The Blue Fox

III (11–17 January 1883)

The shot fires off. It blows away the divine peace of the wilderness like a scrap of paper. A shower of sparks bursts from the barrel. The gunpowder crack shouts: ‘HEAR THE MAN!’

The vixen is thrown up in the air with a pathetic whine.

Reverend Baldur crawls to his feet.

Purple suns and streaks of lightning dazzle his eyes, there’s a harsh jangling in his ears. His legs are stiff from lying in the snow but the lifeblood surges through his body as soon as he moves.

The priest creeps over to the rock and checks on the little fox. Yes, there she lies, dead as a doornail. He sinks down on his right knee and seizes the fur by the tail; it appears quite intact — there’ll be some value in that.

He straightens up, cramming the vixen inside his coat.

***

The highest knob of the Asheimar peak is known as the eastern high knob. The peak faces more or less west, but has a razor-sharp horn, which means that the slope known as the southern slope in fact faces south-south-west.

In north-easterly blizzards a vast snowdrift forms on the south face of this horn, stretching right from the highest pinnacle down to the roots of the peak.

There stood Reverend Baldur, the firearm in his left hand, his right arm buried up to the wrist in his coat, like Napoleon in the desert.

When the peak replied to his shot.

***

The drift splits in the middle with such a thunderous crack that the loose snow is whirled up around Reverend Baldur, obscuring his figure and blotting out his view in all directions. The lower section of the drift sets off down the mountain — snatching up the priest on the way.

He somersaulted over the precipice, landing alternately on hands and feet, tumbling over and over, losing both his fur hat and his gun. He was carried for a long way on all fours before finally landing on both feet at once. Then he managed to withstand the avalanche for a brief moment before it knocked him flat — and after that he was carried along alternately over or under the snow; sometimes half, mostly wholly submerged. In this way Reverend Baldur took flight.

All the time he remained perfectly conscious, never buried for long.

***

The man travelled some two hundred yards downhill in this manner before the avalanche came to a halt. This was by the high crags on the brink of Freyja’s Chair, as they call the deep bowl in the slopes of Asheimar. Below that lies the steep slope of the Kinnar, light of brow, beneath the foot of the glacier.

Reverend Baldur lay still, recovering from his journey. He was winded and coughed a little, having scarcely drawn breath during his descent. He couldn’t expand his chest for the weight of snow pressing on every side. He was completely buried, apart from his head and right shoulder, which protruded from the snow. He tried to move but could barely twitch his right foot or shrug his shoulder. There was a pain in his left thigh and he suspected it was broken as his leg was numb.

The weather was mild, with light cloud and a gentle southerly breeze; the winter sun floated over the wilderness, fat and red as the yolk of a raven’s egg. This was the calm that had ridden on the wings of yesterday’s storm.

***

A shadow darkened the snow crust and a moment later a raven landed there. It cocked its head on one side, examining the man stuck fast in the snow trap. Reverend Baldur jerked his head and shooed the unwelcome visitor away:

‘Damn you, you ugly cur of Odin!’

But the raven was no more obedient than usual. It called to its namesake and the next time the priest looked round there were two of them. They waddled to and fro, sharpening their beaks, occasionally craning their necks towards the man and breaking out in a hideous carrion song:

‘Kark, kark…’

They took little hops towards him, like eager guests at a feast. But when the larger raven snatched at the priest’s scarf and began to tear out the wool, Reverend Baldur felt it was high time he put an end to this provocation. After a great argument with the drift he managed to wrangle his right leg free, and shortly afterwards it yielded up his arm.

Finally, after a long and weary struggle, he crawled out of ‘the snow-white tomb’, having spent most of his time keeping the ravens at bay with snowballs and threats.

***

Although Reverend Baldur was now above ground, he wasn’t quite free of the snow. It had drifted into his clothes during his breakneck descent and lay between the layers, even against his bare skin. And now the slush began to run down his body in icy streams, from his armpits, down his chest and back, and into his shoes.

The priest growled low as the water turned tepid on his battered body.

***

Reverend Baldur began to think about his journey home; it looked as if he would have to follow the belt of rock west, all the way to the crevasse… Or go in completely the opposite direction and try walking along the River Mjadara… Or… The priest couldn’t complete his thoughts for the ravenous cries of the ravens. They roved around, bent double with hunger, rolled on their backs, croaked and beat their wings on the frozen earth.

He shook his fist at the birds and yelled:

‘Silence, or I’ll scorch off your damned heads!’

The household at Dalbotn were familiar with the headache cure of burning a raven’s head in a pot and blending strong lye with the ash. The mixture was then smeared on the sore spot and left there until the pain subsided.

And now, as chance would have it, the raven pair obeyed. They fell silent as one, lifted off from the snowfield and soared easily over the edge of the bowl without so much as flapping a wing. There the updraught caught them and raised them high into the blue.

Then they were beautiful.

***

Reverend Baldur hawked vigorously, intending to spit after the birds, but before he could let fly he heard a deep whistling sound from above. He looked over his shoulder and scanned the peak of Asheimar; the upper part of the drift had vanished from the highest knob.

In that very instant the avalanche paid the priest a visit. It clapped him on the back and swept him over the cliff. On the way he scraped against the edge, flaying his balaclava up to his crown and tearing a chunk of fat from his neck.

During the fall it occurred to him that there was less risk of injury if his body was limp. When he came down on the slope of Kinnar, he halted for a split second, then was whirled away again twice as fast as before — now head first. Reverend Baldur suspected that this was his last hour but took it for granted that he should resist his fate. So he tried to raise his head above the avalanche, lifting it as best he could.

The priest felt as if he were caught in the midst of a raging storm but there were no further discomforts until he began to have difficulty breathing.

***

Shortly afterwards the priest’s hell-ride down the hard-packed snow came to an end.

What happened was that the avalanche reared up like a wave on a stony shore and when it broke on the glacial moraine it shot the man into a small cave — a kind of elongated hollow that had formed at the end of the last ice age when the glacial tongue lumbered over the mountain root, extracting a thirty-yard long molar of rock.

That is to say, Reverend Baldur came to rest in a hollow under the glacier.

And the avalanche closed it off with its full weight.

He lay on his back, his right leg straight and about a yard higher than his head, his left leg bent and his left arm on his belly. His right arm was also bent and oddly twisted. The haversack had come off his left arm and the leather strap lay about his right elbow, trapping his upper arm.

The priest was not in a good way but this did not bother him as he was dead to the world.

***

Now it was fortunate for Reverend Baldur that he was well wrapped up.

His mother, Nal Valdimarsdottir, had dressed him for the fox hunt. He wore thick, homespun undergarments, so well fulled that they could stand up on their own; a middle shirt of rabbit skin; two woollen sweaters, one light and the other very thick; Danish trousers; three pairs of knitted stockings; and unshaven sealskin shoes on his feet. Over all he wore leather trousers and a leather coat; double-breasted with whalebone buttons.

But, most important of all, Nal had equipped her son with a scarf of her own knitting. He had wound the scarf around his head to make himself invisible to the vixen and this get-up had prevented the priest from losing anything in the first avalanche but the hat that perched on top, a German piece made of kid, while on the second journey the scarf had held the balaclava in place, although it was now half off his head.

On his chest he had the wretched vixen.

***

The rock splits open behind the man. In the doorway stands a young woman clad in nothing but blue knitted drawers and a red tasselled cap. She takes the man’s hand and guides him into a low-ceilinged chamber. There is a well in the middle of the floor with lead shot floating on the water, not sinking, so the surface is grey with shot.

She points at it and says:

‘This is the Well of Life.’

The priest stirred.

The glacier admitted a dim blue shadow into the little rock chamber and by that faint light Reverend Baldur could make out his surroundings. He lay at the foot of a wall, which must be the eastern wall. He had scrabbled a little with his left foot in his sleep, but the right leg was still stuck fast, pointing straight up in the air. He couldn’t sit up or twist round or free himself, however furiously he struggled.

He soon grew weary from his exertions, a drowsiness fell on him and he lost consciousness once more.

***

The man thought he must have nodded off, for when he was startled awake by his right leg falling to the floor with a noisy splash, it seemed to him that the very rainbow itself was shining in through the ice-eye of the cave mouth. He simply couldn’t work out where the colours were coming from, but guessed that it was night outside and the Aurora Borealis sisters had followed him from Asheimar — they were greeting their old friend Baldur Skuggason.

The priest thought this was most obliging of them.

He was feeling rather chilly so he tried to move and that warmed him up again. He drifted off for an hour or so at intervals during the night, shifting position in between times — but not enough to tire himself out. The strap on his haversack grew steadily tighter on his right arm but he couldn’t reach the knife in his belt to cut it.

The man knew that it was possible to survive for a long time in a snowdrift, but expected the glacier to prove a cold bedspread — the advantage was that he would gradually grow wetter from the snow, which was melting around him.

The evening of the second day drew on.

***

Next morning the heat from Reverend Baldur’s bodily engine had told upon the snow by his left arm and head. He was reasonably compos mentis and able to rise up on his elbow. He noticed that the snow was dark where his head had dented it. And at this sight he became aware of a stinging in his neck. He pulled off his mitten, reached a hand behind him and groped his nape: he seemed to have acquired a new mouth where the flesh bulged between neck-bone and shirt collar.

He fumbled this phenomenon for a good while before drawing back his hand. It was covered in blood, which appeared black in the deceptive light of the fissure. Reverend Baldur licked the gore from his fingers; nothing nutritious must go to waste. Then he placed the mitten on the wound and bound the scarf round his neck, pulling it good and tight.

He fell into a deep sleep.

***

Twilight fell, not gradually but abruptly, bringing a black murk.

Around midnight, in all likelihood, he sensed a wetness from the snow, and towards morning on the fourth day there had been such a thaw around Reverend Baldur that he was able to remove his belt, get at his knife and cut through the offending strap. Sitting up, he dragged the haversack to him. There he had provisions: a dried cod’s head.

Dried cod’s head is not merely food fit for a gentleman; it is also a diversion. As he flayed the flesh from the head, putting it in his mouth on the point of his knife and chewing as slowly as he could, to make it last, the man amused himself by naming all the bones and parts of the head:

‘Jawbone, that’s the jaw muscle, shoulder bone, that’s the shoulder muscle, pillow bone, that’s the pillow muscle, raven bone, that’s the raven muscle, gum, that’s the gum muscle, cheek, that’s the cheek muscle, nape, that’s the nape muscle, bell, that’s the bell muscle.

‘And that’s all the bones in this old head!’

Reverend Baldur burst out laughing. He pictured that ancient hag, his mother, with the hook bone on her shrivelled lower lip, mumbling:

‘My little bit, my little bit…’

The priest couldn’t control his mirth. He gripped his belly and laughed. He laughed until he howled with laughter. He howled with laughter until he cried. He cried and his tears were sore.

Yes, he wept sorely for the evil fate that had left him alone, with no one to share the entertainment that is to be had from a dried cod’s head.

***

On the fifth day the priest under the glacier began to fear for his sanity, so he did what comes most naturally to an Icelander when he is in a fix. That is to recite ballads, verses and rhymes, sing loud and clear to himself and, when all else fails, to recall his hymns. This is a failsafe old trick, if men wish to preserve their wits.

Reverend Baldur embarked conscientiously on his programme. He sang and recited all he knew, even the psalms of David. But he had nothing left but Reverend Jochumsson’s ‘big bang’ and a comic verse by his colleague Thorarensen, which he meant to leave out and instead start all over again, when he discovered to his amazement that everything that had dropped from his lips up to this point had been wiped from his memory. Not a single word, not a single letter remained.

He reacted quickly, testing whether this was really the case; he thundered all the verses of Jochumsson’s ‘Song of Praise’ to himself — and, would you know it? once he had finished the rendition he couldn’t remember a thing.

Then he came to Reverend Gisli’s verses.

***

SHOPPING LIST FOR THE MERCHANT’S

Paper and ink and pens and wax,

raisins and prunes and hemp and flax,

baccy, pepper and camphor oil,

a hundredweight of coffee, hooks and foil,

anvil, window glass, fencing twine,

ginger and rum and good red wine,

from this my need will be quite plain,

the day I meet old Thorgrimsen.

Now my wife comes after, to wit,

and buys a cask of aquavit,

silk cloth, soap, a whistling kettle,

six plates, a chamber pot of metal,

cards and baubles, a cinnamon roll,

she buys as if for life and soul,

I think that if she had her way,

she’d take the merchant any day.

***

The poem droned c-c-constantly in the m-man’s h-head like a fly under glass, with-without his being able to resist it. H-he was b-both h-hot and c-cold, ice-hot and boiling-cold at o-once. He t-tried what he c-could to recall oth-other stohories, oth-other p-poems, but it was all-all lost and forgotten, lohost and for-gotten from his deep-frozen memory, he w-was st-stuck with this on h-his b-b-b-boiling b-brain:

Oh, o-o-oh, h-how sham-shaming to d-die with this ab-absurd shopping list, shohopping list, o-on, on m-my li-hip-lihips, thought the pre-pre-hiest.

He p-pursed to-togehether his m-mouhouth to p-prevent, his, his d-dying wohords fr-from behing, for example: ‘a hundredweight of coffee’. Though ih-it w-was truhue that-that he had no-ho witness to his hour of deheath b-but ‘Aitch Tee’ — the H-holy T-trinity — he didn’t ca-hare. And j-just f-for a m-moment, Reverend Baldur f-felt s-s-sorry for h-hims-self, self.

H-he wh-whispered to-the dark-darkness:

‘Thi-his is an ug-ugly h-hole…’

He felt instantly better.

He closed his eyes.

And awaited his death.

‘Ho! Reverend Baldur! Baldur Skuggason! Ho!’

The calls which carried to the ears of the dying man sounded as if they came from the belly of a whale; the voice was muffled, and distance even made it, if anything, even shriller:

‘Ho, Reverend Baldur, ho!’

The priest was jolted out of his deathly lethargy:

‘Ho! I’m here! Ho!’

He fell instantly silent to listen for a response:

‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’

He tore off his balaclava and turned his right ear to the livid ice wall, but heard nothing — he turned the left ear: not a sound.

‘Down here! Ho! Down here!’

He shouted and yelled, then pricked his ears, moving with great care so the creaking of his leather clothing would not drown out any noises from outside. Yes! There it was; nearer. A reedy voice was calling:

‘Are you there? Ho!’

‘HO! HERE! HO!’ Reverend Baldur howled with all his life and soul.

***

‘Do you want to deafen me?’

Reverend Baldur’s heart missed a beat. The enquiry did not come from some searcher outside on the snowfield, no, the impertinent enquiry came from someone inside the fissure with him, and not only inside the fissure with him, but right up against him, or to be more precise, from inside his own clothes.

The priest squawked with terror when the vixen stirred at his breast. He writhed on his wet pallet, tearing off his leather coat with such violence that the whalebone buttons popped off and were lost. (Which was a great pity as they were fine articles which Haraldur, Reverend Baldur’s half-brother, had carved with his own hand and given him as a confirmation gift.)

The vixen sprang forth on to the floor of the cave. She spun in a circle, plumped down on her rump — and began to lick herself like a house cat.

***

Reverend Baldur was quick to recover, a man with a priestly training; the naturalist rose up in him. He watched the beast’s behaviour with scientific detachment.

She was damn sprightly, considering she had been out cold for six days and nights. It was ridiculous how she worked away at herself so frantically. She licked the bloodstains from her pelt and bored her muzzle to the roots of her fur, gnawing at herself as if she were de-lousing for Doomsday.

The nature-observer shut one eye.

‘Look at the creature, faugh!’

He slapped his thigh.

‘Hah, a vampire drinking its own blood!’

At that point the vixen spat out the first piece of shot. It pinged against the priest’s cheek. He moaned aloud and swore. But the vixen ignored him. She continued to preen herself until she had cleaned from her flesh all that the rifle had delivered to her: bloodstained lead ricocheted around the fissure, and great sparks flew from the rock where the shot struck.

The priest was hard-pushed to avoid the hail of lead that whined around him like a swarm of midges.

***

The vixen now began to pace back and forth, to and fro, here and there. Reverend Baldur sat quietly in his place, with his hands in his lap. He avoided meeting the beast’s eyes; it seemed edgy and incalculable.

Time passed.

At first light next day the vixen stopped and said:

‘Well, Parson, what do we do now?’

‘We could argue,’ he answered.

‘What should we argue about?’ she asked.

‘Electricity,’ said the priest.

The vixen regarded him as if he were a fool:

‘If you think a wild beast like me knows the first thing about electricity, you’re sadly mistaken…’

But Reverend Baldur was so insistent that he suggested to the vixen that if she could solve a riddle he knew, she would be allowed to decide the topic of argument; if not, they would argue about electricity. The vixen agreed:

‘Out with it, then…’

‘I’m born with a loud noise, and yet I have no voice.’

The vixen took thought — for far too long, in Reverend Baldur’s opinion, but he said nothing, he didn’t dare alarm her — and in the end she gave in.

‘Do you give in?’

The priest laughed at the beast’s stupidity: ‘It’s a fart!’

And he broke wind in support of his point.

‘How predictable,’ replied the vixen, dryly:

‘Go on then, argue about electricity.’

***

By rights the electricity debate should have taken place in a grander setting than the stony crack in a glacier’s backside. The fact of the case was that Reverend Baldur had been invited to Reykjavik to talk about this interest of his at a public, advertised meeting. There he meant to oppose some Icelandic-Canadian émigré who was preaching Edison’s great tidings to his former countrymen.

If the avalanche had not taken him, the priest would have returned home to Dalbotn the morning after the fox hunt. He would have put the finishing touches on his speech and then reached the capital four days later, at noon on 15th January, and that evening he would have wiped both his nose and his arse with his opponent. By his calculations, the meeting must have taken place three days ago; quarrelling about the matter with the vixen was some compensation.

So, the priest expounded his religious theories for the beast, for against electricity he had theological arguments. These theories were highly modern, because Reverend Baldur believed in a material God, self-created, both visible and tangible — compare: ‘When it snows on man, it rains on God.’

Consequently he could not accept that electricity, which is created by the friction of the smallest atoms of the world, which form the kernel of God, should be transmitted via wires and cables, here, there and everywhere, even into factories where it would be used to drive machines which, for example, might spit out meat-balls, yes, or mustard.

What had she to say to that?

***

The vixen decided to meet the priest on his home ground:

‘But if electricity is the building material of the world, and light its revelation, compare the first book of Moses, and God himself is a being of light, though perhaps we can’t see this with the naked eye — like the pitch-black rock that surrounds us — well, couldn’t you say then that in reality it is one all-embracing world mission to bring God into people’s homes via electric power lines; even illuminate whole cities with him — n’est-ce pas?’

She looked enquiringly at the priest. He returned her look in silence; she tweaked the argument:

‘Surely the transmission of electric power ought to be desirable in the eyes of the Church, and its servants, if it is the Almighty Himself who shines in the lamps.’

He did not reply. Had she stumped him, then? No, the little fox had not noticed that while she was talking, Reverend Baldur had drawn the knife from its sheath and hidden it in his hand; the one facing the rock wall.

Then he said gently:

‘Do you really believe, Madam Vixen, that the radiance from these electric bulbs of yours can penetrate the human soul?’

Before she had a chance to answer, the man plunged his knife deep into the vixen’s breast.

***

He raised the vixen’s remains on the blade of his knife and stared into her dull eyes; the pupils were filmy like moorland tarns in the first freeze of winter, but all the priest saw was that she was dead at last.

The corpse lay limp in his hands and he discovered that the skin was strangely loose on the body; a sure sign of a witch’s familiar — since the night she had tried to drive him mad by dividing herself into four, he had suspected that that is exactly what she was: a witch’s familiar. His ruse of luring her into talk had been successful. The sender had been careless, he had put too much of himself into her, spoken unwittingly through her. Yes, the use of French at the end of her speech about the city of lights had given the beast away. The priest was in no doubt as to who had sent him Vixen Reynard’s-daughter.

The demon bore every sign of having been raised against him by that fool of a sheriff from Fjord, Valdimar Skuggason, his elder brother. This upstart had never forgiven Reverend Baldur for the fact that in her widowhood their mother Nal had chosen to live at the Botn parsonage, taking with her their patrimony, the hymnbook collection of ‘Old’ Skuggi Haraldsson from Saurar.

No, she wasn’t put off by the fact that her Baldur had never left these shores nor that he had received all his education from an Icelandic priest’s school.

***

Reverend Baldur Skuggason skinned the vixen, thinking of his brother Valdi with quiet vengeance all the while, cutting along the animal’s back, hacking a groove beside the spine, from ruff to tail: yes, he’d get his just deserts; he groped inside the body with his hands, down along the flanks, squeezing his fingers between flesh and hide, leaving the fat behind in the belly: he would bring a charge against him at the high court for attempted murder; he snapped the outer limbs from their sockets, cut a ring round the paws and forced the legs out of their socks, he jabbed his forefinger into the muzzle, tore the nose from the skull with his nail; he would go to the gallows, the damn mountebank — and so the man tugged and tore and toiled until he had ripped the animal from its blue pelt.

The priest stripped naked. He gouged the fat out of the skin bag and greased himself from top to toe. Then he dressed himself in the hide, which proved so roomy that its forelegs reached the ground. The vixen herself wasn’t much to look at where she lay on the stones, naked as a foetus in the womb. The man stuck his finger into her ribcage, plucked out her heart and laid it on his tongue:

It’s like ptarmigan, thought Reverend Baldur, pulling the skin over his head. He swallowed the slimy fox heart, and as if he’d been struck by lightning the thought flashed through him — OUT!

***

Reverend Baldur dug himself out of the avalanche. He used both jaws and claws, he no longer knew his name, he just scratched and gnawed, gnawed and scratched.

The blood throbbed in his temples.

‘Light, more light!’

But the closer the priest came to his goal, the less man there was in him, the more beast.

He stands shivering on the glacial moraine, gulping down the refreshing mountain air. The morning sun blesses and restores him.

Below his feet lies a long, quite narrow, green valley. There are fair slopes, grown with grass and willow scrub. A river runs down the middle; a char flashes under the surface, a phalarope floats above. Field mice scamper over the moor, a whimbrel whistles in the marshes, ptarmigan busy themselves building nests among the tussocks, a honey bee growls in the moss and plovers wait to be caught. Everything is greener and bluer, larger and fatter than he has ever seen before.

Then a fox barks from the stony ground at the mouth of the valley.

‘Argh, argh!’

Skugga-Baldur pricks his ears at the call.

There’s no mistaking the scent; it’s a vixen on heat. Lust burns in his eyes, he puts his best paw forward and sets off down the fair valley; he will be the first to reach her.

It is spring before the days of man.