Devil's Fjord Page 2

  Nothing much happened in this part of Vágar when it came to crime. A little drunkenness. The occasional case of domestic violence. He’d heard a solitary policewoman patrolled the area from time to time. A stranger, the source of some gossip in the village since she’d been there only a few months. She was of Faroese stock apparently but her family had moved to Aalborg in Denmark when she was a toddler. Quite why a youngster would want to hide herself away on Vágar was beyond Haraldsen. This was a place for older people surely …

  ‘Tristan!’

  He would make a phone call to introduce himself, he thought as he let the mower ride over the healthy turf of the roof then roll down towards the ground. A cry from below told him she’d got it. Then Haraldsen took one last suck on his pipe – the thing was banned indoors – and put it in the top pocket of his black pyjamas as he went for the ladder.

  A bright red pickup was making its way up the snaking lane to the cottage. Tristan Haraldsen believed he knew his new job. He’d read every last line in the manual provided by the Ministry of Fisheries, gone with the assigned fleet foreman from Djevulsfjord for formal training in the government buildings in Tórshavn. This was the man behind the wheel of the pickup: Baldur Ganting, owner of the Alberta, the largest fishing boat in the harbour.

  Haraldsen hurried down the ladder, came over and shook Ganting’s hand as the fellow climbed out of the cab. Elsebeth was shielding her eyes with her fingers, as if in shame.

  ‘You’re mowing,’ Ganting said in his gruff westerner’s voice. ‘In your pyjamas. Are you well?’

  ‘Never better! We heard the news. Whales!’

  Ganting was staring at Haraldsen’s sheep as they came round the corner of the field, curious to see the visitor.

  ‘Where in God’s name did you get those sorry creatures?’

  ‘A nice man from Sørvágur sold them, at a very good price,’ Elsebeth said with a smile. ‘They are pedigree, I believe.’

  ‘Pedigree?’ Ganting shook his head then pulled a can from the pocket of his trousers. Snus. Chewing tobacco, imported from Sweden. He popped a wad beneath his top lip and looked at Haraldsen. ‘This is a decent-sized pod of blackfish from what I hear. Perhaps forty or more. Someone new to this …’

  ‘I leave the fishing and the blood to you,’ Haraldsen told him. ‘I’m there to see the rules are followed. Nothing more.’

  He slapped Ganting on the arm. The fisherman was a hefty fellow. Taller than Haraldsen with a serious face, half-hidden by a grizzled brown-and-grey beard. He wore a blue canvas shirt and yellow oilskins. A long whaling knife that looked a hundred years old sat in a leather sheath on his left side, the curved blade clearly visible. On his right a marine VHF radio. It squawked then. Ganting answered, and spoke so quickly it was hard to catch the words.

  ‘Well then,’ he said when he was finished, ‘these whales are ours for the taking if we want them, Mr District Sheriff. All it awaits is a word from you.’

  ‘I’ll get dressed,’ Haraldsen said. ‘And consult the books.’

  ‘The books,’ Ganting muttered. ‘No time for books. If we’re to drive them we must know now. There’ll be every boat in Djevulsfjord needed for this job.’ A pause. ‘Are you happy with that, man?’

  Haraldsen checked his email daily. If the ministry had cause to demand hunting be reduced in number or abandoned altogether the news would be communicated to every district sheriff throughout the islands. No such missive had arrived.

  ‘I am unaware of any reason why this opportunity should be allowed to pass,’ Haraldsen replied. ‘You?’

  ‘None at all,’ Ganting said and finally allowed himself a smile.

  Haraldsen declared he had to go inside to change and make a telephone call. Ganting watched him leave, then doffed his blue fisherman’s cap to Elsebeth.

  ‘I apologize, Mrs Haraldsen. I’m a simple fisherman, rude of demeanour and manners too. I never wished you good morning.’

  She laughed and said he was forgiven.

  ‘Grind, you see. It’s food. It’s money. It’s—’ he winked – ‘why we’re here. Will you be joining us now too?’

  ‘If I’m welcome,’ she said.

  A moment he hesitated then said, ‘Of course.’

  The Thomsens lived in an old sea captain’s house just a few steps up from the quay. It was one of the few homes in Djevulsfjord with two floors. Dorotea had the upstairs front room set for tea. From there the place had the best view of the village. Out to the little harbour. Along the fjord to the Atlantic. She could see the long finger of grey cliffs that led on both sides of the water. The ridge on the left, the village side, on the way to Selkie Bay, was known as the Lundi Cliffs, lundi being Faroese for puffin. They were the point at which the dwindling foothill of Árnafjall, the peak that separated Djevulsfjord from the rest of Vágar, met the raging sea. A spider’s web of winding fell paths led up from the harbour to the cliff’s edge and ran round to Selkie Bay.

  In season the men would go fleyging there, fishing the sky to catch puffins for the pot, stretching a hand net between two rods above the stone hides set there for this purpose, then trapping the little parrot-like birds in flight, hundreds on a good day. Dorotea Thomsen believed she prepared the best puffins in Vágar. Smoked. Stuffed with sweet cake, fruit and spices. Soaked in milk or beer then boiled. In the commercial kitchen she’d had her husband George build out back she would bring in hired help for long hours cooking the birds, selling them on in Sørvágur for a hefty profit. Sometimes she would do the same with gannet chicks which had a good market too once her team of local women, paid the very minimum, split the little fledglings end-to-end, took out the ribcage, head, neck, and stomach, then pickled the tiny carcasses in brine.

  It was all sound income, for her at least. Especially the gannets if they could persuade some men to make the extra effort to hunt for the tiny chicks. Not that income was a necessity. Baldur Ganting may have possessed some social authority as the leader of the harbour fleet, but the money lay with the Thomsens. While most in Djevulsfjord struggled for a living, they never went without. George’s family had been a kind of aristocracy in the hamlet for a century or more. He’d inherited most of the good agricultural acreage along the fjord and running up to the mountain. Almost every smallholder in the area leased their fields and some their homes from the Thomsens and paid a steady rent or found themselves evicted. Dorotea ran the single village shop, a small business that sold everything from milk to batteries and rope from a converted warehouse near the quay. Between the two of them they had the monopoly of local commerce.

  A good number of their tenants were in arrears that hard summer. But the sound outside the window, the horns, the hubbub of animated voices, told Dorotea Thomsen there was no need to worry about being paid. The premises out back were set up to process the harvest of the sea as well as that of the air. Whale meat and blubber aplenty when the grind warranted it. A tenant farmer too lazy or talentless to make his fields work might pay off a little of his debts by offering his portion of the skinn. There was a discount in such negotiations, naturally. A greater one than George Thomsen, a weak and over-generous man, would offer on his own.

  Dorotea would put steel in his backbone then. As she had many times before.

  At her window in the upstairs room she watched the growing commotion by the quay. The Mikkelsen boys came out, the smart one looking round, his chubby face full of curiosity and mischief. The stupid older brother followed, hands in the pockets of his red shorts.

  ‘Oh you little brats,’ Dorotea Thomsen murmured. ‘Who really fathered you, I wonder?’

  ‘Silas did,’ said a voice behind her. ‘Don’t you go telling people otherwise.’

  Her husband had come upstairs and she never heard him. They were a childless couple which was how she wanted it. They had married out of convenience more than anything. She wanted a better life than her peers. He felt it appropriate for his standing to be attached to a wife and none of the local women he thought more co
mely seemed interested in sharing his bed, in spite of all the money and relative luxury that came with it.

  ‘You think so?’ she answered with a smile. ‘I would like more tea. There’ll be work to be done later. Bargains to be struck when that meat and blubber come our way.’

  George Thomsen was a clean-shaven man of forty-eight, one year older than his wife. Thin and a little weedy. It was good he’d inherited, she always said, for a man like him could never make his own way on the sea or in the fields.

  ‘I don’t want you making them hate us any more than they do already.’

  Outside, the sound of buzzing outboards was growing, like a swarm of frantic bees gathering over the silver water. Soon the district sheriff would arrive, a new one, a town man from Tórshavn. Once this incomer gave the signal the grind would begin.

  ‘I’ll endeavour to remember that. Tea, George. And brown bread with butter and strawberry jam.’ She held up her hands. They were big and strong, those of a fisherwoman which, if marriage into the Thomsen clan had not intervened, was exactly what Dorotea would have been. ‘Make sure that slut Alba’s earning her pay doing the pans for the kitchen. And those cutting knives too. Then we’ll be swimming in blood before long and where there’s blood there’s money.’

  ‘Ja,’ he grunted and went back down the stairs.

  Dorotea pulled her chair nearer the window and gazed at the stone harbour with its single jetty, the whole now alive with people and boats stirring, large and small.

  The Mikkelsen boys watched, the smart one tapping his right foot on the cobbles, always anticipating something.

  ‘Whose prick made that wicked little face?’ she whispered to herself. ‘I wonder.’

  TWO

  Sharp black dorsals cleaved the bright water as the boats turned and drove the pod to shore.

  A good school. Two thirds adults, the rest young whales, clinging close to their mothers, alarmed at the sudden turnabout in their intentions. The pack had been skirting the mouth of the fjord when Silas Mikkelsen, out in his own boat with two local men for crew, spotted them in the churning margin where the inlet met the ocean proper.

  His simple craft was small and fast. The nets for shoal fish had not yet been laid. It was an easy matter to steer round the school, take up position off the ocean side, then call up others on the VHF.

  From here he could see the shallow curve of Selkie Bay. No one lived there except the mad artist woman who occasionally occupied a shack by the shore. The place was too bleak and too remote even for Djevulsfjord. The nearest real house was back at the edge of the village, the cottage that belonged to the new district sheriff, close to a fell-track that led to the Lundi Cliffs.

  ‘I’ll be wanting my share and more,’ said one of the crewmen, a lout from Sørvágur who’d come out with his mate for the money. ‘Grind’s hard work.’

  ‘You’ll get your due,’ Mikkelsen said and glared at the pair of them. ‘Grind! Cut your cackle and get the gear. We’ll gather more this day than we’d make in weeks.’

  That shut their mouths.

  He’d half-hoped there’d be whales about that morning and came out prepared. In the bows of the craft sat the necessary equipment. There were heavy stones fastened on lines to splash noisily in the waves, driving the school landwards until they beached on the stretch of rough sand along from the quay. More loose rocks for deterring any lead whale that might try to break free. They’d probably be needed too. A pod was like a herd of sheep. His father had drummed that into him when he was a child, ready to puke in the heaving family boat, rolling on the rough seas. The creatures had no individual sense of action, only a communal belief that together they would be safe, and apart in peril. Shoo them ashore with noise and boats and mashing water and they’d strand themselves there, ready to die together too.

  He had the equipment for that last part of the journey as well. Blunt blowhole hooks attached to sisal ropes that could be inserted into the wheezing gap in the whale’s head and used to drag them through the surf to the sand and shingle. The slender spear that would kill them, severing the spine and with it the artery to the creature’s brain, all with a single swift strike one hand’s width behind the blowhole, a quick and easy death or so it was hoped. And whaling knives, long-handled, vicious old things, sharp as a razor, ready to finish quickly any that lingered.

  The cloth he’d run up on the boat mast was tradition. The rules enforced by the district sheriff demanded it. Fifty years before, it was the only signal the fishermen knew. But now they had VHF radios – mobile phones rarely worked reliably on the waves – and could summon others in minutes. From what Silas Mikkelsen could see there were a good six boats casting off for sea already, looking to profit from this calm and sunny day. Word of grind always spread like diesel on water. Men would sail in from Sørvágur and villages beyond, all for a chance to take some meat and blubber home. And in their wake busy women, ready with their butchery blades, hungry for the taste of fresh whale, something they’d grown up with on Vágar, a treat they’d never want to miss.

  The radio on his hip buzzed.

  ‘We have permission,’ Ganting said through the crackles.

  ‘Of course,’ Silas Mikkelsen replied. ‘Why wouldn’t we?’

  A pause then Ganting added, ‘Permission is needed. Do this every inch by the book, boy. Haraldsen’s new to these parts.’ He laughed and that was rare. ‘For God’s sake he was mowing his roof when I turned up! In his pyjamas! I ask you.’

  ‘I doubt the fellow’s a fool.’

  ‘Never said he was,’ the older man snapped back. ‘You follow the law when it comes to getting those blackfish ashore and in our larders. I want no trickery, no unnecessary cruelty. These creatures die for our benefit. We give them due respect, just as our fathers did before us.’

  Ganting and Mikkelsen’s old man had been great friends. In a way Baldur had been a kind of father after he died. Until the marriage fell to pieces.

  ‘Ja,’ Mikkelsen said.

  ‘Will they turn?’ Ganting asked.

  Silas Mikkelsen scanned the pod. Two more boats had come to join him, blocking the school’s entry back to the open sea. If the whales had the least bit of sense they could swim around these little craft as easily as a bird might fly from an approaching pack of cats. But nature was nature. They clung together and were easily herded. Just like puffins flying so easily into the fleyging net. Meat was put there for a reason. To refuse to harvest it was as close to a sin as he might imagine.

  ‘They will turn,’ Mikkelsen said. ‘I could do that with the boat I have alone.’

  ‘Ach!’ Ganting grunted over the crackly call. ‘And steal for yourself all the glory. I am foreman, the sheriff’s voice in these proceeding. You will wait for the others. They come soon. I don’t want this lot lost when they get to the Skerries like last time.’

  The rocks at the mouth of the inlet were always the tricky part. The sound and splashing of the waves against them could easily turn the pod back to the sea if there were insufficient craft to keep driving the school ashore.

  ‘I am aware I failed you then,’ Mikkelsen said. ‘And in so many other matters also.’

  They never spoke about Alba any more. Life was easier that way.

  ‘So bring that pod in,’ Ganting told him. ‘Lord knows we need it.’

  The harbour was so busy they had to leave the truck at the back of the shop. Ganting took a canvas bag out of the back then grabbed a metal spear and a large hook attached to a rope. By the time they got to the waterfront the quayside was milling with people, full of a party spirit as if this were a picnic or a holiday.

  ‘Silas has got them past the Skerries. It would take a proper fool to lose them now,’ Ganting said as he scanned the inlet.

  Haraldsen shielded his eyes against the bright sun and peered at the fjord. Elsebeth did the same. It looked for all the world as if a pack of nautical sheepdogs was herding a flock of black, gleaming bodies through the low grey sea towards the narrow
strip of sand between the quay and the Lundi Cliffs. The school stretched a good two hundred metres across, fins cutting through the waves as the pilot whales bobbed up and down, retreating from the oncoming craft. Sometimes one would turn and try to head for the open sea. But the men on the boats were lifting and dropping their stones on ropes, some lobbing rocks too. The racket and the threat of violence soon deterred them. That and leaving the supposed safety of the pod.

  ‘There are young ones,’ Elsebeth said, a little worried. ‘Must they all die?’

  Ganting seemed puzzled by the question.

  ‘They live as a family. They perish as a family. How else? If any manages to escape it’s our duty to chase it down and kill the creature as gently as we can. Better than to leave it wandering the open seas alone, only to starve and beach itself on rocks somewhere. You are town people. Perhaps you don’t understand. This is a harvest. We kill with kindness. But we kill. We kill them all. No man or woman can live in a place like Djevulsfjord unless they take a life from time to time.’

  He hesitated then turned to Haraldsen.

  ‘On which subject I must say something. Please excuse my frankness. It is a fault of mine, I know.’

  ‘No,’ Haraldsen replied. ‘You must speak your mind.’

  ‘It concerns those sheep you’ve been sold without full knowledge of their upkeep. That building at the back of your cottage. You know what it is?’

  ‘Ja,’ Haraldsen told him. ‘An abattoir. Though principally I use it as a shed …’

  ‘The fact we have an abattoir does not mean we must slaughter things in it!’ Elsebeth intervened. ‘We moved here for peace and silence—’

  ‘Some beast of yours must be slaughtered for winter mutton,’ Ganting interrupted. ‘If sheep were never killed there’d be no point in keeping them, now would there? Besides if you don’t take them soon the little things become too old and the best you can hope for is fat and gristle, scarce fit to eat. Sheep are not pets. Not for us. You do the creatures no favour to treat them as such.’