ICELAND DAYS

Text by Nick Woodin Photos by Eden Batki

 © 2009 nick woodin and eden batki
illustrations by paul osenbaugh
design by kelly hofschneider
published by aquadanick press, ausable forks, ny
PREFACE
I went to Iceland in 1967. I was twenty-five. For many rea-
sons, including my relationship with my parents and the war
in Vietnam, The United States in the late nineteen-sixties
had become too much for me and I wanted to leave it for a
time. My Fulbright got me a leave of absence from my Army
Reserve Unit. So I left. Iceland was a new world, without
connections. During a lonely Christmas in London, I began a
little memoir. In the first winter after I returned home in 1969 I
finished it. I sent it out here and there but no one was inter-
ested, so I went on to other things. But I didn’t forget the
manuscript and when I took it up again recently, the shape
and smudges of the first, typed page brought me back to a
familiar world.
Thirty-five years later the daughter of a friend brought her
cousin to visit. The young women were curious, outgoing and
charming; perfect guests, they enjoyed cooking. At some
point during their stay, Eden, apropos of nothing, blurted
out,” I’d love to go to Iceland!” Eden is a photographer who
lives in Los Angeles. Some weeks after they left, we received
a yellow box with two photos, one of my wife and one of me.
I was a bit shocked at how good they were. I had recently
inherited some money. After a few weeks I wrote Eden back
and asked her if she really wanted to go to Iceland.
So she and Sara went. I paid. They went for ten cold days
in mid-March. Like all northern areas, Iceland has warmed
considerably in the last thirty years, but mid-March on an
island in the North Atlantic can be grim. I think Eden was a
bit shocked at the weather (she said her shoes were inade-
quate) but Sara, who lives in Chicago, was not surprised.
They looked, drove, ate, drank. They had adventures. March
is not the tourist season in Iceland. One evening they showed
up at a hostel in the country and were met at the door by a
group of young men in their underwear; all of them started
shouting the same word in a sibilant eastern tongue. (Sara
says it was, “Whores! Whores!”)The women retreated to the
very expensive hotel next door (closed for the season and
owned by the same family). The owners took pity on them
and gave them a room for the night in return for helping
with the laundry.
When I got Eden’s photos, I didn’t know what to do. She
had exposed two hundred rolls of film. I had known she
couldn’t illustrate my trip and had always thought her photos
would be tangential to what I saw. For several months, off
and on, I played with what amounted to a expensive, if
entertaining game of Scrabble. Slowly I realized I had two
trips, mine and theirs. They intersect at certain points: in the
landscape, some street scenes, the photos of ptarmigan
habitat. So that’s the story of this book.
INTRODUCTION
IN SEPTEMBER 1967 I WENT TO ICELAND
on a Fulbright Scholarship to study gyrfalcons. The
reasons for my acceptance still escape me. The
project I proposed (an investigation of population
cycles in ptarmigan) happened to be what the
Museum of Natural History in Reykjavik was study-
ing at the time. Ptarmigan are a northern grouse
whose populations in Iceland show a ten-year cycle
of abundance, documented in shipments of hunted
birds to Denmark. Many populations of northern
animals show such cycles, and islands, with their
simplified ecosystems, are a good place to study
them. Of the four recommendations required for the
Fulbright, only those from an instructor in German, a
professor of chemistry, and a professor of botany
had been sent. My zoology professor said the
proposition didn’t sound real. She knew my qualifi-
cations best and was probably right. However, I was
accepted. After my acceptance, my advisor in
Iceland, Finnur Gudmundsson, wrote to suggest
that I concentrate on the gyrfalcon, which is the
chief predator of the ptarmigan in Iceland. I knew
something about birds. I knew Finnur’s name from
from his appearance in Roger Tory Peterson and
James Fishers’ Wild America. So I decided to go:
why not? Iceland would be a good place to wait out
the war. At least until the US Army found me; ???
more heroic ??? I had nothing better to do.
I left in early October from Idlewild Airport (it
changed its name to John F. Kennedy Airport after
Kennedy’s assassination, which occurred while I
was in Iceland). I arrived at the airport much too
early. Outside it was hot, with a heavy smell of
kerosene. Planes at that time were still jettisoning
their excess fuel into the air before landing. The
sidewalks beside the terminal had a yellow glare in
the late afternoon light. The plane was scheduled to
leave at ten-thirty in the evening but didn’t take off
until early the next day. The stewardesses were my
age and drinks with dinner were free (including after-
dinner brandy) and I soon fell asleep. I awoke some
hours later. For an indeterminate period we slid
through a gap between two layers of clouds whose
eastern cracks were lined with rose, which slowly
turned to gold. Later we began to glimpse the sea.
The winds below must have been considerable, for
its dull surface was dotted with white breakers,
utterly motionless from our height, which I first mis-
took for icebergs. A ship appeared and slowly van-
ished. At dawn we had been served breakfast.
Toward noon you could feel the plane, in delicate
intervals, begin to descend.
One imagines, I imagined, Iceland as a tiny
place, a dot, a speck, in the North Atlantic. We
burst out of the clouds into sea haze and sunshine,
with in the distance a low cut-violet mountain. A
plain in russets and browns stretched away to its
base and then vanished in distant outlines, peaks,
and glacial glows toward the east. We circled, the
vision was replace by the slow rotation of a bar of
sunlight across the speckled window, and then by
an olive flat coasting nearer and nearer, until one
could make out the smaller tidal channels and
stones, a chain-link fence slid by, and we landed.
Upon my arrival in Reykjavik, I was lodged in one
of the University of Iceland’s two student residences.
The buildings faced each other across a grassy
slope, with the main University building lower down
and in between. The feeling of peace I had those
first few days has never left me. My room contained
a bed, a desk, a desk chair, and an easy chair in a
corner. A hard sofa converted to a bed. A narrow
entryway, separated from both room and outside
corridor by doors, held a washbasin and closet. The
backyard, with two leaning clothespoles, ended in a
double row of birches atop a bank, with a part of the
city beyond. At night a streetlamp next to the yard’s
corner picked out a silent and homey circle of fence,
birch, and angled dirt road.
Yet every morning the first week I woke up
headachy with dread, wideawake to a blue or gray
sky, a cool room, and the roar of a bus on a nearby
street carrying people to work. I encountered virtually
no-one, the language was incomprehensible, and
except for occasional footsteps in the hall, followed
by the slam of a door and perfect silence, the dormi-
tory appeared empty. Water bubbled in the radiators.
Quite ordinary acts turned out to be feats of planning
genius: having acquired a box of cornflakes, one still
needs a bowl, milk, and spoon. I was not able to
locate the Museum of Natural History, despite
searches occupying several windy and cloudy after-
noons, all suspiciously similar now in my memory, but
on one of them I came to a peeling building in the
middle of a muddy lot, with above its door a plaque
depicting a white falcon on a blue background (the
symbol of the telephone and telegraph monopoly)—
and after a block to a bakery, and then to a milk
shop, luck was with me that day—and on the others
all to the same place, no mater how I approached it,
a huge hole in the ground, site according to a bill-
board of a new police station. Finally my advisor
phoned me (the dormitory had a public phone but I
had not been able to figure out the telephone directo-
ry: people are listed by first name in Iceland), and told
me that the Museum was in the building across the
street from the hole. It had two entrances, and the
one on that street was temporarily closed.
When I woke up the second Monday, my
fear was gone, never to return. I had been there
exactly one week. Esya, the local mountain greeted
you through the front door as a low gray massif
under a soft blue sky—nothing like it would become
in November, when in the late, endless dawns it
had a dusky, violet glow, with masses of snowy
clouds in the hollow of its humped ridge, and sun-
light slowly reddening its lower slopes, while after a
wet night, gift of a delesquescent moss, those
same slopes would flash a vivid, evanescent green.
But now it was still early in the fall. One warm after-
noon in my second week I stepped outside to find
a small brown falcon hovering over the door, four
feet above my head, as a sparrow-like bird dived
under the steps, and the falcon’s tail showed its
dark bars against the pale sky. In a moment another
appeared, but the pipit had gone. I saw the two fal-
cons several times over the next month, perching
like pigeons on the front of the University building,
or diving at some chittering, dipping redpoll, a
straggler from a flock which fed in the birches,
before they disappeared, flying over several hun-
dreds of miles of ocean, to some warmer (or more
fruitful) place for the winter.
9
october 25: Mornings I write, but almost every afternoon I go to the Museum,
which occupies the second floor of a building a mile or so out from the center of
town. I time my arrival downtown so I can spend ten minutes in a bookshop on
the main street among the smells of paper, overcoats, and glue before catching
a bus from the central turnaround nearby. The concrete pavement of the square
is set out with three benches and a clock tower of aqua glass, the glass covered
on three sides (one is bare) with advertisements for ‘Opal,’ a chewy sweet.
Yellow and green city buses pant beside the curb. The boom of a ship in the har-
bor sticks up above a row of sheds. In front is a grassy hill. When we have ground
up over the hill and are in a sense almost there, and gathering speed with a rat-
tle, I see a traffic sign consisting of a triangle with a central exclamation point,
the shape of which exactly mimics the gable of a house that projects out into the
sidewalk beyond it, concealing an intersection just ahead —a scene I always
associate with a cold bus, a gray sky, a slight afternoon depression.
I try to arrive by three, as at three-thirty coffee is served for the staff. On my
second visit I had been presented with a room, newly cleaned, which Finnur and
I soon furnished with a table from the geology library and two chairs. The
thoughtfulness behind these preparations, of which I was professionally so
undeserving ((I had no experience in field biology), spiced the sense of guilt
which was, at least in the beginning, the chief reason for my regular attendance
at the Museum. In the room I compiled a card file of literature about gyrfalcons,
collected maps, and made plans for my field study in the spring. I tried twice to
spend my mornings there, but as so much scientific work bored me, and as an
appearance at afternoon coffee seemed to satisfy any doubts about the serious-
ness of my scientific activities, I stopped that effort. After a week or ten days I
leaned out the window and pulled a string to close a vent, part of a small evacu-
ating hood, which had made the place, once the door was closed, rather chilly.
We drink coffee about a table which is always short one chair (mine): it must
be fetched from the geology department next door. The heads of the depart-
ments of biology and geology, who share a rotating directorship, sit at opposite
ends of the table, with their subordinates and associates grouped around them.
The middle section is occuppied on one side by a moss specialist and a botanist
(two separate people), and on the other by the two secretaries, who make and
pour the coffee. Under the half-raised blinds, pale gray houses stride up the
street. The chief geologist, a radical socialist and song writer (known for wear-
ing a red cap on his expeditions to the Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in
Iceland), and the moss specialist, a somewhat lugubrious communist, skim the
political news of the afternoon daily, a left-leaning Daily News. (My arrival had
rated a frontpage picture and feature story). After everyone has been poured a
second cup, a sequence of events occurs which I never fathomed: the taxider-
mist, who sits opposite me at the biological end, offers the chief geologist a cig-
arette from a newly opened pack, which offer is accepted. The geologist com-
ments on the price, and after removing one, tosses them back. At this point the
botanist (whose chair has been up to now empty) arrives and appropriates the
newspaper, from which he reads aloud the more amusing parts, while the moss
specialist, eyes averted, lights up one of his own cigarettes and rests his temples
on his fingertips over his coffee-cup. Amid a dead silence, one of the secre-
taries, a woman with thick glasses and a warm smile, with whom I have become
friends, asks me a question in English.
We occasionally have visitors. In October a lanky Dutch student with a copper
beard spent three days in a closet off the entrance sorting out a backpack of
botanical specimens into tiny manila envelopes. He spoke halting Icelandic,
had walked across the island, and left the coffee table a pouch of excellent
tobacco. Then one late autumn day Finnur introduced himself with Germanized
surname to a visiting volcanologist. In January came a party of botanists from
North Carolina, of whom my only sight was a snapshot view of an upturned face
with an upturned nose and distant smile of one of them lacing up his boots in a
1
room full of equipment.
After coffee I return to my books and sunset. Occasionally Finnur takes me
into his office for a chat. It is difficult to find out anything definite about con-
ditions in the north (afterwards I realized why). A blonde woman in the build-
ing’s opposite wing, whose windows were framed by a set of olive-green
drapes, switched off her light and left at four fifty-five, by when the ragged
western clouds would have changed from rose-pink to dirty gray. Soon after-
wards I left. Along a straight street, the lights outline a topographical question-
mark which ends at the glass tower in the central square. One’s dominant
impressions are dusk, damp, and hurrying crowd. A faint greenish mist hangs
over the bay against the dusky mountains. A bus roars by on the street. In the
windy dark downtown I pass a restaurant whose windows are blotched with
steam, skirt a square, and come out near a little lake, along whose shore I con-
tinue up. In a pool of open water on the far side, through the orange shadow of
a school, swims a silent crowd of ducks, geese, and gulls. My sidewalk rises
 toward the campus, which is situated on the outskirts of the city, near a small
airfield. I pass a home for unwed mothers whose yard in the morning is full of
sturdy, noisy children and young women in sweaters. In a yard, the branches of
a rowan end along a white gable, mute testimony to the winds. As I wait to cross
the last street, a gap in the low clouds reveals a pale streak of yellow, such col-
ors in these long twilights, amid the polished aqua glow.
october 30: I have been more or less taken on as a fieldworker by another
biologist in the study, Arthur Gardarsson. The study constitutes Arthur’s doc-
toral dissertation. While he and I were marking birches at Herdisavik this
morning (birch catkins are a winter food of ptarmigan), we looked up once to a
call to see two dark birds, primaries spread for an instant against the gray sky,
looping up under the cliffs that stand above the lava plain on this side of the
Reykjanes peninsula. Arthur said they were fieldfares, some Scandinavian pop-
ulations of which migrate west along a line of latitude in the autumn to winter
near the Gulf Stream on this barren coast. It was a cold day, alternately still and
with a leaping October wind, and we returned hurriedly to our painting and
2 catkin-counting, which, what with laying out transects both on the scree slope
(where birches are lost to rock-slides) and on the plain below, took us two hours
more. The sun shone occasionally on the flat sea to the south, now and then dis-
solving in ripples a trawler that was slowly creeping along the edge of the plain
until, when much closer, it vanished under its lip.
About two-thirty we left for another study area over a one-lane dirt road,
through whose loose gravel slopes of black lava showed like elephants’ backs.
Every so often a break in the cliffs would be marked by a low cascade of rock and
gray moss, old lava falls from the center of the peninsula. Some of the roadside
was fenced and a few of the fenceposts were topped with grassy cones. The cones
had been built up from dust and the droppings of perching birds, mostly
ptarmigan, which used the posts for display in the spring. Among the clumps of
yellow grasses one could make out a few of the woody curls, speckled with
cream, of the previous sesaon’s inhabitants. Perhaps because of the fertility of
these perching posts, their grasses tend to be cultivated—hayfield—ones. We
passed a small house of corrugated iron where the sea bent in, skirted the end
of a large lake, and found ourselves on a straight road leading to the height of a
much more extensive and fertile plain, sunlit for a moment now, with fenced-
off fields and hollows in gray and russet.
Two women were picking crowberries on a slope and further along a man in
a blue cap (husband? brother?) was sitting in a dusty Landrover smoking a
pipe. In the distance the gentle curve of a shield volcano appeared and slowly
vanished. Soon there appeared another line of cliffs, but with grassy taluses,
along the lower slopes of which were spaced the white houses of farms and then
a group of larger buildings, a boarding school for girls.
We turned off on a dirt track that went up along a small river. Where we
stopped to stretch our legs, three gray and white ducks dove in a backwater,
whose current was like black silk. The windows of a summer house shone
through the birches on the opposite bank. Outside the jeep it was cold and
muddy. Further upstream was a hydroelectric station. Beyond a bare slope of
houses and power poles, we caught for an instant, just before it disappeared
over that bare hill, what might have been the butterfy flash of a gyrfalcon.
Rounding the hill, we came in sight of Lake Thingvellir, the river’s source. It
was now too late to do any work and we planned simply to return to Reykjavik
by a road from the head of the Lake, a shorter route than retracing our tracks.
As we approached the shore, a fine mist began to settle in, so that looking out,
you saw a headland dropping down and the motionless water, when, with a turn
of the road, headland and horizon vanished, a black rock appeared, and for one
luminous moment you could not tell where water ended and sky began. This
particular headland remained in sight for perhaps a quarter of an hour and as
I was to see it many times again it has impressed itself on my mind: bare and
rocky, with a peculiar concavity just below its peak—of a size and shape which
exactly fits in my mind’s eye the tightly pressed ball of my thumb.
november 3: If one takes a line straight south from Herdisavik, that flat sea
with its mists and glints of sunlight extends all the way to the Antarctic. What I
also cannot get used to is the tracing by the noon sun of slight swells and irreg-
ularities in the turf outside my window, the uncertain beginnings of the frost
hummocks characteristic of an Arctic meadow. Technically speaking, Iceland
is still in the Low Arctic Region, which extends from Latitude sixty to seventy
degrees north. Above seventy degrees north begins the High Arctic, which goes
to the Pole. Reykjavik, at sixty-five and a half degrees north is two degrees or
about one hundred and sixty-eight miles south of the Arctic Circle. Thanks to
the presence of the Gulf Stream the city has what is known as an oceanic cli-
mate, which while characterized by much wind, damp, and rain, is relatively
mild. However we are twelve hundred miles north of my birthplace in north-
ern New York. The hill slopes have frost hummocks eighteen inches high and
two feet across and in a flat bed of gravel by the edge of a lava flow, on which
sparkles a dark hump of moss, and where a twig of blueberry pokes up next to
a stone, one can make out the dim irregular polygons characteristic of such
ground throughout the Arctic.
november 5: Today Arthur and I reach Thingvellir in time to mark birches.
There is some urgency in our efforts. Birch catkins form a major part of the
ptarmigans’ winter diet. In March, when food supplies are low, ptarmigan have
been observed eating not only catkins (the future birch seeds), but also leaf
buds and short pieces of terminal wood (much less nutritious food). Birch
woods are limited in extent in Iceland. If, through over-browsing, a large
autumn population of ptarmigan were to limit the next year’s supply of catkins
and buds, starvation (and a fall in the population) might result: eating branch
tips might be a sign of starvation. Population cycles might then be related to
over-exploitation of the food supply. Now the birds are still mostly in the hills
but with the first heavy snowfall they will come down into the areas where we
are working.
After marking the birches we drive on a dirt track around the side of the
mountain and up a narrow cut in the hills in an attempt to see some ptarmigan.
As we descend a rise there opens ahead through the scrub a flat plain. Against
the mountain at its far end is a hill like a dome, on whose sides and rounded
top Arthur says people once sat to watch horseraces on the plain itself. The
domed hill is sacred, and the last races were hundreds of years ago when the
Icelandic chieftains sat as a lawmaking body beside the lake at Thingvellir. The
plain is now divided by a fence and the surrounding hills have eroded, great
mats of the remaining turf lying on the rough gravel slopes, the effect of a
thousand years of grazing sheep, wind, and water on light volcanic soils. While
the landscape is far from untouched, the almost palpably clear sky, which is
just now beginning to leak a little starlight, the cold air that seeps like oil down
the steep slopes, the utter still in this pink and brown evening, must have
remained quite unchanged.
november 11-16: One evening after dinner Arthur and I discussed a trip to
the north to check on the hunters’ bags of ptarmigan and to do some collecting
of our own. Last year he had observed an apparent separation of the birds into
groups that were likely to survive the winter and groups that were not. These
flocks tended to keep to separate places. We had however to wait for snow to
bring the ptarmigan, now in their white winter plumage, down from the high
plateau. Thus it was two weeks later that we set off in a rose and blue dawn in
which one’s breath smoked, the ground rang underfoot, and the lawn behind
Arthur’s apartment building was gray with frost, which by noon would retreat
to the building’s shadow, under which it would reform as the day moved on. On
the map our evening’s hotel occupied a hollow next to a stream along the grav-
el road that led to the north, on that high neck of land that, dividing the water-
sheds of the north and south coasts, connects the quacking, crested head of
Iceland’s western fjords with her fat duck’s body. The glow of the sea was
reflected on the dash as we circled Reykjavik’s bay and then wound around the
head of a deep fjord. Our route that day was heraldic with the various moun-
tains we passed.
I have a photo of one vanilla range, taken from a riverbank with the arched
bridge we had just crossed out of the picture on the left. It was about three
o’clock in the afternoon. Before us is the gray river, full of the whoosh and click
of ice cakes, then a misty upstream valley, a long white ridge, and the range
itself, with a fistful of golden rays thrust out from behind one bent peak, the
whole cut and twisted in four different modes before slipping into a cobalt and
5
glittering sea. A faint, fresh scent of salt and sulfur, as well as a refrigerator
chill, enveloped us.
The day turned quickly into a cold lavender evening, and after several more
miles we turned off the main road onto a dirt track that, slightly raised above
the fields on either side, headed straight inland where, over a succession of
drainage ditches, each with its receding row of dirt cones, the horizon was dis-
solving in white hills and clouds. Arthur didn’t quite know the way. Once we
ended up at a ranch-style house with a car in the front yard and the roar of a
stream in the middle distance; then in a pasture where a large owl flew up in
our headlights as we turned to retrace our route back to that triangle of snow in
a hollow of thick scrub where the road had last branched.
***
Now, two and a half years afterwards, I cannot reconcile my memories of our
 trip with a reconstructed voyage in mapland, either on the mauve and yellow
sheet furnished by the Shell Oil Company, on which a bisected country occu-
pies both sides of a single foldout, or on the more detailed reproduction in
nine sheets, of the Geographical Institute of the Danish government, in which
the former’s thick red roads, dotted with bright Shell stations, are replaced by
slim strands of various thicknesses and symbolic significance, and its crude
colors by five delicately differentiated pastels. I can identify the final stretch of
road before the farm, marked off in alternate bars of red and gray on sheet
number five, which runs beneath a conical mountain up to the edge of the cen-
tral plateau. The plateau, which is uninhabited, extends from there to the
heads of the valleys along the north coast and in a western direction to our
hotel. It is a good autumn ptarmigan ground and Arthur wanted to check the
bags of a market hunter who boarded at this farm in season.
The road crept down a bare slope to end abruptly at a barn wall. Though the
lights were on in the farmhouse, nobody seemed to be home. Eventually we
located a teenager who accepted a cigarette from Arthur’s pack and took us to
see the ptarmigan. Unfortunately the farm women were in Reykjavik for the
6 day, so we wouldn’t get our coffee.
The ptarmigan are shot in large numbers for the market. They were strung up
from the beams of a low room behind the stalls in the sheep barn, in what I
found was more or less standard fashion: a slip-knot at one end of a short cord
is put around the necks or feet of five birds and pulled tight, the same arrange-
ment carried out at the other end, and the whole hung over a nail and left to age.
The hunter had shot most of those we saw, which at this time amounted to about
three hundred birds. The boy soon excused himself (He was having dinner at a
farm up the road) and we spent about an hour aging and sexing the catch.
Yellowish shots of various unimportant things -- two gas pumps and mud, a
roadsign, a tendril of smoke reflected in a rainspotted windshield—would
complete a film version of the next two hours. In movieland it is easier to sti-
fle time and jump, say, from that reflection of match and patting thumb, to
(scenes along the same road) a rainy afternoon with moss on a cindery bank,
or a distant mountain in moonlight and mist. We stopped once for coffee and
about eight crossed a river and bounced up a driveway to our hotel. The tem-
perature had risen considerably in the past hour, and gusts of wind shook the
jeep, and as we stopped, emptied a puddle in the headlights. No guests were
staying at the hotel this evening and we found our landlady standing on a table
in the dining room washing the ceiling. She was a rather shy, but amusing
woman much taller than her husband. and she gave us coffee at a table next to
a sort of dutch-door opening into the kitchen while our dinner warmed up.
The hotel smelled like heat, drying wool, and soap. It served as a lunch stop
for buses between the north and south and also put up ptarmigan hunters and
hikers. The roar of an electric generator hung over it like a blanket. The man-
ager’s sister was a sculptor and the marble head of a woman (face upturned,
with vulnerable throat) stood on the landing of the staircase in the hall, four
steps down from a pair of boots set toe-to -toe on a radiator.
While we had our coffee the manager joined us in socks and sweater to talk
with Arthur about the ptarmigan shooting. He was also a hunter, a short, some-
what dreamy man with thick glasses, who came from the south of Iceland, where
(as Arthur said)under the glacier the hills are green. I soon lost track of the con-
versation and concentrated on the “coffee,” which was my first in an Icelandic
restaurant. It is usually served with three cakes: a yellow torte with a red jam fill-
ing, only half the height of one’s thumb; a doughnut fried in a twist; and a dry
butter cake with raisins and citron. Occasionally one comes across a cold, sweet
raisin pancake, the size of one’s palm and having a faint flavor of the lamb fat in
which they were fried, which was served hot with sugar the evening before; or a
very light, thin pancake, also cold but in this case scented with butter, which one
wraps around a cylinder of whipped cream, sugar, or jam. I find a mild sense of
loss, both poignant and terribly mortal, in the evocation of these tastes. Thus I
remember with especial pleasure and pain several other dishes, two from
Sunday afternoon coffee at Myvatn (from the farmhouse where I would spend
the coming spring) and one from dinner at a friend’s: the first was a tall, fluffy
combination of pastry, shaved chocolate, and whipped cream; the second a
moist, fruit-filled cake with a tender apricot meringue; and the last a soup in
two colors (whose warm shades, swept into concentric spirals in four fragile
bowls decorated with blue and yellow flowers, I could without hesitation point
out on a color chart) and three distinct flavors—butter, tomato, and cream. At
the same time I cannot recall the taste of the boiled char at Myvatn, which we ate
five times a week all spring and whose pink or white flesh (the species contained
two gastronomic varieties), topped with bits of butter, floats with photographic
clarity before me—as well as the hole in the ice, the green nylon nets, and the
raw wind over the frozen lake from which we had taken the fish the evening
before. But their taste has vanished.
 After dinner, Arthur, the manager, and two other hunters, who had arrived
after us, had a long disscussion, which about eleven adjourned from the dining
room to a map in the hall, an opportunity I took to loosen my stiff smile and
retreat up the stairs to my room. Each day, after the first hour or two, my com-
prehension of the language seemed to get less and less. The room contained a
square window, which banged during the night, a three-piped radiator, now
cold, in whose interstices I hopefully stuffed my socks to dry, a table, and a
painted box bed.
***
The next morning we breakfasted under a light bulb in the company of our
reflections in the dining room window, but by the time we were done, and
Arthur had had a smoke, a gray gloom had replaced them. Without the wind,
which had blown hard all night, it was strangely quiet. Mist rose from the river
in the hollow against the hill and the mud of the parking lot glistened now and
then in an opal glow through the low clouds to the east. On the square of tiled
floor inside the front entrance, separated from the hall by a sill, half an inch of
water had collected from the night’s storm.
Arthur couldn’t decide where to go. We were dependent on the snow, which
was rapidly melting, to keep ptarmigan in the area. On such a day they might be
anywhere. I think it was because the river, which we had to wade to go east, had
not yet risen much, which it would certainly do if the thaw continued, that
Arthur decided to go in that direction. We parked the jeep beside the road on a
flat above a falls and set off angling upstream toward a series of low hills, which
had first seemed merely another undulation in the flat, a bar of paler gray
splotched with black against the dull gray sky. On a rise the recent tracks of sev-
eral ptarmigan wound in and out on the thin snow under a circle of boulders.
We managed to ford the river with dry feet. On the far side Arthur shot the
day’s first ptarmigan. I was too startled to shoot, whereupon the blood on the
snow, the circling flutter of the dying bird, the whistling side-slip of the
remaining pair around the corner of the hill, concluded a scene which I had in
a sense first come across in a photo in a large book of my father’s, bound in
forest green cloth and printed on a glossy paper which has since vanished from
such books. In the photo two ptarmigan are perched in tandem on a snow
slope, against which they stand out in white on white silhouette, their visible-
ness increased by their strong shadows. The curve of the Colorado slope stands
out against a clear sky, while the shadow of the photographer’s head, camera
next to nose, appears at lower left. We had almost walked over our three. Arthur
slipped the ptarmigan into a waxed paper bag on which he noted the hour, the
date, the spot, and the bird’s age and sex, and slipped the bag into his rucksack.
Three streams broke through the hills in small gorges to form this fork of
the river. We split up: I was to follow the stream on the edge of which Arthur
had shot the ptarmigan up to the plateau, while he would cut across a small
divide to the north and follow up the next. We would meet back here for lunch.
I soon met with more ptarmigan. The gorge had given way to a pale hollow,
which I ascended first along one side, then along the other. The stream was
more or less covered with thin ice. If I could, I would substitute for my prose a
photo in that large book, showing the shallow, snowy valley, tan stones poking
up, a dark oval of open water in the brook, and the five ptarmigan, a slightly
different tone from the snow, heads stretched back, caught in different poses,
with the first one I had seen still leaning forward where it had stopped in the
short, chicken-like run that had caught my eye. My gun felt ten feet long. When
a few seconds later they rose into the gusty wind coming down the valley, they
seemed much larger, closer, whiter. They sailed up the valley with an occasion-
al wing beat and flip of a black-edged tail. I was so nervous about collecting my
share of the fifty birds we needed from that area (the minimum statistically
9
significant sample, according to Arthur) that I never thought of shooting:
nerves are the enemy of the wingshooter, as they are of any sport. I followed
these birds up and flushed three out of range and then one at the edge of the
valley which cut back by me to disappear in the rising wind over the upland.
Making a circle in that direction I found nothing and, disgusted with myself,
returned to the valley, which soon terminated in a hollow with a little pond.
To the east, over a succession of ridges, a cloud bank was fading in damp
blotches of cream and turquoise, while behind me, from the west, was
approaching a second, whose leading edge was marked by two strong white
lines. The wind was now quite strong. To perhaps eight feet off the ground the
air was hazy with fine blowing snow, blurring the view, though the sky over-
head was quite clear.
Arthur had told me to make a circle over the plateau, and so I struck out to
the east for a long ridge with a sort of break in it part way along, of which how-
ever, after crossing a few more hollows, I soon lost sight. A marginal diagram
 in another childhood book showed the tracks of two elk hunters lost in the
woods in a snowstorm: it formed a gradually tightening spiral, so that when
they were found by a search party two days and forty miles later they were less
than a mile from where they had started, but as far as they were concerned,
they might have been anywhere. After about twenty minutes I realized I was not
quite where I expected to be and began adjusting my direction to what seemed
this or that familiarity in the landscape. Topping a ridge, whose right slope had
at first appeared familiar, I saw a hollow and a pond, but it wasn’t right, and in
the depression over the next ridge I crossed my own tracks.
Panic and disbelief (the tracks perfectly fit my boots) were followed by a
moment of enforced calm. It was too late to retrace my tracks. The storm was
now almost overhead and the haze of blowing snow would fill up my tracks
before I had ever untangled them. Further, I had realized for some time that a
mountain we had passed the day before had kept persistently to the east, rather
than the southwest, which was where it belonged on the map, so I tentatively
abandoned my sense of direction, placed the gray peak a little south of west and
headed straight west toward the car. After about fifteen minutes I was
10 approaching a height with a little bank of turf at its crest, somehow familiar to
eye and knee, but so was everything now, and beside it were three bootprints,
and below a frozen pond, a set of tracks, and the reverse curves about a frozen
stream that marked the beginning of my valley. Downstream the wind was
blowing great hunks of snow off the tops of the rocks into the gorge, which sup-
posedly fills completely with snow during the winter.
Arthur hadn’t got any birds either, and after eating and collecting some veg-
etation samples (the other reason for coming here), we forded the river, this
time getting our feet wet, and trudged in the gloom back across the messy,
thawing flat, whose fading light, drizzle, and wind, now somewhat lower,
reminded me of an upstate New York spring, except for a certain fresh empti-
ness in this Arctic air and the early hour of the dusk.
***
The next day it was raining. Arthur did not appear until eleven and I spent the
morning reading and on the toilet. I had been eating a great deal lately and
drinking an unreasonable amount of coffee. About noon we set off for a drive
up the pass. We passed a blue Volvo parked beside the road, and when we
stopped on the height of land to put on chains, Arthur said he heard a shot over
on the mountain. We continued for some miles down the other side of the
divide, than took a side road to where a rectangular building that looked like a
school stood next to a stream. The black bay under purple clouds a hundred
yards to the north was part of the Arctic Ocean. Rain splashed in puddles on the
lawn, and Arthur came running back to the jeep, after an unsuccessful attempt
to phone another of his study areas in the northwest.
We spent the afternoon poking around near the road. On the flat top of a
ridge Arthur found the remains of a raven, then a ptarmigan wing and a fox
scat. He began trying to unravel the connections (if any) among them, while a
cloud dragged its tail over the next ridge to the north, compressed and almost
dissolved in a gust, and I, having broken through some snow into water up to
my waist, sat on a stone, wrung out my socks, transferred wallet and shells into
a coat pocket, and wiped my numb hands on my wet pants. We were standing
near the jeep sometime later when the Volvo passed us with a swish and a brief
view of two shotguns over the seat, and the backs of two heads through the
mud-spattered window. When we finally came in sight of the hotel, the Volvo
was pulled up in the yard and we learned inside that the two hunters had shot
sixty ptarmigan on the lower slopes of the pass. Their luck was our luck: we got
to age and sex the birds and knew where they had been killed.
***
When we got up the next morning the hotel was silent. The hunters had spent
a rather rowdy evening. Downstairs a light bulb burned over the bowls on our
formica table, whose box of cornflakes and pitcher of milk (now warm) had
been set out the night before. Arthur said it seemed to have snowed a little.
It was cold and the windshield of the jeep kept fogging up, so we drove with
the windows down. It was still dark. We had some trouble deciding where to
park. We wanted to be even with the northern end of a small lake on top of the
divide, which we had to skirt to reach the mountain. It is never that dark with
snow on the ground and once the jeep lights were out and we had got our packs
together and were loading our guns we could make out the dark shimmer of the
willows at the head of the lake below us. A ptarmigan called across the valley,
and then again. The second time one couldn’t tell its direction.
Part way across the flat we had to circle several slushy ponds where a brook
ran down into the lake. We could hear the rush and tinkle of water further up
and soon came to a snowbridge, milky and gleaming from the night’s freeze,
over the stream, which was now blocking our way. We didn’t dare cross it, and
continued on until we came to a place where the water flowed for a moment in
the open among black stones. Ice lobes shone in the current. Down in the gully
the snow came to our waists.
Arthur shot the day’s first ptarmigan. We had heard them coming and wait-
ed and then there were three right over our heads beating away in different
directions and I shot twice at one cutting up the gray hill while Arthur dropped
one going away. We were still down in the gully, next to an enormous boulder,
and Arthur’s bird, which had dropped on an open patch of snow was easy to
find. It was a juvenile female with a full crop. (Ptarmigan in the autumn tend to
segregate into flocks separated by sex and age. A full crop meant the bird had
already fed.) Ptarmigan were now calling all around us. Each of us taking one
bank, we continued up to where the gully ended in a terrace.
The slope of the mountain was interrupted with these terraces, which were
virtually unvegetated and looked almost man-made. This one was covered with
a skin of wind-blown snow, interrupted by the gray glaze of frozen puddles and
piles of rocks. Miniature drifts had formed against pebbles sticking up from
the frozen mud, and across a pocket-sized depression beyond wandered the
tracks of a ptarmigan. Following along and listening I eventually made it out
calling among some rocks. It disappeared among the stones, then reappeared
in a gap, head bobbing rapidly back and forth, then ran again. As I approached,
it ran out of the rocks and began to cluck. It ran and clucked again, then again,
when I fired, and it dropped. As I ran up pushing in a shell, I heard a shot to my
right followed by a boom of wings overhead, and eight or ten ptarmigan circled
out of range down the terrace, then slipped along the slope at a slant below me,
soon fading out of sight against the dim loom of the lake below. Arthur had
killed a single from the flock. I went down to follow the birds up while he
explored further along the terrace in order to hold our position on the slope
against the arrival of other hunters.
I couldn’t find those birds. By the time I made it back up the mountain it was
ten o’clock and full daylight. Arthur had disappeared. Three other hunters had
arrived. The Icelandic method of shooting ptarmigan, which comes from a
long tradition of market hunting, consists of taking a potshot into a sitting
flock, marking down where the remaining birds settle, stuffing the downed
birds into one’s gamebag, and galloping after the survivors. Because the birds
are so hard to see against the snow, this is not as simple as it sounds. At any
rate, with four people performing this activity in a small area, the air was full of
flying singles, at which I could not resist shooting. While, relaxed, any reason-
able wingshot could have collected a pile of birds, I as the field biologist missed
everything. The ultimate humiliation came when a sitting bird I was about to
annex vanished when I fired at a pair that flipped over my head while I was
raising my gun. I then tried to sneak up on a number of individual birds but in
the dead white light was never sure whether I was near enough and ended up
flushing them, shooting, and then not being sure where they had gone. Birds
were getting scarcer, and I realized I had drifted away from the group, when
seven heads resolved out of the gray blur of a slope, framed between a snow-
drift and a stone. I stepped closer and closer. I raised my gun, hesitated.
Afterwards I realized I had been within twenty yards. With a thunder of wings
they disappeared down the hill.
Following along in their direction, I found nothing for a long time. It began
to snow. When well down the mountain I finally found a few isolated birds and
began making a regular circuit along the slope in a determined effort to collect
them. One incident remains in my mind. I had flushed several birds and, not
shooting, marked where they had gone. The falling snow had prevented me
from seeing how far they had flown and after the first hundred yards or so the
13
suspense became great. I paused again and again, until with a certain slow
rush, as when you finally pick out the last cat in the pink and green oak in one
of those trick pictures in the Sunday newspapers, the pieces fell into place:
there was the outline, head back, its feathers slightly pink against the snow, of
a ptarmigan perched on the side of a hummock, and raising my gun I slowly saw
its companion hunched down in the hummocks to the left, beyond a bit of
frozen moss, resisted the temptation to shoot between them, aimed at the
more exposed bird and fired, whereupon the camera stopped, the extra flew
away, and I walked over to pick up the dead bird. In this way I shot four or five
ptarmigan. About two o’clock the snow stopped and soon afterward Arthur
appeared striding down the slope. He had walked around the mountain to the
south, then got worried about me because of the snow and returned. He had
left his pack up on the mountain. It was now almost clear and I followed him
back up the slope to a narrow terrace with several tall vertical stones on its
edge, where we ate a late lunch.
 I wanted to return to my spot, but Arthur, who was going to walk over to the
northern slopes, wanted me to try further up. We had between us seventeen
ptarmigan.
As the weather cleared, the birds became very wild and during a long circuit
up the mountain I couldn’t manage to get near enough to shoot. Toward dusk I
pursued a flock high up. The storm had faded away and the sun disappeared
behind a slope in a flush of pink, which, coloring the snow, made the ptarmi-
gan almost impossible to see. I had put up this flock three times when finally,
having marked their flight exactly, I made a long circle to come down on them
from above, the only approach that would give me a clear view, along the course
of a frozen brook that emptied into a little marshy pond. When within bare
range I squatted down and waited. For several minutes I could make out noth-
ing except the glazed pond, snowy hummocks, still grass. I rose and took a step
forward, a bird ran, and they all flew, tipping down the hill before I got off a
shot. That was the last chance of the day. Part of me felt utterly defeated: the
bitter taste of unmet expectations. But we already had our fifty birds. To kill
ptarmigan one has to overcome a certain identification with them. The birds
14 flocking for winter were part of the whole wild day, of the clouds sailing over
the nearby peak, the cold glow of the sky. (So were we hunting them.) As I
started downhill I could see Arthur moving below me, and partway up the
opposite slope the line of plowed snow that marked the road, over which, only
part of its roof showing, I made out our jeep.
We stayed two more days. My best and worst moments as a hunter came late
one afternoon on a hillside covered with scrub birch where I killed three
ptarmigan I wasn’t able to find. Tracks wound everywhere and the birds were
rising close in. It was like shooting ruffed grouse at home. I had killed a single
and was going to pick it up when I downed one of a pair that rose after a larger
group, missed a passing shot through a gap in the branches, then killed one of
another pair that came by over my head. I thought I had marked all three care-
fully, but in the gloom under the birches I couldn’t find any of them. Half an
hour later in the near-dark I killed one I only heard and then, following some
sixth sense (I hadn’t known whether I had hit it, but thought I had heard it fall),
walked over and picked it up.
What turned out to be the last day dawned red and clear, and at ten o’clock
the frost hummocks on the edge of a little plateau above the river still glittered
slightly pink in the bright sun. We spent the morning up on the divide but did-
n’t see much. A haze covered the slopes and sea to the north. By the time we
returned to the hotel for lunch, the temperature had risen fifteen degrees, the
wind was booming, and it would soon be raining hard.
Further down the valley, moss glittered on soaked earth, water exited in
bursts of spray from culverts, and a line of telephone poles marched single file
over a tan and white slope angling away from the road. We passed the hillside
with the birch scrub and soon reached a farm and post station at the head of a
fjord on the south coast. The unstuccoed concrete buildings, streaked with
rain, reminded me of the poet’s house at Herdisavik. He had lived much of his
life as a businessman abroad, writing poems of Reykjavik, the sea, northern
winter nights. When he returned, he had built a small, one-story house of cor-
rugated iron painted white, with a white iron roof. Situated on the narrow lava
plain between the line of cliffs and the sea, it had had a magnificent garden
gate: two great drift logs that had been cut off and set in the ground. A round
cap of moss grew on top of each and with time they had leaned slightly togeth-
er, though still holding on to the lava slabs of the wall, so that entering, you
had, just barely, to twist your shoulders.
november 20: Late in the morning I go out and pick over the books in the
United States Information Service Library, whose location (an Icelander told
me) was recently changed from a working-class neighborhood, where people
visited it on their lunch hours to read the papers, to splendid isolation on the
ground floor of the new hotel I can see from my dorm window. A wet wind is
blowing and later I go to a coffee shop downtown, located above a bookstore
(Icelanders read more than the people of any other western country), where I
read a three day old Herald Tribune and stare at the green metal gable of the Post
Office building across the street.
In the evening I, the other American in Gardur, and an English girl we take in
tow walk into the old town to attend a weekly function of the embassy commu-
nity, a double feature shown in the residence of the Marines. There we get
slightly drunk and I slip into Susan’s purse a needed glass, which someone had
already removed from the hotel I had visited that morning. When we leave, the
night seems so silent, black and still: a red dot glows from the spire of a church
in the distance, there is no wind.
Descending a hill we cross the bridge at the bottom of the lake. Ice gleams in a
bluish line between the asphalt road and the curb. After partly ascending the
15
opposite hill, on Susan’s dare we climb the gates to the cemetery (Susan has the
most trouble), and race each other along the paths, then try walking along the
narrow walls of the graves (Susan was the best). Coming on an open gate on the
other side, we return on a sidewalk along the lower edge, on which the sound of
the basaltic sand crushed underfoot, on a still or gusty midnight, echoes with a
metallic ping off the iron walls and garden gates of the houses, startling the late
and solitary walker himself who produces the noise. By the time we make it back
to Gardur, the wind is blowing hard again, rattling through the open window on
its hook my bare white door.
november 30: This evening we all walk up to the concert. It is a weekly occa-
sion: foreign students are granted passes to one of the series of the Reykjavik
Symphony. In addition to the usual crowd we have Freyja, who has borrowed a
pass from a German student who didn’t want to go. A capricious wind is blow-
ing and two ducks, caught in the upthrust cone of a streetlight, seem to flutter
like great brown moths, a visual impression contradicted by the whistle of their
wings overhead. Freyja is small, quiet and blonde. By the time we reach the high
ground near the Hotel Saga the group has split up, the wind has doubled in
force, and Freyja and I hold onto each other crying out and laughing as we slide
along the edge of the road, skirting the mud, headlights, and smoking exhaust
of the parking lot.
january 1: I go to England to visit relatives for christmas and return about
midnight on the 31st to Reykjavik. I offer my floor to two Englishmen my age
who have come on the plane for the winter’s fishing, and after the light is out
they go to sleep immediately, but I can’t. It is a wet, windy night and the geese
that spend the night on the soccer field behind Gardur keep honking and chat-
tering, the open window bangs in the wind, and the smell of rain fills the little
room, before I finally fall asleep.
january 2: Today with the dormitory still empty from the Christmas vacation,
I take a bus to Selfoss to visit Freyja. Though it is early afternoon, the sun has set
and the sky is streaked with pink. The bus driver plays sentimental tunes on the
radio that match the changing colors of the sky and it seems a long time before
we come down off the high moor to the plains near the sea. In a pasture clumps
of yellow grass show through the snow. A miniature suspension bridge crosses
the river before the town and we pull up on the main street—a vista of gray light
on snow, with a field on one side and the buildings of the town on the other.
Following the bus driver’s finger, I head down a street along the river. The
houses are large and two-story, made of concrete, each with its birches and
rowan in the yard. A church stands beside a pond, on which a number of chil-
dren skate through a reflected gleam of green and rose. Through the branches
of a birch one can see the round glow of one of their smaller member’s crim-
son trousers. With a sweet, sharp note a snow bunting bounds over an
approaching wall and I see the sign of the street I am looking for. Her house is
on the corner. Opening the iron gate I look back across the plain to see, much
closer than I had expected, like a gigantic black step against the gray sky, a
massive black mountain. I slowly realize I have seen it, from another side, two
or three times before.
Inside it is warm and she is glad to see me. Her mother sets out a magnifi-
cent tea and her father and I toast the still young year in peppermint schnapps.
january 18: This morning I go out to Seltjarnarnes (Seal Point), which forms
the tip of the peninsula on which Reykjavik is built. After a walk downtown,
preceded by a rush, so as to be there early enough (ten past eleven, it’s dark
until nine) I catch a bus from the central square. It is a cold day. Despite the
clear, almost aqua sky, the buildings and vacant lots of the city are in tones of
17
gray. The next to last bus stop is oppsite an open window in a house wall, from
which someone sells hot dogs. Beyond, we pass a fish freezing factory, several
new concrete houses, and a low old one, built of wood (probably recycled pack-
ing lumber) and tar paper. At the top of the hill is a school and a metal shelter
where the bus turns around. A footpath leads down to a large house facing the
sea. Retreating back down the road a bit, I make my way along a pasture fence
through the snow to the beach.
In front of me, an offshore reef is marked by the dip and sway of water and
dark strands of surfacing weed. Eiders are diving along its outer edge, the
white breasts of the drakes slightly reddened when they catch the sun. On a
rocky spit several oystercatchers scream and yip as they pick over the mats of
olive Fucus. Across the silver and aqua bay the stacks of the cement factory in
Akranes and a long row of pastel houses float in the wet glow, with on one side
four cottony mountains and on the other a dim bluish chain which is finally cut
off by the hill to my left. From the top of the hill on a clear winter’s day one can
 see the shadow of the massive cone, faintly pink, of the glacial peak in which
the chain (and the island) end a hundred miles away. Something slides past the
edge of my vision as the level of riot rises among the oystercatchers, and by the
time I have my binoculars out, a gyrfalcon is suspended over the beach, then
turns, beats his wings twice, and in thirty seconds has vanished in a long glide
over the bay towards Esya, half visible under a cap of cloud, easily outdistanc-
ing two awkward and loose-jointed ravens which flap up from further down the
beach in pursuit. The ravens row slowly back into sight, now croaking and jok-
ing, one sticking out a stiff wing and flipping over on its back. A wave breaks in
a long curl on the reef, the noon whistle blows downtown. It is damp, cold,
lovely, and lonely.
Past the schoolhouse yard, where grass shows through the snow, the road
forks, one fork leading out to the point itself with its lighthouse and the other
across the peninsula. I take the latter, which leads me along a hollow between
two low hills. Further on I come to a housing development, then a blue glitter
of sea, and a long yellow slope leading down to a fresh-water pond. Mallards
quack in the grass beside the pond and from a cobalt bay between two black
18 points come plaintive snatches of song from a long-tailed, old-squaw duck
who is diving there with two companions. I walk over to the adjacent beach, off
which an unknown duck is swimming slowly past a file of chunky eiders into a
pool of obsidian and rose. Water from the pond trickles steadily down the
shingle while in front of me a silhouette of cones and rugged slopes slowly dis-
appears in mist, leaving only a dark line over the water. A gull walks down a
glistening sewer outlet into the green and violet, cold and brimming glow. The
sun has set but it will be light for several more hours. I am suddenly cold
through and head for home.
Back along the peninsula the streets keep curving out and out along the sea.
Here and there on the beach side of the road are groups of fishing shacks, each
with its two or three boats, and a pair of rusty rails leading down into the water.
When near the Hotel Saga I turn away from the glow and make my way along a
snowy street past the familiar bakery, then a grocery store with a pyramid of
oranges in the window, and a bus stop, at the corner of a wide street.
At last back in the warm kitchen of Gardur I take off my boots and have a mug
of tea. The sky out the window is streaked with green which will fade after a
while to a deep aqua. Inside it is almost dark. My toes are warming up as I hear
the second pot of water come to a boil.
january 23: Returning to Gardur from town, I see the sun reflected in its
opaque, sea-green windows, the color I suppose an effect of the spray that is
often in the air of this narrow peninsula. A tremendous wind is blowing but it
is not very cold. To an occasional noise from the geese behind the building, I
fall asleep in my chair.
february 14: I have a photograph of the little lake in downtown Reykjavik
taken on a February day when the other American student and I were on our
way to take the ferry to Akranes, a town across the bay, for the afternoon. It was
a still day. Under a pale sky the row of buildings along the end of the lake is
reflected without a ripple in the brimming blue water.
The ferry ride took about an hour. I, who was brought up several hundred
miles from the sea, find remarkable each time the tension of a ship underway,
driven by the angle of its compass needle and the vibration of the engines. It
was beginning to cloud over, with a coppery light on the rippled sea to the
south, while a mile or so away the passing shoreline was marked off by small
white houses, each a mile or more from its neighbor, on its rectangle of yellow
field. We skirted the mouth of a black fjord and soon after changed course to
point directly towards a tower on what seemed to be the outskirts of the town.
The town grew taller and taller as we approached.
Two main streets led at an angle from the sloping entrance to the harbor. We
chose one and for lack of anything better to do went in search of the tower. The
town was spotlessly clean. The streets and houses were made of concrete:
Akranes is the site of the only cement plant in Iceland. The cementitious mate-
rial comes from deposits of sea-shells on the ocean bed. Fish hung drying
from the balconies of the houses. The two streets met at the end of the city in a
sort of turnaround with a row of shops and parking spaces, and a gas station.
Beyond were fields and a gravel road.
Heading back, we took a side street toward where we thought the tower
should be and soon came to another outskirts with unfinished apartment
buildings on both sides of a muddy road. We could now see the tower in the
distance. Al stopped at a bakery to buy some cakes.
The tower turned out not to be part of a church, but a square, redbrick struc-
ture with an oak door in its base. It was set in a walled rectangle of turf whose
yellowing grass was spotted with the crimson rosettes of last year’s dandelions.
Al, who could read more Icelandic than I (I was the only foreign student who
was not studying Icelandic), said the tower was a memorial to seamen. The
door was locked and no one seemed to be there, so after inspecting it from the
outside we left.
It turned out to be further than we realized back to town. The sky was turn-
ing an inky blue over the slope of a nearby mountain. A man in faded work
clothes passed us on a bicycle with a “good evening” in Icelandic. One could
hear voices from a white house just visible along the mountain’s base, a dog
(dogs are rare in Iceland) barked in the distance toward town, the rutted road
smelled of mud, and it was very peaceful and still.
We got back to the harbor with two hours before the next ferry and looked for
a place to have coffee. Unfortunately the hotel was under repair, and a stand
near the cement factory, where we were told a woman served coffee at certain
hours, didn’t seem to be open. We were already well known as the two foreign-
ers in town, and in an incident typical of Iceland, a man who spoke English
stopped us to ask what we were doing and then took us to his house for coffee.
He had a thirteen year old son who was interested in birds. The boy showed us
the feathers and rocks in his room, which included feathers and a wing from a
dead gyrfalcon he had found a month ago on the beach.
march 1–3: On March first I was scheduled to fly to Husavik, a fishing vil-
lage on the north coast, and from there to make my way inland some thirty
miles to a farm-hotel on the north end of Lake Myvatn (Fly Lake: named for its
abundance of non-biting black flies), where it had been arranged for me to
stay that spring and summer while studying the area’s gyrfalcons. The realiza-
tion that I was soon to go prompted me, after my return from England, to sign
up for an evening course in basic Icelandic at a commercial school downtown,
an institution whose peeling hallways, rain-blotched windowpanes, and class-
room methods—and even the lumpy moon in a polished night sky, threatened
by a transparent arrow of greenish and yellowish drift, as wrapping my coat
closer, I hurried down the street on which the school was located, to cut across
at the corner—were unpleasant reminders of my educational past. That fact
however should cast no reflections on the halls, windowpanes, or sky them-
selves, or even on that harsh and illusive language from which in a process too
far along for me to sense, my own everyday tongue has developed.
As it turned out, we could not leave when scheduled because of a snowstorm.
The next day was one of those odd, lazy days when everything is packed and one
waits, yawning nervously, in an attempt to speed up time, with a sense of
clouds, sun, and the orange flesh and taste of the smoked herring one had with
tea for lunch. I called the airport every hour or so until they said they would call
me. About one o’clock I became convinced we would not leave that day either,
and decided to go shopping (it was a Saturday, stores would close early and be
closed the next day) for the weekend. At the end of a gray, gray street, between
concrete houses and piles of fluffy snow, with an occasional liquid gleam
through the low clouds, were supermarket, milk shop, and fish shop, with a
bakery on the corner. Back at Gardur I had another cup of tea and did some-
thing or other in my room, and what then followed (a call to the airport, the
plane was leaving in twenty minutes) helped leave me (but I was already obses-
sive enough), in connection with the most minor leave-takings (this time we
did not take off for another hour and a half), a persistent feeling of something
left behind undone (door unlocked? gas on?) that persists to the present day.
Our small plane’s aluminum skin had long ago lost its sheen. I walked up the
aisle to a seat padded at back and bottom with heavy vinyl cushions, which
enveloped me in a rush of chilly, vinyl-scented air. As we circled after take-off,
we had a momentary view of the bay, with its depths in shades of green and
brown, its black reefs, tawny brown islands. (A century and a half ago an
Icelander had rowed out to one of those islands and killed with a stick, for a
Danish collector, the last recorded great auk.) A white house on the slope of
21
Esya rose to meet us, then began to tilt as we disappeared into rough air and
mist. The clouds parted once during the next hour and a half to reveal a thread
of ice in a ravine drowned in snow, the land rising ahead to some upland, when
everything again disappeared. The suspense was becoming enormous when we
pulled up with a roar over a black sea and slid into a hollow between two low
hills, snowflakes suddenly shot past the window and slowed, and everything—
hills, plane, valley—was halting, stopping, melting in a gray twilight. The door
opened with a clank next to a green shed, with a jeep and a truck, headlights on,
struggling up the road in the distance.
The truck turned out to be the airport bus. It had seats on a raised platform
behind the driver and a rear section, separated from us by a partition, for
freight. We entered Husavik down a hill, stopping now and then at side streets
or house doors, to let people off. The main street downtown was a single track,
with snow up to the houses’ roofs. Lamplight shone on the drifts and on the lit-
tle plumes of snow that sifted across the road. The airline office, final stop, was
 to my relief right across the street from the large brown hotel. I soon collected
my box, bag, pack, and skis into the empty lobby.
I pushed open a swinging door into what turned out to be the dining room.
A couple sat at a table having a coke. After some hesitation I asked them in
Icelandic whether they spoke English. Both shook their heads and the girl
started to laugh. Then they called the waitress, who after trying to understand
me, led me into the kitchen, where a round, pleasant woman who had lived for
a long time in Chicago, was making dinner. With her help I got a room for the
night and lugged my belongings upstairs into the company of two beds, a sink,
a desk, and a strong smell of lamb fat. Dinner was in half an hour. It was still
dusky outside. The room was very hot. I had been bothered by the amount of
snow on the ground: how was I going to get to Myvatn? However right now
there was nothing much I could do. Putting my suitcase on one bed, I took off
my sheepskin, sport jacket, and sweater, shed my boots, and sat down experi-
mentally on the other. The key with its wooden wedge lay on the desk. I lay back
for a moment with my head on my two hands and in a manner undoubtedly
prescribed in some book by an English traveller fell asleep.
22 When I awoke twenty minutes later, the windows of the room had a rich, vio-
let glow, as happens whether at forty-three or fifty-eight degrees of latitude at
the beginning of a snowy night. Outside, people were moving along the blue
street, and a group of teenaged girls, with upward looks, paused under my win-
dow. I felt sweaty after my nap and rinsed myself off at the sink, then tried to
open a window to change the air in the room. Placed carefully in a corner under
the sink was an empty vodka bottle, its square glass like a bottle of witch hazel
or some other medicine.
Shortly after six, I took a seat in the dining room for dinner. The only other
occupant was a small man in a flannel shirt and sweater who had the table next
to the kitchen. That seemed to be the most popular place, for after his punctu-
al occupation of it the next noon, it was taken by a group of noisy workmen in
blue, who ate an enormous lunch, joked with the waitress, and had their ther-
mos refilled with coffee. After dinner I went upstairs to plot out what I would
do, but I already knew what those possibilities were, and went down to talk to
the woman from Chicago, who was frying a bread which I remember being
called Christmas bread but which may have been something else, for it was
being made for a festival the next week. From her I learned where the oil com-
pany and milk cooperative were located, whose trucks would be my only way,
besides foot or ski, of getting to Myvatn. She didn’t think anyone would be
going anywhere for some time. After talking with her and a brief turn about my
room, it still being too early for evening coffee, I went out for a walk.
Outside it was blowing hard. At the top of a short, steep hill, a row of houses
ended in a streetlight, the top of a green picket fence, and an expanse of glazed
snow. Further on was a large building with a corrugated metal door. I pushed
on, breaking more or less regularly through the crust, toward where I could
hear the sea. By the time I reached the top of the hill my forehead ached from
the wind. Snaky, white, luminescent waves broke on the beach below. My
palms, wet with spray, only made the headache worse, and as I headed back the
immediate sensation of relief (I was now heading away from the wind), the tin-
kle of the spinning bits of crust, the tug of the gale at my back, made me start
laughing. I got back across the fence and picked my way down the plowed
street. Part way down the wind was much less. Between the houses a row of
unblinking greenish lights lit the edge of the harbor.
The next day the storm was over. It was a wet, overcast day. While I had
directions for the dairy cooperative and the oil company, I still had what I sus-
pect is a commonplace traveller’s trouble with directions in a small town,
everyone knows who and what is where, and has trouble conceiving of your
problem (it’s on the street two doors past Audni’s house). However the poor
stranger, seeing no street signs or numbers, or finding two red houses where
there should be only one, and then stopping to ask for more directions, has his
problems. Luckily for me, the oil company had a large sign reading “Esso” on
its wall, which was almost visible, except for the slight curve of the street, from
the hotel.
The concession was open, somewhat surprisingly, since it was Sunday. The
manager recognized me as a passenger on yesterday’s flight. He had just
returned from a vacation in Spain. Oil trucks wouldn’t be going anywhere until
the roads had been cleared but this evening a snow vehicle, which had arrived
two days ago by ship from Sweden, was leaving for Myvatn. He left to phone and
reported that the driver was still asleep, but he would speak to him when he
awakened and see to it that he picked me up. He would phone the hotel if any-
thing changed. He spoke Icelandic and I English; we seemed to understand
each other. Elated, I walked back to the hotel, a still unsuppressable bit of
worry, and a window with a view of black sea and gray cloud. Finally my binoc-
ulars on a chair took me outside to where a flight of wooden steps led from the
hotel yard over a roof to the harbor. Steam rose from a chimney next to the
stairs, and beside a bare landing someone had thrown down a pile of fish
heads, rope ends, and glass floats, which were now frozen into the glazed curve
of a drift, with everything speckled with fine snow.
A thin, wet arc of pebbly beach revealed the reach of this morning’s high
tide. Fishing boats were tied up along a quay out near the breakwater. A hen
mallard swam in the ripples twenty feet away, a little further out a cormorant
capped a piling, for an instant the clouds to the south turned silver, and when
they had closed, everything seemed so much more wet, cold, and gray. Jumping
a small stream, I followed a flock of purple sandpipers along the beach. Every
now and then an unkempt gull, one of the two varieties into which I had divid-
ed the crowd circling the outer harbor, would sail by, convulse in a shake, or a
one-footed scratch, with a resulting loss of altitude, recover, and sail on, its
brief closeness aiding my attempts at identification. The sandpipers flew,
regrouped, raced each other, bickered, and finally flew for good as we
approached the end of the beach in a pile of brown stones. They reappeared
once, a cloud of midges, over the outer wall before angling down in a far cor-
ner of the harbor. I turned back to the hotel for lunch. An hour later the
kitchen window framed water, a double row of boats, and the cloud of gulls.
About two I walked up to the oil company to check on my ride. Everything
had been set up, said my friend, and the departure time was four o’clock. He
asked if my watch was on Icelandic time, sighed, and remarked that it was bet-
ter here in summer. As I left, the machine itself, a sort of red and black tank,
roared down the hill opposite and disappeared up the street. I had a twinge of
fear. Had I been abandoned? The kindly oil man assured me not; the guy was
just joyriding.
By four-fifteen I, two other passengers, and the driver were whirring down
the center of a wide valley, along one side of which ran a river, with here and
there on a point a farm, and in the slowly failing light, hills and valley were
drenched in dimness and snow. As we proceeded inland it became colder,
grayer, and more bleak, which insofar as the country was becoming wilder,
which was all to my expectations. It was nearly three hours later that we let off
the last passenger besides myself, in the yellow light from the headlights of a
jeep, its exhaust smoking, where another road joined ours, and the white-
haired woman, who had carefully made me understand during a halt that the
fellow who drove this machine did not own it (the community did), was greet-
ed by her large, pipe-smoking son or grandson, and I felt much more at home.
Half an hour later I was let off in a snowy yard illuminated by a floodlight, and
surrounded by three dim houses, whereupon I realized I didn’t know in which
of them I belonged. I got the names of the inhabitants from the driver, who was
anxious to get home. Deserted in an utter, now starry silence I finally trailed to
the nearest one, at which as it turned out I stayed for the next three months,
until the hotel opened for the summer and I was put there. It wasn’t until the
next autumn that I learned it had originally been planned for me to stay with
another family, the man of which was a guide and ornithologist. The warmth
and welcome inside, where a coffee party was going on, as well as a certain
familiarity with the furnishings, which one might have found anywhere, came
as a reassurance and surprise.
march 4: The next morning I get up about eight, breakfast with the family,
and by nine am out of the house with my binoculars and pack. From the kitchen
table, covered with a blue and white checked oilcloth, one can see a box con-
taining weather-measuring instruments on a tripod and the gray wall of the
closed hotel. The snowy road leads south with houses here and there on either
side. On top of a rise stands a smaller, older hotel, the center of the separate
settlement of Reykjahlid (I live in Reynihlid). As I learn later, all these build-
ings have been constructed since the 1940s, when the first concrete houses in
25
the area replaced turf dwellings at the farm where I am staying.
The settlement behind me, I keep on south along the Lake. After rounding a
hill, the road curves toward the head of a narrow bay, which is almost com-
pletely unfrozen. A pumping station for the diatomaceous earth plant squats
on the point; the upper surface of the Lake bottom consists largely of the shells
of diatoms (an algae). The shells are industrially useful and a plant using geot-
hermal heat to process them is being built near the hotel. Open water in win-
ter along the eastern side of Lake Myvatn is a result of subsurface hot springs
(their heat another reason for the Lake’s biological richness; over the long
term the Lake bottom is supposed to fill in about as fast as it is pumped out).
During a storm, wind would cool the surface water and ice would creep nearer
and nearer the shore. On the far side of the bay is a rocky hill covered with
scrub birch. A mallard swims among some stones, and out near the edge of the
ice are several lines of goosanders. Their heads are up and as I watch them,
they take off in a rush.
 The road leads over the hill, on which lava humps stand up above the birch-
es to another settlement of several houses grouped about another open bay.
Further south, where the shore again bends in along the road, the open water
more or less stops. For some distance there is a series of tiny pools, every other
one of which holds a single drake Barrow’s goldeneye, black and white duck in
a setting of still water, wet beach, and snow. One duck silently dives and half a
minute later reappears with a dropless shake, in the next pool down.
I had left the road to follow the shore and after getting back to it continue on
up a low shrubby hill which forms the base of a point extending a long distance
out into the Lake. From a lava hump on the top I can see a frozen bay a mile or
so south but no open water (one of my projects was to determine the Lake’s
winter use by ducks), and as it is now after two o’clock, I decide to turn back.
The large bay at Vogar with its several houses has turned a steel gray with little
waves and a slight mist. I get back about four-thirty and greet my landlady, who
is chatting with one of her in-laws at the garden gate: she has left me a plate of
sandwiches for afternoon coffee on the kitchen table.
26 march 5: Today is my birthday. It snows lightly most of the day.
I go out after lunch and after counting the ducks in the narrow bay, find a sort
of observation post at the foot of a lava hump on the hill beyond. My backpack
makes a good seat. After I have been there about fifteen minutes a ptarmigan
bursts out of the scrub behind me and flies across the road, angling downhill, to
put down near the hill’s bottom. Twenty minutes later, as it is snowing hard,
another ptarmigan bursts out over my rock and flies high across the road, clear-
ing the telephone wires. A large gray and white gyrfalcon is perhaps ten feet
behind it. The ptarmigan twists down into the birches, I see the falcon turn, and
immediately afterwards spot it perched on a branch, apparently without the
ptarmigan. It remains there for about five minutes, then takes off, and just
clearing the trees, begins to fly in my direction, rises to clear the wires, when I
make a slight movement, it flinches, veers over my rock, and disappears.
I stay put for another hour and then for the rest of the afternoon explore the
birch scrub on either side of the road, in which I find signs of much use by
ptarmigan. The snowfall lets up somewhat, but the sky remains overcast. I see
the hunting gyrfalcon twice more. About four o’clock I leave for home. As I go
down the hill, I flush a ptarmigan from under a birch beside the road, near
where I saw one set down an hour before. Its tracks wind in and out on the lit-
tle slope, birch leaves, grass, and strands of moss are scattered about the snow.
It has scratched the snow away from many low-growing silvery rosettes of
Dryas octopetala. The sky is still heavily overcast and the surface of the snow
and the clouds to the west have a pink glow in the unnaturally early dusk.
march 6: Today the weather is colder and windy. Now and then the snow
ceases for a moment, a blue hole slides open in the clouds, and sun lights the
white hills to the east, or the front of an approaching squall over the Lake. I go
out after breakfast. Today I am on skis, intending to make some final adjust-
ments before setting out on trips to the eyries about the Lake. As I was having
a cup of coffee under my lava cone, a Landrover wallowed by on the road with
two men from the settlement, who wave and grin at me. My downhill skis are
really not suitable for cross-country, but I manage to devise a suitable set of
bindings and get around pretty well. Room and board are costing me slightly
more per month than my Fulbright stipend, so that except for the fact that I
have a couple of hundred dollars saved, I would be in financial difficulties and
don’t feel I can splurge twenty dollars on a pair of those narrow skis of golden
wood, made in Finland, a single one of which weighs less than a pound, for sale
at the co-operative store: undoubtedly one of my more foolish decisions.
After lunch I ski out to the point beyond Vogar. A gyrfalcon leaves a rock
above the bay, circles along the hill, and disappears. The usual flock of
goosanders, as well as a few Barrow’s goldeneyes and mallards, are swimming
in the bay. The goosanders, which seem to be paired up, stay out near the edge
of the ice. As I approach, they begin to fly. They appear as big as geese but with
short, curved wings. In the sun their white sides look yellow against the char-
coal clouds.
march 11: It is snowing with a heavy wind this morning. The temperature is
twenty-four degrees. I stay in all day reading. By four-thirty the wind has
dropped and the sky begins to clear. The temperature has fallen to twelve
degrees by six, when I go out for a little wa;lk before dinner. With a slight,
steady breeze and the white light on the snow it feels bitterly cold. The hill
slopes and parts of the meadows near the Lake have been blown clear of snow.
Completely out of place, over a yellow field, a fat snow bunting clucks at me
from a telephone wire.
march 15: One stormy day in mid-March I find on the bookshelves in the
living room a thin volume, a coffee table book in English, on the Arctic. I feel
a growing excitement at how closely its meteorological descriptions and pic-
ture-postcard photos reflect my daily surroundings. From the ridge of Dalfjall,
a mountain a few miles away, on a bright noon, one’s view to the east ends in a
rolling haze along the gorge of a glacial river. The riverine fog fades upwards
through a rim of turquoise into a cobalt bowl, in which float a few fluffy clouds.
Among the dwarf birch on the glittering plain I can make out the black trails
and holes in the snow where a flock of ptarmigan spent the night. A raven
croaks once in the distance, soaring over a white ridge. As I listen, I can make
out the sharp click of the ptarmigan budding below me in the birches.
I look at the book again one afternoon in April. I have been out all day and
am lying on my bed before dinner in the tiny room off the hall I was given after
my return from Reykjavik. Sun floods the window, my face burns from expo-
sure, I am enveloped in warmth and lassitude. The night before I was reading
a book by an English ornithologist of a hundred years ago, and a cold bare
waste, with weeds sticking up through the thin snow, the shadow of a gable on
a green and blue summer day, a sense of another time, mingle with the blue
and white photos, the shiny paper, the sun-baked room.
march 17-18: On the seventeenth the temperature remains all day at twen-
ty-two degrees. A strong wind starts blowing at dawn and from the kitchen
window at breakfast, amid the hiss and boom of the storm, one can only now
and then see the hotel across the yard, or the gray box of the weather station,
which is forty feet away. At six-thirty in the evening the wind stops and it is
quiet all night. When I go out on the morning of the eighteenth the tempera-
ture is still in the twenties, with a slight southerly breeze. The hill between
Rejkjahlid and the pumping station has been blown almost bare. The two bays
are separated by new ice.
After making a count of the ducks south to where open water in the Vogafloi
stops, I go home for lunch. I feel like doing nothing, but after lunch take my
pack and walk up to the little airstrip on the plateau behind Reynihlid to look
around. The wind is blowing steadily from the southwest and the temperature
has risen considerably since morning. I walk a mile over the plateau to
Seljadalur, where a pair of gyrfalcons who share a valley with a pair of ravens
can’t seem to decide where to nest. Water drips and blows off the cliffs and
even the ravens aren’t there. I poke around for a while and slowly make my way
toward home. When I get back to the airstrip about four o’clock I hardly recog-
nize the view: under a dark sky, the red-tipped birches, the purple mountains
at the foot of the Lake, the yellow grass of a meadow near shore, all foretell
spring. The surface of the airstrip is greasy with mud, which clings in lumps to
my boots.
march 20: Today is bright with a strong west wind. I go on skis to Dalfjall,
which has several eyrie sites in the faces of a fault that cuts through the moun-
tain at a slight angle until, splitting off a little hill, it disappears down into the
plain. Single gyrfalcons fly over twice. About two, while I am eating lunch on a
shoulder opposite the main face, I hear a noise and see the female of this pair
swoop down the slope to land directly behind the male, who is perched on a
dead ptarmigan on the plain below. He refuses to share the kill with her. He
turns his back, calls, and mantles the prey with his wings, then flies to anoth-
er perch, where he feeds for a few minutes before she, who is much bigger,
tentatively approaches him again. Finally he flies up the slope toward me,
perches once, then again, balancing in the gale with the dead bird, sees me,
and flies north, vibrating like a string in the wind, followed by his mate. I go
way down the ridge but can’t find either of them. By the time I return to the
plain to look over the sign it is late afternoon. Falcon tracks and wing marks,
29
the two black halves of a male ptarmigan’s bill, a gizzard with attached intes-
tine, and drops of blood decorate the snow, which shines with a white light.
The wind is less on the plain but it is very cold. While I collect the remains and
make a sketch of the situation, I can feel my feet beginning to freeze and when
I am done I take off one boot to warm the foot in my hands but they are too cold
to do the job, so I put on my skis and start along the foot of the slope, which I
will follow to where a road cuts over a pass to the basin of the Lake.
Around the bend, two ptarmigan are budding in a patch of gray scrub and a
flock comes low along the slope and dives into a ravine just beyond. A soft, gray
cloud appears over the ridge and it starts to snow. I slog along. It is impossible
to get lost. Here and there a branch of the dwarf birch that grows on the plain
pokes out of the crust (the dwarf birches are a different species from the other
birches, which may reach twelve to fifteen feet in height). Some of the tips have
been budded by ptarmigan. They have even nipped at the next quarter inch of
wood, which, cut almost through, still hangs from the rest of the branch. The
 ptarmigan population was at a peak the past autumn and may start to fall this
spring. My feet gradually start to regain their feeling. Ahead of me in the falling
snow I can see the slightly raised mound, with a waist-high hump in the cen-
ter, of the home field and house of a former farm, on the rising ground next to
the slope. The snow whirls in occasional gusts, and now thoroughly warm, I sit
down on the old turf wall for a little rest before starting to ascend the hill in
back in order to reach the road above in the notch, from where the way home
is all either level or downhill.
The snow stops about twenty minutes later and the sky behind the clouds has
a steely glow. When at six-thirty I get back to Reynihlid it is still quite light. The
temperature is five degrees above zero.
march 22: I often think of Freyja. I also missed the other foreign students in
Reykjavik. I had kept my room in Gardur and now made plans to go to
Reykjavik for a week over Easter. The evening before I left two young women
came for coffee. They were visiting my landlady and except for several glances
more or less ignored Snaebjorn (the husband), Piessy (the seven-year-old,
30 who helped teach me the language, when he wasn’t burying my boots in the
snow), and me, mere household males. As they left, one of them, who I had
seen before working in the cooperative store, bent over a table to examine
something, and the flat curve of her ski slacks made me suddenly wonder why
I was making this trip.
At any rate it was already arranged. The next morning I dressed in my good
pair of wool pants, tucked into rubber boots, with the same shirt, sweater, and
jacket under my sheepskin that I had worn when I arrived. It was a damp. misty
morning. After breakfast Snaebjorn’s brother-in-law went out to start the
snowmobile on which he had offered to give me a ride to the foot of the lake.
There I would meet a Landrover that was going to a school in the Laxa Valley to
pick up local children for the vacation. From the school I would have to make
my own way to Akureyri, from where a plane left every evening for Reykjavik.
When we were out in the middle of the Lake and tearing along, we hit a series
of soft spots in the snow, in the last of which the machine bounced and stalled.
As Audni tried to start it, it started to sink. We both jumped off and I, not
knowing what to do, also started to sink. Audni managed to get the machine
started, wrestled it forward until it caught, we scrambled on, the machine
ground and ground, then caught and we roared off, my suitcase bouncing up
and down behind on its sled: the ice was soft here and there from hot springs
in the Lake’s bottom. After a while the little conical hills at the end of the Lake
slid by, then the mouth of a wide bay, and we roared up on shore, along a bank,
down a road, and pulled up beside a porch, where Audni left the outlander in
the company of an old man in a skullcap. I was invited into a sitting room
whose greenish blinds, furniture, and scent of dust somehow matched the
weather, the old man, and even the tray of bitter coffee and apricot cake a
young woman brought out for us. The driver of the Landrover arrived almost
immediately and I made halting conversation with the two men until everyone
got down the two cups that etiquette required.
We drove very slowly with another car in front of us for what seemed hours
over a snowy plain. The sun came out and lit the snow and a line of bare hills
under the gray sky. After about forty minutes we began to descend a slope,
crossed a bridge, and continued along a river valley. Here the road had been
cleared. We passed several farms. About noon we arrived at a complex of large
buildings on the far bank of a stream, which comprised the school. Students in
scarves and caps were standing around, or running back inside for something,
cars pulled up, doors slammed, the sun shone now and then on some rowan
trees by the stream, and it was quite gay. The headmaster himself, who was
supervising things in classical fashion with scarf and no hat, found me a ride in
a red Bronco, into whose luggage compartment we jammed my large suitcase.
About one o’clock we set off with seven of us besides the driver.
After we had been going about twenty minutes it started to snow. No one had
travelled our road recently and it was sometimes difficult to see where it was.
We went several times into the ditch but with so many people to push got right
out. The students and driver were in a good mood and making plans for the
vacation. The snow stopped, we skirted the shore of a frozen lake, and started
up a river valley between high mountains, with the buildings of farms on the
slopes far above the road. In one spot where we jumped out to push, a gulley
across the little river, with what looked like juniper sticking out through the
snow, ran in shadow up towards the reddish cliffs and snowfields of the peaks,
the sun shone on the drifted road, a dog barked, and smoke rose from the
chimney of a farmhouse up the slope, against a damp blue sky.
The summer road over the mountain between us and Akureyri was blocked
and we had to drive around the peninsula and then south to Akureyri, which is
at the head of a fjord. Toward dusk we got on a more traveled road, very rutted
and icy. The snow was up to the car’s roof. It was a gray evening and smelled of
the sea. After passing through several villages, we got to Akureyri about eight.
As it turned out, I might as well not have gone to Reykjavik. Our snowstorm
was a forerunner of a gale over a large part of the North Atlantic that lasted for
almost a week. Most of the students were away for Easter. I spoke to Freyja over
forty miles of telephone line, beneath which the roads were closed by drifting
snow. Esya shone a dull violet under a bright sun and the sky looked dusty with
flying spray. In the afternoon I would go down to the harbor to drink a cup of
coffee in the restaurant of the seamans’ cooperative, and watch the moon rise
and reflect on the green wavelets inside the harbor wall, over which from time
to time spray from a high wave would fly. The harbor was crowded with
freighters which had come in to wait out the storm. I was more lonely and had
less to do than I had had for the past month, and was glad to go back the follow-
ing Sunday to Myvatn. The storm had ended the day before. It had evidently
brought warm weather to the north, since there so much snow had melted that
that evening I and three others returning to Reynihlid had to take a taxi to a
house on the opposite side of the fjord, into whose backyard was as far as the
snow vehicle could come.
april 8: On my way to Seljadalur (the nearest eyrie) I stop for a moment out april 21: About five as I stand eating a solitary breakfast in the kitchen I keep
of breath and become suddenly conscious of the pounding of the blood in my
ears, the damp smell of my woolen scarf, my burning face. I remove cap and
pack and unfasten my skis. The silence when I stand up is absolute. Over the
gulley’s white edge the intense sky is almost violet in the morning sun. I try to
wipe the vapor off my glasses, but it, as always, ends up frozen into a field of ice
droplets, which I must patiently breathe on and polish off.
april 10: This morning after breakfast I sit in the living room to listen to the
weather report over the radio—a deliciously indolent ten minutes. After the
regional forecasts, data on local conditions are reported from thirty or more
stations, of which ours is one of the last. The windows of the room face south
and I sit by one which is slightly open for the air. It is a blue and white spring
day. The warm taste of milk, porridge and coffee return in a burp as I listen a
little longer before leaving for my weekly hour and a half ski to Dalfjall.
I turn off on a side road before the cooperative store. A flock of sheep has
been driven along the edge, their hooves striking the dirt through the thin
snow. In a hollow, where I stop to adjust my skis, frost crystals are settling, with
a slight tinkle, through the colder air. Over a rise is the main road, with in suc-
cession, a factory for processing diatomaceous earth, a bathhouse on a hill, and
a concrete block factory. The factories utilize geothermal steam, and the roar of
the steam vents, when the wind is right, can be heard all along the northeast
shore of the Lake. The air smells of sulfur, which five hundred years ago was
exported from here to Europe.
Beyond, the road curves up to a pass. A snowmobile has gone here several
days ago and packed the snow. As I get higher up, I see through a gap to the
north a cave of pinkish stone against the blue sky. Steam rises from patches of
bare earth. The road finally evens out and enters a narrow cut among bare,
stony hills where the snow is still drifted several feet deep. From its far end I
will turn off toward the Dalfjall ridge.
When I arrive on the height of the ridge an hour or so later, it seems too
pleasant to hurry. A light wind is blowing. The plain below glitters in the sun,
and to the south, toward the center of the country, the lava fields fade through a
line of egg-shaped hills in an ascending, ice-blue shimmer. Another attack of
spring fever: I sit down for a while before going on to the main face for lunch.
hearing a distant noise. It grows and fades, almost like an airplane, except that
33
long after it should be gone, it begins to reappear. I am looking out the window
over the sink, toward where a branch of the main road follows the slope of a
hill. It is a dull gray morning. As I watch, a grader moves slowly into view: it is
plowing out the road around the Lake.
april 25: Today I find a spot above the main cliff in Seljadalur from which to
watch the resident gyrfalcons. The valley floor is out of sight but I have a good
view of the opposite face and the receding ridgetops to the west, which are not
visible from my usual position at the foot of the valley. I sit on my pack on a
snowdrift, some of which I mound up to make a rest for my telescope. The sun
feels hot. Below the drift is a band of damp earth, and then the frozen slope, tan
with a pinkish tinge, falls in a gentle curve toward the valley.
After some minutes I make out the female perched on a ledge of the oppo-
site slope. Stiffly upright, she remains almost motionless with occasional fits
of preening. After about forty minutes another falcon lands on a rock above
 her, then swoops down and up to the same ledge. They perch facing each other
for a long time and then slowly begin a responsive dance, whose elements are
the common preening elements. It starts with the feathers of the breast and
wing, proceeds to the back, the abdomen and thigh, and after several repeti-
tions and regressions becomes a series of progresively deeper bows, until the
male takes off, circles, lands and balances on her back, as she bends her head
toward the ground. Usually he then flies down and out of sight around the cliff
to disappear for an hour (the reason I am today up on top), but this time he
lands on the ledge beside her and walks slowly back and forth while she
straightens and shakes her feathers.
I look away for a moment to rest my eyes and when I look back one of the
birds is gone. Shortly afterward the other sails away to the north. Twenty min-
utes later I spot one on a ridge to the west. It must be a good half-mile away. It
is soon joined by the other and they perch side by side, now and then changing
position, for an hour and a half, when the female begins to preen. Copulation
is followed by flight to still another perch.
About four I pack up and walk along the ridge toward the mouth of the val-
34 ley. The edge of a great mat of turf on the slope comes to my thigh. Most of the
hillside has already washed into the valley below, where it exists as a bare, level
plain, or become part of the “earth winds” that blow in summer: the result of a
thousand years of grazing by sheep. A dry birch leaf is curled on a mat of wet
crowberry, a little snow glistens in the sun, and the wet leaves next to the shoot
of the birch smell of a northern forest in spring.
april 27: As I trudge back across the Lake from watching the gyrfalcons at
Vindbelgjarfjall this afternoon, the hotel, which I can see on the far shore,
seems to remain forever at the same distance. The sun is hot in a clear sky, and
the crust, which was frozen hard this morning, is now soft, so one sinks into
the crumbly snow. A Landrover sets out from a farm ahead of me and goes
bumping, water flying from the front wheels, over the ice toward the hazy hills
to the south. Near shore, the birches have a spicy smell.
may 7: Arthur arrived two days ago with a plan. When he and Alfred (a bio-
chemist) leave, they will drop me off near a hydroelectric station on the river
that flows out of the Lake, and I will walk back up the valley, checking for gyr-
falcon eyries along the way. Counting the one near the hydroelectric station,
the area along the way is reported to have four eyries. The distance from where
Arthur will let me off to the first farm near the Lake is about twelve miles. That
farmer drives the milk truck for the area, so I could probably stay overnight
with him and in the morning catch a ride back to the hotel. The whole walk
back to the hotel I calculate to be about twenty miles.
We spend the last morning shooting a few ptarmigan and trying to collect
their blood (difficult when they are dead), for a study Alfred is doing. By three
o’clock that afternoon, when I am about to be let off, Arthur is having second
thoughts and telling me to forget it and come on with them to Husavik, where
I can catch a bus home. We all get out of the jeep on the far side of an iron
bridge over the river. Alfred, the laboratory scientist and something of a
romantic, settles down on a patch of grass with his hands clasped behind his
head. Should I go? They have to leave immediately; we are late as usual. The
jeep must get to Husavik to see a mechanic. I am not sure what Arthur—or I—
am worried about anyway, it is light almost all night now. I decide to go. Alfred
gets up and brushes the sheep dung off his tweed jacket, we all shake hands,
and the two of them grind off down the rutted road toward the bridge. Only
later do I understand Arthur’s fears were natural enough in a countryside peo-
pled with the ghosts of travellers frozen to death in sudden storms. (But rarely
in May.) I follow a wire fence up a steep meadow towards a tan outcrop, out of
which sails a raven, croaking and gawping. It is joined by another over the river
a moment later.
Dandelions are in bloom along the fence, and the grass is a bright green. By
the time I have scrambled to the top of the outcrop I am out of breath. Ahead I
have a long steady climb before I will reach a vantage point over the valley. I go
more slowly, and after about twenty minutes sidestep up a snowdrift as the gra-
dient lessens, and stride across the brown, sticky top of the ridge to a large brown
stone, where I shed pack, jacket, and sweater, and sit down to look around.
To the north, several miles away, a round white mountain fell in a black drop
to the sea. The soft haze into which the shining planes of water disolved, and
the fluffy dead-white of the snow that covered the upper part of the mountain
formed an elemental contrast (blue, white, black) with the dull moors,
streaked with melting snow, that lay in between. Across the valley, in a gap
between two high hills, a line of blue peaks reflected the sun. I was still not
high enough to be sure of my position. One of the eyries was supposed to be to
the northeast of me (the Lake was to the south), and leaving my pack behind, I
headed along the ridge towards a higher slope I could see in that direction.
I had been told to look for a face that rose abruptly out of the moor. From the
height I reached fifteen minutes later, I could see two possible faces, near each
other, but at least an hour’s walk away to the north. Both looked unclimbable.
Here I was quite a bit higher and to the south could make out with binoculars
the red roof of the farmhouse at the valley’s head (a quarter mile from the
Lake), set on the side of a sunny slope that rose behind it to a considerable
height. I would have trouble finding my things again if I went much farther,
and turning back downhill, in ten minutes I came in sight of the top, where I
picked up my stuff, and headed south along the ridge toward the Lake. It was
beginning to cloud over and the late afternoon air felt cold and raw.
My way led along the slope and then uphill again. I soon crossed a jeep track,
and though it angled somewhat away from the river, began to follow it toward
what now seemed the major height between where I had first come up on the
moor and the farm at the head of the valley. About five, I reached the height,
perhaps three miles from where I had first started. The track ended at the top
of a hill in a circle of bare soil, enclosed by large stones. Down the slope a loud
whirr and cough announced the presence of a cock ptarmigan, still in its white
winter plumage, the afternoon’s first, who eyed me from a patch of camoflag-
ing snow.
The moors were a dark green and brown this time of year, before new leaves
appear on the birches and herbs. The vegetation consisted of mosses, mounds
of dark crowberry, silvery Dryas, a low Arctic heather, and a creeping birch,
still leafless. Here and there were large circles of a curly, pale lichen, once used
for soup. Despite the open character of the country, the walking was not very
good. The hollows often consisted of a network of frost hummocks, which it
was easier to skirt, and on the higher ground the creeping birch kept one from
a steady stride.
For the next two or three miles I found signs of gyrfalcons. Here and there
on the slopes were boulders, often on a little height or shoulder. Some had
bright blotches of an orange lichen, with at their bases, a stiff wing or two yel-
lowing breast feathers from last season’s ptarmigan. One, on a level, was sur-
rounded by withered stalks of lady’s mantle, a fairy ring fertilized (like the
lichens) by the nitrogen-rich droppings of the falcons.
There was supposed to be an eyrie near the abandoned farm of Hamar, which
the map located just upstream of a large birch wood. On my last circle toward the
river, I had seen the beginnings of the wood and after a while, fed up with push-
ing my way along the moor, and at any rate out of sight of the cliffs along the
river where the eyries probably were (they had been reported by an old alcoholic
and smuggler who lived nearby), I started down. After a hundred feet the vege-
tation became more dense and green. Farther down water seeped from a slope,
and a clump of birches, their leaves just showing, stood higher than my head. I
came to the side of a gully, which widened back into a sort of bowl. A bird flipped
up to a branch, and through my binoculars the low sunlight shining on the scene
expanded bird, valley and scrub willow all out of proportion, an illusion which
only vanished upon my approach when the thrush flew down toward some rocks
and I saw the outcrops stood perhaps head-high above the basin floor. Turning
around I followed along the gully and soon came in sight of the river. It had been
a lucky calculation, for perhaps a hundred yards upstream, on a little rise sepa-
rated from the river by the black humps and birches of an old lava flow, I could
see the yellow grass of a meadow.
It is on a summer’s day in a northern country that one should see these
meadows. Long-stemmed dandelions creep upward through the high grass,
insects buzz, a birch tree shimmers on the hill, while the hint of coolness in the
air, the bright sun, lend that moment a rich, almost overpowering nostalgia.
Even in the spring dusk, surrounded by the constant roar of the river, one felt
something of it. Last year’s heavy grass, with a dry, sweetish scent, lay flat on the
37
acre of field that surrounded the house. Water tinkled at the bottom of a ditch
near the door. The ditch was still bridged by a plank, and one could step from
end to end of the building, which had probably been inhabited for several hun-
dred years by at least two adults and their children, in four paces (the old bird-
watcher had supposedly grown up there). The outer walls, which were of turf
and two feet thick, reached my chest. The roof lumber, except for two posts, had
been removed. A low turf wall enclosed the home field, which with labor and
time had been raised two or three feet above the surrounding land, so that from
the outside in some places it came up to one’s chest. I sat down away from the
house on a little rise near a stone where the grass gave way to rosettes of Dryas
and clumps of moss, and ate my dinner: bread, with the lower jaw of a sheep.
The sour taste of the coffee from the thermos, lingering along the back of my
tongue, has become symbolic for me of these Icelandic afternoons.
For some time after leaving Hamar, I stayed down near the river. But the
going was difficult there also, I still had a long distance to cover, and so I head-
 ed once again to the higher slopes. A footbridge across the river marked the
location of the next and last eyrie, so I had to stay more or less in sight of the val-
ley. It was becoming quite dusky, and when I stopped to rest I could hear the dull
pound, expanded by distance and the growing dusk, of the river. A pair of head-
lights wound up the road to the farm at the valley’s head, still several miles away.
This time I came down off the slopes too early and had some trouble finding
what I wanted. Just below the bridge itself was a pond in a sort of bowl, and I was
up on the slope behind it poking around when a molted gyrfalcon feather and a
series of lichen-splotched perching posts led me over the ridge into a neigh-
boring hollow that contained several small cliffs, some yellowing ptarmigan
remains, and an abandoned raven nest on a ledge that smelled of thyme. The
nest had not been used by falcons this year, and I sat down on a rock on the far
side of the hollow to finish my bread and coffee. I had now come about ten
miles. A little waterfall splashed in the hollow, my shins ached, and a winter
wren, a bird I knew from home (the Icelandic form was plumper and grayer),
sang several times, a rising and dipping swell of notes, from the other side.
Anyway, now I was on my way home. For a while I pushed along a sheep
38 track, but it was just a bit too narrow to make good going and for the last time I
climbed up to the slopes above the river. I had lost sight of the farm. On the
heights here the ground was muddy and almost bare. Above the rising ground,
the dome and long hump of Vindbelgjarfjall, the mountain at the near corner
of the Lake, now quite close, were bathed in a pale gray light. When I saw the
farm again it was below me on the slope, where its red iron roof made an “L.”
Two trucks were pulled up in the yard. Its windows were dark, it was a long way
down and almost nine o’clock at night, and while I was tempted to descend, the
simplest thing seemed to be to continue on my way. Most of the rest of the way
would be by road.
A half hour’s walk brought me over the plateau and in sight of the Lake and
a farm. As I waded a shallow stream a dog began to bark. I left my bootprints
along the edge of a bare field, and crossing the corner of someone’s yard,
arrived by their driveway on the road around the Lake.
This section of the road was unfamiliar to me, but forty minutes walk
brought me to the little hills surrounding Vindbelgjar farm, situated near the
lakeshore across a marsh from the mountain. At the head of the driveway was
a large sign reading “PRIVATE” (in English), an anti-birdwatcher measure.
(Myvatn was popular with English and European birders in summer. I regular-
ly trespassed, threading my way around the ponds of the marsh, with their
nesting grey-lag geese, to visit the eyrie at Vindbelgjarfjall). Night was falling
and from a patch of open water on the Lake came a cacophony of waterbird
noises: whistles, coos, trills, the whoops of swans. One doesn’t think of water-
birds as singers, but their songs have a strangely haunting quality. When the
Norse god Loki took Freyja to his castle in the hills, she wouldn’t stay: she said
the wailing of wolves compared poorly with the song of swans.
The road turned away from the Lake and ran along a fence toward the moun-
tain, against a blood-red sky, straight north. Trees grew along the fence, and
the pasture was full of small birds, all singing, stopping when I came too near
and beginning again when I had gone on. A thrush flew into a birch ahead of
me and that monent, under that mountain and that red sky, with the thick grass
behind, the near rustling bird, seemed again the essence of an Arctic year. A
ptarmigan coughed from the scrub, a swan called, and further along a band of
sheep clattered out onto the road, stopped when they saw me, and disappeared
with a rush around a bend.
At one o’clock, at the distance of half a mile, the yard-light behind the set-
tlement at Reynihlid had the green and violet glare of true night. As I crossed
the lava field that had flowed down from the plateau two hundred and fifty
years ago to stop (as one could see) at the walls of the stone church, gulls were
screeching over the Lake. The door was unlocked, the rooms had a familiar
smell. My dinner had been left warming on the stove.
may 15: I leave the house at five after a cup of coffee and two of last evening’s
sweet pancakes. The pair of gyrfalcons at Dimmuborgir (a lava depression with
several good faces three miles down the road) has laid and I go watch the nest
almost daily. Nothing much happens: the female incubates the eggs, some-
times the male brings her prey. Most of the prey are ptarmigan. That should
change in a month as the male ptarmigan lose their white winter plumage and
stop displaying. A ptarmigan moor, with its rocks and lava humps dotted with
displaying, very visible cock ptarmigan is essentially a supermarket for gyrfal-
cons. Looking out over a moor, one sees the ptarmigan and then if one keeps
looking, often a silent gyrfalcon, perched in the top of a birch. After the eggs
have hatched, the cocks turn brown (as the hens did a month earlier), stop dis-
playing and become much more difficult to hunt. The gyrfalcons then turn to
ducks and young gulls; at least this is Finnur’s theory (and it turned out to be
what happened). The air is raw and smells of mud as I flip last night’s rain off
my bicycle saddle with my fingers. Now the roads are open I have acquired,
thanks my landlady’s generosity, a new mode of transportation. The sun is
already burning over the brown hills to the east but most of the plain about the
lake is in shadow. Ten minutes later as I am coasting down the hill before
Vogar, I am still cold and I turn off on a track into a lava field interspersed with
birches that leads toward the underground hot spring where we bathe. A mer-
lin (a small, dark falcon) flies from cone to cone and then crosses the track as
I gain a little height among the blocks of red lava. The lava ends in a slope of
black sand, cut by a line of dark blocks that mark the underground stream.
Wisps of steam rise from the ground and three hundred yards away a ptarmi-
gan coughs from a rock near the foot of the hills. When I head back, the same
merlin crosses the road, now five feet behind a frantic gray and black wagtail
(an abundant summer songbird) which escapes among some rocks.
By the time I reach the turnoff to Dimmuborgir, it feels warmer. Two drake
mallards are pursuing a hen high in the sun-streaked air. Rushes push up at the
edge of a little pond, and a snipe booms, with spread tail, in an arc beyond the
telephone wires. As I turn, my tire stirs a breath of summer dust from the road.
june 5: I arrive in Akureyri late yesterday evening after a brief trip to Reykjavik,
where I arranged for a visit by my parents in September. The bus for Myvatn
does not leave until eight o’clock the next morning. After supper in a cafeteria
I go for a walk. It is a clear evening with the sky slightly suffused with pink at
eleven o’clock. I am almost comfortable in shirtsleeves. A cruise ship is
anchored out in the fjord and the sound of dance music drifts over the water.
At the far end of a wharf, two men are working on the deck of a trawler. It isn’t
that warm and I start to shiver.
I get up the next morning to a cool room. Sunlight drenches the window cur-
tains, which move slightly in the morning breeze as I wash in a basin at the foot
of the bed. I get a cup of coffee from a stall and am five minutes early for the bus.
We are soon ascending the slope of the mountain across the fjord in a series
of long hairpins, at the end of each of which the sea and mountains exchange
positions. Here and there a house stands above the road, its white walls and
windows shining in the sun. New grass is beginning to cover the stones beside
the road. The fjord widens further out, with pink sawtooth mountains, their
tops cut off in a straight line, on either side. Several miles down a brown island
floats in the pale Arctic sea, which dissolves beyond a line of black cliffs and
pink slopes in sunlit planes of mist.
june 7: It is a cold raw morning. Clouds hang over the northern part of the
Lake, and when the sun comes out, the horizon to the south and west has a blue
glitter. After a chilly pedal, I leave my bicycle by the entrance to Dimmuborgir
and start down the slope on a worn path (Dimmuborgir is a national park) from
which I soon branch off towards the eyrie.
My usual route leads over the raised center of the lava depression to a shelf
on its far side, on which I sit across a valley from the butte on the depression’s
edge which contains the eyrie. On the sides of a small pit created by the col-
lapse of its lava top, birches are in new leaf. Several terraces make a zigzag
descent to my valley. The last one, which is completely covered with crowber-
ry, with heart-high birches in twos and threes, I cross the long way to reach a
rocky gulch from whose head I can see the eyrie. To the east crouches a line of
purple hills, mottled in white, like leopards, with snow that never seems to
leave. A birch leaf, rubbed between one’s fingers, leaves a scent and faint
stickiness that lasts all day, a few sprigs of crowberry have clusters of pink
bloom, the sun shines for a moment on the ground, and it seems as if spring, a
warm day when one can sit outside without moving, will never come.
41
june 20: Today after lunch I go to Vindbelgjarfjall. I am quite sure the gyrfal-
cons there aren’t nesting. From where I leave my bike beside the road, the way
leads through a birch scrub with several small irregular lakes. Today, three
years later, I am certain I could not find my way through that marsh without
some trouble. I sit down on a little rise below the east end of the cliffs. White
clouds float over the ridge and a merlin (one of a nesting pair) makes a move-
ment on an outcrop above me, against the dark slope. I can hear the chomp and
snuffle of a small horse feeding a hundred yards away.
About half an hour after I arrive the gyrfalcons appear gliding and flapping
with their curious butterfly beat, midway along the slope from the east. The
merlin leaves his post with a scream to dive again and again at the larger birds,
who duck, flinch, and finally swoop up to land on the face some distance fur-
ther down, whereupon the merlin returns, still screaming, to his post. About
ten minutes later one of the gyrfalcons flies, circles twice, and disappears in a
glide over the ridge, to be followed after a minute or two by the other.
 Ptarmigan are less abundant this spring, which may be why
several pairs of gyrfalcons about the Lake failed to breed.

august 10: As I drink my coffee at the table in the corri-

dor off the hotel kitchen this morning, the sun that floods
the little room bakes my head and neck with summery
warmth. Cool air and morning voices float in through the
open door. Finished, I go up to my room (in July I was given
a worker’s room in the hotel) to get my pack and take it out
to my bicycle, which, leaning in the shadow against the
back wall of the hotel, is still damp from the night. Today,
as for the last several days, I plan to look for groups of juve-
nile gyrfalcons. In the hollow between the two settlements
grass partly hides the window in the gable of a turf barn,
and when I reach the top of the rise near the co-operative
store I get off my bicycle to put on a sweater.
I stop near the turnoff to Dimmuborgir to poke around.

42 From there the road leads down a slope and into an area of
round hills and nearby islands, a low, rich lakeshore where
moss grows among small rocks and the purple flowers of wild
geraniums color an island between two pillars of tuff. On the left of a long straight
stretch sand dunes approach the road over a low lava ridge. As I near the foot of
the Lake, the road turns west along a fence. A dirt track goes south toward a farm
on the shore of a small lake whose outlet the main road (also dirt) soon crosses
on a wooden bridge. Beyond the next bend the willows and lava plates of a marsh
shimmer in the sun. It is almost noon. After glassing the area I turn back to the
bridge to eat lunch. Reeds grow in the miniature estuary of the stream, where
next to a grassy hill it enters the Lake. In the green water a single char is rising
for gnats on the surface. Now and then it almost disappears down among the
weeds that rise from the bottom, toward where a tall bank of stalks glows in the
thick sun. With the tiny, competitive speculative part of my mind I cast a fly to
a ripple above him, while with my gaping senses I feel the warm planks under
my stomach, the translucent air, the fields shining like rubies around the
Arctic lake, the cool breathe of the water, the rising fish, and I feel an
immense, terrible peace. I could live here forever, never speaking to a soul,
never caring for anything more than the pale gleam of a stockingless thigh.