at the back of the island, from the southern tip to the north.

Allan came ashore for the last time that evening at about half past eight. He had lifted thirteen or fourteen youngsters out of the water and picked up another seven from the caves. He did not have the strength to tie up the boat but made do by pulling a loop of rope from one of the jetties over the rowlock. Allan staggered across the steel-grey gravel on the jetty. He stopped on the steep slope up to the caravan on the ledge. He stood still and became aware that his legs would not carry him any further. Getting up the last few metres seemed impossible.

A small, stocky figure on the wet hillside. Something inexplicable had happened. Krokkleiva rose up above him like a green canopy, but its familiar red cliffs resembled bloody slates. Until that day this landscape had been Allan and Reidun's paradise in storm and wind, sun and clouds, but now it had been torn apart, leaving a scar. Allan and the other people with boats had picked up every single head they had seen swimming in the fjord, gathering in every single one, but they had not been able to stop something strange and unfamiliar being carved into the stones on the island. Something running from the island and seeping out into the grey waves of the fjord, rising up into the air like mist and casting a shadow over the surrounding blue hills.

Anne-Berit Stavenes

The rescue operation had started before the boats picked up the youngsters from the water and before the ambulances and helicopters transported the wounded to hospital. It had started on the island while the massacre was ongoing.

Anne-Berit Stavenes lay on her back in the ferns above the track leading from the pump house up to the clearing where the wash house was. She could not move. The grey windowless pump house was down by the water less than a hundred metres away, but Anne-Berit could not see anything apart from the branches of the trees, the ferns and the thick, dark blonde hair of a slender AUF girl lying on her stomach. A few hours earlier, this girl with pronounced dimples had been standing together with two of the other cooks on Utøya, saying ‘You – are – fantastic’ to everyone coming to eat lunch. The three cooks said one word each: ‘You’, ‘are’, ‘fantastic’, like Huey, Dewey and Louie. The essence of the Utøya spirit.

Now she was bleeding to death. A shot had gone through her jaw, from her left cheek to her throat beneath her chin. She had a graze shot to the chest and gunshot wounds to both arms. Anne-Berit thought the girl had been hit by at least three shots and assessed the wounds on her arms as the most serious. Her arteries were torn open and she was bleeding profusely from both arms. ‘I can't feel my arms any more,’ she whispered.

It was almost an hour since she had been shot, Anne-Berit reckoned. Her mobile phone showed that the time was ten past six. Anne-Berit used her mobile sparingly to call the police and her colleagues while saving the battery.

If the girl was to survive, she would have to get to hospital as quickly as possible. They were lying in the ferns and could not move. Anne-Berit had instructed the AUF members who had stretchered her out into the woods from the Café Building to bandage her arms and neck with a triangular neckerchief she had fished out of her pocket. They had collected stones to put pressure on the wounds. Eventually Anne-Berit pulled the girl on top of her, without thinking that this put her in a position from which she could not run away any more. The cold ground would kill the girl. She had to be kept warm. While Anne-Berit focused on the wounds to her face, the AUF members took care of her arms.

With Anne-Berit from Norwegian People's Aid below, the injured girl on top and four young AUF members putting pressure on her wounds on each side to stem the bleeding, they looked like a crystallized form of the human will to survive. They were in spontaneous formation, like a statue hidden in the bracken.

Anne-Berit could just hear and not see what was happening on the island around them. She had tried to stop the massacre in the Café Building but had not managed. Together with Ida Spjelkavik, Anne-Berit had been one of the first to reach the Little Hall when the shooting began in front of the main entrance. While Ida ran into the group meeting room, Anne-Berit had gone out the glass door and had stood at the top of the concrete steps leading down towards the campsite.

A policeman was walking calmly towards the tents on the gravel track below the steps with his gun raised. It looked as if he were clearing the area. A girl came towards him. Anne-Berit was about to shout to him and ask if everything was alright. The policeman came to a halt and shot at the girl. She collapsed and lay there. In the background, Anne-Berit saw a group of young people standing at the campsite gaping. Someone was at the door behind her.

‘Wait,’ Anne-Berit hissed. ‘Don't come out here.’

‘I want to get out!’ shouted an angry voice.

‘No!’ Anne-Berit screamed. ‘Go back in.’

Anne-Berit went back inside, ran into the Main Hall and called her colleague at the camp who was in charge of crisis management. They briefly summarized the situation: there was a policeman on the island, and he was shooting to kill. The shots picked up again and Anne-Berit realized that the policeman was not heading towards the tents after all, but had turned and was approaching the Café Building. She threw herself down on the floor and crawled out into the corridor to shout that they had to shut the doors, but it was too late. Amidst the screams and the panic, she heard shots already being fired indoors. The policeman was firing in the Little Hall.

‘I can't feel my legs,’ the girl whispered.

Anne-Berit reassured her that she would be alright and that the police were on their way. The shooting was moving around the island. A few minutes earlier, the shots had been coming from the north, from the area around the rock at Stoltenberget and the cove at Bolsjevika. Now it was quiet again. She heard people sneaking through the woods around her, a voice whispering that ‘he’ was on the football pitch. Everybody knew who ‘he’ was. There was just one of ‘him’ on the island. Anne-Berit finally got through to the emergency number 112, but one of the AUF members hushed her.

Calm footsteps were approaching from the woods. Somebody was coming along the footpath from the north. To start with it seemed as if the footsteps were coming in their direction, then they went further away and down towards the shore and the pump house.

‘It's the police,’ a voice said. ‘The boat's come to help you. It's safe to come out.’

Some AUF members answered, but there was only one person walking calmly around Utøya that day. And then the gunfire started. Shot after shot, salvos and single shots as if it would never come to an end. Shouting. Dying screams. The smell of gunpowder came drifting through the wet bracken.

The shots continued. Anne-Berit lay motionless, unable to move. She could not run away and realized that she was going to die. ‘That's as far as I'll get in life,’ she thought. ‘He's going to shoot me in the head, and then I'll die. Here. In the ferns.’ The shots rang out down the hillside. On the phone she heard the voice of the police operator shouting to her colleagues.

‘There's gunfire there now! […] I don't think the caller's being shot at.’

It fell silent again. Perhaps he was reloading. Perhaps he was on his way through the grass. But then she heard the sound of feet running along the track from the pump house. He was not walking calmly now but running in her direction. The steps approached fast, passing just below them and running on up towards the clearing by the wash house. Anne-Berit heard the steps disappear towards the centre of the island. A few minutes later, shots rang out further away from the southern end.

The AUF members began to whisper again. Anne-Berit spoke to the girl lying on her stomach.

‘Yes,’ said the girl. She was still alive and still conscious. ‘I know I'm going to die, because you're so afraid,’ the girl whispered.

‘No,’ Anne-Berit replied in protest. ‘You're going to live.’

A helicopter was circling over the island now, the loud roar of its engine drowning out all other sounds. Anne-Berit remembered the girl with the mosquito bite who had woken her at six o'clock that morning.

She only got through to the police again shortly after seven o'clock. They said that one perpetrator had been caught, but that they should not move because there might be more of them. Neither Anne-Berit nor the AUF members lying there thought there was more than one perpetrator, and when they heard boats down by the shore they got up. The way down to the water was steep and rocky. Tall flowers, northern wolfsbane, were waving to the right of the pump house. Using strength she did not know she possessed, Anne-Berit carried the girl down the slope towards the cove where the boat was waiting. She took no notice of the bodies in the grass around them and did not see the blood on the stones.

There was a seriously injured boy on board, lying with his legs half-way out of the heavily laden boat. Anne-Berit counted three wounds on his body and saw that he was pale with a distant look in his eyes. She took hold of him by the shoulders and spoke to him in an attempt to keep him conscious. They came ashore at the ferry landing. The girl with the dimples called for Anne-Berit one last time. She was lying on a stretcher and was about to be taken away. She wanted to say goodbye. Her face was pale, but there was still life in her eyes. She was not gone yet, and Anne-Berit took heart: perhaps she would live after all. The girl said she did not want to call her parents before knowing whether she would live.

Anne-Berit helped out at the ferry landing but was beginning to move slowly, like a sleep-walker. She took blankets for people who had already been taken on to hospital or to Sundvolden Hotel. Her reactions were slow, as if she were underwater, submerged. Some other volunteers from Norwegian People's Aid turned up on the gravel track and told her that her other colleagues on the island were alive and had saved themselves, as well as many youngsters, by barricading themselves in the Schoolhouse. They did not say that Hanne Fjalestad was missing.

Her fingers were dripping red. Anne-Berit washed her blood-stained hands, but they would not come clean. She washed them a second time. Her hands were immediately covered in blood again. It was her clothes that were dripping. Her fleece was drenched with the girl's blood after having spent almost two hours in the ferns. Anne-Berit washed herself yet again. She blinked, shook her head and stared down, but her hands were still just as red.

Erik Øvergaard

Unlike Allan, Erik Øvergaard did not have his wife or any grandchildren with him at the campsite. Instead Erik had all three of his children in the caravan. Two boys aged thirteen and eleven and a girl aged nine. The previous year he had become a permanent resident at Utvika and acquired a powerful sports boat to have something to play with when the children visited him at the weekends. Now he was standing on the jetty when he saw two girls swimming up from Utøya in nothing but their underwear. ‘Are you going to shoot us?’ one of them asked.

As soon as Erik realized what was going on, he ran up to the caravan. He fetched the children and took them to the caravan of a couple he knew. Erik sensed the children watching him as he jogged back to the pier. A black car with tinted windows came driving down towards the shore. It stopped, turned round quickly and accelerated back up towards the main road. One of Erik's neighbours was standing at the jetty staring out at the boats that were already rescuing people. ‘Are you up for it?’ Erik asked. The neighbour jumped into his boat, and Erik backed out from the jetty.

On his second trip out, Erik went to the northern side of the island. The grey cliffs at Stoltenberget rose up ahead of them, with large pine trees bristling in all directions at the top. Beyond it was the white strip of sand in the cove at Bolsjevika and a glimpse of grey sky above the track leading in towards the football pitch and the main building. The banks of clouds hung low over the pine trees, but Erik was not looking at that. On the island there were ten to fifteen youngsters screaming and waving. Shots could be heard from the woods behind. They were close by now, not distant thuds but ear-splitting cracks nearby. The young people on the shore were desperate.

‘We've got to head in,’ the neighbour said. The young ones were right down by the water's edge, waving their arms and screaming in terror. The shots rang out again even closer.

‘It's not safe,’ Erik decided, steering the boat out. He headed south towards the heads swimming in the water on the western side of the island. ‘Do you think I'm a coward?’ asked Erik.

They threw all the life jackets they had to the people in the water and picked up a full boatload of seven people. When they went back, it was silent on the shore by Stoltenberget. The young people they had seen were lying on the stones now. Erik knew they were dead. When they took the children back to the camping ground, somebody said that they had seen the bullets landing in the water near the boat.

‘They were shooting at you,’ one of the campers said.

But Erik did not believe it. If he had been shooting at the boat, he would have hit it, but, if the gunman was up in the woods shooting down at the children on the rocks, the bullets that missed or that went straight through the children would reach some distance out across the fjord before penetrating the surface of the water. That could make it look as if the boat were being shot at, even if it was not what the gunman was aiming at.

For some reason or another, Erik was unable to imagine that somebody might shoot at him. Why would they want to do that? But, even if Erik had not seen the gunman among the trees at Stoltenberget, he realized that he had taken the boat to where people were being killed. Would he have been able to save any of the young ones by going in closer towards the island? There was no time to think about that question at that moment. Neither was there time to think about the moment of bitterness when a policeman in full emergency gear pushed his boat back out from the Thorbjørn's pier, back towards the island, while the policeman himself stayed on the pier. By that point the shooting had stopped, but nobody knew whether there were more gunmen out there. While the strobe lights of Norwegian officialdom flashed all along the road at Krokkleiva, camping tourists and residents of Hole were out on the Tyrifjord, risking their lives for hundreds of young people.

Erik Øvergaard (personal photograph)

A burly, blond boy was about to go under when they reached him. The other young ones in the water around him shouted to Erik to leave them and save the injured boy first. The boy had been shot in the legs and the groin during the massacre at the pump house but had managed to drag himself down to the water and then to swim just with his arms for almost a kilometre out from the back of the island. When Erik pulled him up into the boat, he was pale with blood loss and exhaustion, but the boy was still alive when they took him ashore. Erik and his neighbour filled up the blood-stained boat several more times before starting to fetch young people from the island.

Afterwards, Erik and his neighbour were unsure of how many children they had picked up, but Erik thought he had gone out six times and taken about thirty-five to forty people back to the shore. Most of these youngsters were picked up from the water. He remembered a few of them: a young boy from northern Norway the same age as his youngest son, a stout girl in a cook's apron who apologized for bleeding on the seats. Even if Erik could not remember every single one of those he had ferried back to the shore, he could not get the glimpses of their faces out of his mind. It was like a slide show in which the still pictures followed each other so quickly that you could barely take in one image before the next flickered across the screen. Girls in their late teens, soaking wet and with a look of something wild and unfamiliar on their faces.