Alone.
Always alone.
A cloak. Catching the wind.
Colors.
North.
South.
East.
West.
Purple eyes.
North south east west.
East.
Unafraid.
Neddy
ROSE WHISPERED SOMETHING, but I couldn't hear it. Her eyes were fixed on the trees that lay a stone's throw away.
"A white bear, Neddy," she said, louder.
But by the time I turned to look, there was nothing there.
Rose dragged me over to the whitebeams and the two of us examined the ground for markings of a large animal. "You believe me, don't you?" Rose asked. There was nothing to show a bear had been there.
And yet I believed her, though I did not say so.
"'Tis almost suppertime," I said abruptly, and began to lead the way back. Rose took off her cloak and, folding it as she walked, trotted along beside me.
"What is it, Neddy?" she said.
"Nothing," I replied, trying to keep my voice normal. "It's gotten late..."
But I was lying. I was frightened. Not of the white bear, at least not for myself.
"Are you sure?" she persisted.
"Yes."
Rose gave me one last sidelong glance.
"I wish you had seen it, Neddy. It was so large, and its eyes..." she said. "I get this feeling it wanted something. And that it was sad."
"Must be your imagination," I said, making my voice light and teasing. "This time of year it's still too warm for a white bear. And you know they don't come this far south, even in winter. Perhaps it was a white doe. Their eyes sometimes look sad."
But of course I was lying. For I had seen the eyes of a white bear, that time years before. And I felt sure it was the same one.
I knew about white bears. After that day when I had looked into the eyes of the white bear that saved Rose, I set out to become an expert on them. I would interview everyone I came into contact with, to see if they had ever seen a white bear or if they knew anything of white bears. Most knew nothing. My main source of information turned out to be a peddler who had traveled into the far north and had once even been on a Saami expedition of white-bear hunters.
"Before going out on the ice to hunt the white bear," the peddler told me, "the Saami taught me. They said I must know the isbjorn by heart if I was going to hunt him. They called him the Great Wanderer or Ghost Bear. Other names they used are: He Who Walks Without a Shadow. Ice Giant. Nanook. The Traveler. Great White. Sea Bear." The peddler paused, letting those names settle into my memory.
"The white bear is a solitary wanderer, never moving with a pack or even a mate. He walks on all fours, but when he stands he is nearly ten feet tall." The peddler raised one hand as far as he could above his head.
"He lives by his sense of smell," the peddler continued. "There is a Saami saying about white bears: 'A pine needle fell in the forest. The hawk saw it. The deer heard it. The white bear smelled it.'
"His eyes are black. His nose is black. His paws are black and the five claws on each of his paws are black. The rest of him is snow white."
I listened to the peddler, my eyes held by a scar carved into the skin just below his hairline. Maybe a white bear had given him that scar, with a thrust of black claw.
I learned more. I learned that the white bear's habitat lay well to the north of us, in the region where snow can remain on the ground for twelve months of the year. It is true that an occasional white bear had been known to travel as far south as our farmhold, but only very rarely and only during the deep winter months.
I learned that the white bear's eyesight is not as good as its sense of smell, but that it is still very strong. The bear has an extra eyelid to protect its eyes from snow glare, and it can see underwater and through a driving blizzard.
I learned that of all bears, the white bear is the most fur-clad, every inch of it covered except its nose and paw pads, and the fur is dense and soft. It has forty-two teeth, including long, sharp canines for piercing flesh. It eats meat but can also survive on berries and grasses if it has to. The white bear's strength is legend. It is said it can kill with one swipe of its paw.
I even wrote a white-bear poem. It began
Ghost bear wanders, always alone,;
king of the north,
dispensing death from his traveling throne.
It was shortly after this effort that I decided I wouldn't be a poet after all.
Father
THE DAY ROSE CAME HOME with her finished cloak she seemed different, as though something had happened, something important. Neddy, too. They were both quiet, inside themselves. It didn't seem to be a quarrel between them. I asked Rose if Widow Hautzig had been unkind or hurtful that day, but she said, "No worse than usual," and then shook out her cloak to show me.
I stared at the cloth, amazed. I was hardly able to fathom that my own Nyamh, my Rose, had created such a thing. It had more color and inspiration than anything Widow Hautzig could even have dreamed.
"Your wind rose," I said.
"Yes, Father. I hope you do not mind that I copied it."
"Of course not. It is..." I faltered, suddenly realizing that the lie was there, too. Unknowing, Rose had woven the lie into her cloak.
I began speaking again, expressing my admiration for her artistry. I think Rose sensed something, though, for I felt her puzzled glance on me several times as everyone gathered around to exclaim over the cloak. Eugenia prepared a special meal that night, scraping together what she could from our sparse larder, in honor of Rose's accomplishment.
I think that day, the day Rose brought home the cloak, was the last our family knew of happiness. She was almost fifteen years old then, but we had been suffering ill luck for a long time, since the year she was born. Occasionally the thought would cross my mind that our "luck" had been affected by the lie of Rose's birth, but I would quickly berate myself for being as superstitious as Eugenia.
I was not cut out to be a farmer. When we first moved from Bergen to the farm, we were fortunate, but when things went poorly, my decisions made them go still worse. By the autumn when Rose finished her cloak, we were barely scraping by and my children knew more of hunger than I could sometimes endure.
One of the factors that had contributed mightily to our reversal of fortunes was the fact that Eugenia's cousin, who had fallen on hard times of his own, had been forced to sell all his landholdings. Our farm had been purchased by a prosperous merchant who lived a distance away, in the city of Oslo. It was more than a month's journey by horse to Oslo, and thus we never saw the merchant, nor even heard directly from him. All of our communications came by messenger from the merchant's deputy, a man called Mogens. Our rent did not go up right away, but slowly, over time, it did rise, and eventually the rent was nearly equal to what we could produce, with very little left for us. Over the years our two eldest children left the farm. Nils Erlend set out for Danemark, where he hoped to make his way, and Selme Eva married an ironworker and moved with him to a village in Njord far distant from us. We rarely heard from either of them.
The day after Rose brought home her cloak, we'received a final blow. A letter arrived from Mogens saying that due to lack of payment of rent, we must vacate the farm in less than a month.