Far Afield (14 page)

So, the conscience said. So. What have you done that you’re so proud of? Split second of silence for Jonathan’s answer; no answer; conscience rolled on. You are so smug and self-satisfied and self-deluding. You can’t think straight, that’s your problem.

You know what the real problem is? Jonathan was tired but fascinated; his conscience was always announcing the “real problem,” and Jonathan could not relinquish his hope that someday he would be enlightened by something the conscience said. The real problem is, you don’t like these people. You don’t like this place. Now that’s just completely wrong, Jonathan protested. This is a great place. If it’s such a great place, why aren’t you doing any work? Jonathan knew this was drivel. That’s drivel, he said; that doesn’t follow at all.

This stopped the whole procedure, and Jonathan had a few minutes of peace, succeeded by a queasiness more penetrating and intolerable than the pain of inquisition. If the conscience was “wrong” and even negligible, then what was left of
consciousness
? A strand of primitive consciousness—I’m hungry, I want to take a walk—remained intact,
but all that Jonathan took to be the hallmark of civilization, reflecting upon one’s actions and musing on the actions of others, seemed bound up in this Nagger. Much of the time it slumbered, but its sleep was never deep, and any venture into the realm of thought might waken it and provoke its rantings. Yet without it Jonathan felt one-dimensional.

He spent the day alternating between a flat, unsettling silence and bouts of interrogation. Only one thing was solid: his need to eat. He went to the dock to get some fish; from the steady rain and the slow bobbing of the boats on oily, choppy water, he had his first insight into the components of “drear,” which he saw could be a formidable enemy.

Toward evening Heðin put his head into the kitchen to say they would be leaving at eight the next morning. “I’m coming,” he said, “to show you what to do.”

Jonathan broke through his stupor enough to say, “I thought you hated to drive sheep.”

“Yes, but the currents are bad for fishing, and I’ll show you what to do. We’ll have fun.”

This might be irony; Jonathan peered at Heðin’s face, but he couldn’t tell. “Fun?” he asked.

“It’s just work,” said Heðin. “Eight o’clock.”

They rode out in a flatbed truck under skies splashed with clouds that moved swiftly, peeling off white to show pale blue bright swatches between puffs. The wind was high but moist; the sea was lavender and gray between swells. A charged, metallic smell blew over the hills, greener now than they had been when Jonathan took his walks. Petur and his two sons in the front were silent; Jonathan, in the back with Jens Símun the elder, voiced an occasional grunt of admiration or surprise as the view or the bumps in the road hit home.

A pen improvised from a circle of trucks and some tired-looking lumber was teeming with sheep when they
arrived. Small, collielike dogs and boys ran around the outside, barking and yelling. Inside, two men were wading among the sheep, one brandishing shears, the other a paintbrush. In their distress at being penned up, the sheep were shitting and bleating and kicking each other. Jonathan felt a surge of sympathy. They were a far cry from the noble, disdainful creatures he’d eaten lunch with, and he pitied them for their captivity.

Petur added his truck to the circle and everybody piled out. Little Jens Símun immediately joined the ring of barkers and yellers, where his cousin, Petur, yelled loudest and ran fastest. Their fathers stood next to the truck, dividing up the territory: they would go north, Heðin would take Jonathan south and show him what to do, then continue west.

“And east?” asked Jonathan.

“East is home. The village,” said Petur. “No sheep there.”

Heðin and Jonathan set off, walking shoulder to shoulder on the turfy road. After ten minutes’ walk Heðin halted, sat down on a boulder, and rolled a cigarette. “Want one?” He offered his tobacco pouch. Jonathan took it and rolled a misshapen, nearly triangular object. Heðin shook his head. “That’s terrible.” He unrolled it and dumped the tobacco into a fresh paper, which he rolled slowly, explaining what he was doing. “You must roll evenly, roll all your fingers at once, and push from the middle, otherwise you make that messy thing you made. Here.”

Jonathan was an infrequent smoker, and he felt a bit dizzy from tobacco so early in the day. But sitting in the speckled silence with Heðin was pleasant; they seemed like friends.

“Oh, I hate to drive sheep,” Heðin said. “You know, it’s very hard work. They can run fast and they never want to go where you want them to go.”

Jonathan said nothing; he was content. The sun was warming him, and the air was clearing his head of all the vapors of the day before.

“Well, time to go.” Heðin sighed. “Off into the
hagi
. Do you know what that is?”

“It’s the outfield, isn’t it?”

“Yes. The
bøur
is the infield, where we are now, just on the edge of it.” He paused. “In the winter, the sheep come into the infield. But in the summer, they live in the outfield.”

“I know,” said Jonathan. If Heðin had decided to set himself up as an instructor, he was certainly starting at a first-grade level; these were facts Jonathan had learned from his Danish guidebook.

“Do you know who else is in the
hagi
?”

“No.”

“The
huldufólk
. Do you know who they are?”

“No.”

“They are the gray people who live in the
hagi
.”

Jonathan cocked his head. “Elves?”

“No. They are people, except they are all gray. They have gray clothes and gray boats.”

“Have they got a village out here?” Jonathan couldn’t tell if these people existed or what.

“No. They live in rocks.” Heðin nodded several times.

“Oh. Then they are a sort of elf.”

“No. Elves are smaller. Also, elves live in town, mostly. But the
huldufólk
live here—there.” He gestured into the green beyond. “You have to be careful.”

“Why?”

“This is their land. Sometimes they don’t like us coming out here. Sometimes they get angry when we come out to get the sheep.”

“Then what happens?” Jonathan felt a faint stir of unease.

“They can do surprising things. You’ll be walking
along and all of a sudden there’s a
huldumaður
—a gray man—walking beside you. Or sometimes you’re catching hold of a sheep, and somebody else is pulling it away from you—because it’s a sheep that belongs to the
huldufólk
.”

“What do you do then?”

Heðin laughed. “You let go.”

Jonathan hesitated for a moment, then couldn’t forbear asking, “Do you really believe all this?”

“Jonathan, I am telling you this so you know what to do if it happens. And so you won’t be scared if a
huldumaður
appears. They don’t hurt us. They live here and we live in the village. It’s just sometimes they don’t like visitors. So you must be polite and remember that you are on somebody else’s land.” He stood up. “Come on,” he said.

This region was one Jonathan had not explored on his walks, but it looked familiar: green, lumpy, flowery. Soon, however, the terrain became more hilly; stony outcroppings shaped like miniature mountains made a hike of their progress, leaving Jonathan out of breath and trailing behind Heðin. His wind was not good; sitting around in hotels and kitchens sulking and brooding had not kept him in condition. He hoped his running was up to scratch.

On the crest of the next ridge Heðin was waiting for him. “There,” he said, as Jonathan wheezed up beside him. A herd of sheep grazed in the valley below. “We’ll get behind them,” Heðin said, “and I’ll scare them. Then we’ll chase.”

Scaring meant throwing stones into the middle of the herd and yelling “Oopla!” Jonathan joined in. The sheep paid no attention. “We’ll have to push them,” Heðin said. He walked right up to a fat ewe and pressed his knees into her rump. She baaed and moved away, sending Heðin into a lurch. “Stupid sheep,” he muttered. He leaned down and put both hands on her back, propelling her forward in the direction of the ridge. This worked. The ewe took off, spraying chunks of turf as her hooves dug in for the sprint.

“Push another!” yelled Heðin.

Jonathan put his hands tentatively atop a white ewe, who promptly shot a burst of pellets on his feet. “Dammit,” he said; he kicked her gently in the backside, mostly to repay the favor. But it had the right effect, and this ewe too ran toward the ridge.

“Two more,” called Heðin, “then they’ll all go.”

In unison, Jonathan and Heðin each pushed a sheep. And the entire herd, stirred by some critical amount of movement, followed in the wake of the last two. “Run!” Heðin yelled. He circled around to the back of the herd and pointed Jonathan down toward the opposite side. “Get over there and run!”

And so they retraced their leisurely journey, both of them panting now, Heðin directing Jonathan’s movements and position like a football coach: “East! Down! Harder! Watch that black lamb!” When they reached the rock where they’d had the cigarettes, Heðin stopped and flopped onto the ground.

“Leave them here,” he said between gasps.

Jonathan thought he might faint. He stood still while the world spun around him in black and green flashes. When his blood had slowed to a steady thumping, he too dropped onto the grass.

“Why don’t you use dogs?” he asked.

“Sometimes we do.”

“Why not today?”

Heðin laughed. “I told you it was hard work.”

The sheep were a ways in front of them, grazing again. “Should we take them to the pen?” Jonathan asked.

“No, they’ll stay here. They’re in the
bøur
now. Somebody will get them, or we’ll get them later. So. Do you think you can do it?”

“Sure,” said Jonathan. This was pure bravado. He doubted he could ever run again. And he doubted he could
agitate enough sheep to set a whole herd running. “I just have to rest another minute.”

But Heðin stood up. “We’ll walk back out,” he said. “It’s farther.”

It was much farther. They walked for half an hour before reaching the next group of sheep. Jonathan was worried. “I don’t think I can run all this distance,” he said softly.

“When you stop, they stop,” said Heðin, “so you can rest. Then you have to get them going again, but sometimes it’s better that way. This is too far to run, so you’ll have to stop. But watch out that one doesn’t get away. Sometimes one keeps running.” He nodded. “That can happen.”

Jonathan could only hope it wouldn’t. Heðin had lighted another cigarette and was picking up rocks. “Here.” He offered Jonathan a fistful. “If you run at them while you throw the rocks it works better.” He walked away.

“Are you leaving?” Jonathan heard a note of distress in his own voice.

“I’ve got to get the ones to the west,” said Heðin, waving his arm toward America. He threw a rock into the herd, stirring up a little movement. “I got them started for you,” he called over his shoulder.

Alone with his charges, Jonathan had a rush of worries: the sheep would trample him, the sheep would refuse to move and he’d be out all day and night trying to budge them, he’d pass out from overexertion on some hill, where he wouldn’t be found till morning. Lurking behind all this was the specter of the
huldumaður
, that otherwordly shepherd in gray who might at any moment appear to reclaim his stock. A thrill of fear shot up his spine; wasn’t that a movement over there, just beyond the herd? Jonathan stood very still and stared at the spot where he thought he’d seen something: nothing. Of course, he told himself. He was being ridiculous. With the energy anxiety brings, he threw
several rocks at the sheep and ran at them, yelling “Git!” as he went. They got; in seconds most of them were charging over the hill.

The rest period and the reanimation of the herd went off without incident, and within an hour Jonathan was walking back out to the
hagi
, with a doubled number of sheep munching in the
bøur
, his dutiful children waiting for his return.

Finding sheep on his own, though, was hard. Heðin must have known where they were; Jonathan walked for what seemed miles without running into anything alive. The reliable guidebook had mentioned the lack of animals: no snakes, no squirrels, no badgers, no owls, no deer, no mountain lion to live among the trees that weren’t there; no hedgehog, no elk, no arctic fox to burst into his path with its shining tail. Like the absence of trees, this vacuum was one thing when described and quite another when experienced. A pre-Edenic silence and stillness reigned here, in this vegetable and mineral universe. Time was fixed at the fourth day of creation: water, earth, grass, and herb yielding seed, and lights in the firmament, but the fowls and great whales of the fifth day were not in evidence, though in other parts of the island time had progressed that much.

Jonathan was not sure he liked this version of the world. God had been right to put man into a place already populated by moving creatures. Even two days as the only form of animal life would be enough to cause permanent loneliness—and, Jonathan guessed, a permanent delusion of grandeur.

So it was with relief that he heard, faint and far away, the bleat of a ewe calling her lamb to her side.

He followed the trail of the sound, which led him suddenly to the brink of a cliff. The sight of the sea crashing and seething below was as heartening as the noise of the sheep: Jonathan knew there were fish in the water. And a
clutch of guillemot took flight at his step, spinning black and white in the pale air. He realized he’d been holding his breath as he walked, taking in small gasps when necessary. He let his chest relax. The ewe was perched on the edge of the cliff, tearing at a tasty clump; her lamb was right beside her. They were both gray.

“Git!” he yelled. The animals lifted their heads and stared at him. “Uh, go home,” he tried, as if to a dog, waving his arms in the direction he hoped they would go. The ewe backed away, looking at him as she placed her feet gingerly on the fine grass at the cliff’s rim. She stepped on the lamb’s leg; it bleated and started to totter. Still staring at Jonathan, she pushed the lamb to higher ground with her hindquarters, flicking her stubby tail on its back to get it moving. With the lamb positioned away from the cliff, Jonathan felt safe making his move. He ran a few steps and then lunged after it, hoping to catch hold of its fleece with his outstretched hands. But the lamb bounced away, bounding off in its rocking-horse motion across the tundra. It was quite young and small, and like all young and small beings it looked like something good to hug. Jonathan was determined to get his arms around it—as much for the pleasure as for the fulfillment of his duty.