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Skrælings, so while one boat finished off the whale and lumbered toward shore with it, the other boat put itself between the Skrælings and the whale. They shadowed each other into shore where all three vessels were pulled onto the rocks and the whale was secured. The Skrælings ran toward them, brandishing spears and yelling. There were only three, so five of the men ran out to meet them. A hand-to-hand fight took place with knives and clubs. One of the Skrælings was killed by a stab wound to the chest. The other two then ran back to their boat and paddled away.
    “They ran away!” the men boasted, proud that they had defended themselves and their catch successfully this time. “And left their dead brother to be eaten by bears.”
    “Heathen dogs,” Bjarni chuckled. He was still excited by the day’s events.
    During the course of harvesting the whale flesh, they were surprised at the discovery of a broken-off harpoon tip embedded in the whale’s side. It was a Skræling harpoon made of bone, not iron like their own. The hunters grew less boastful after that, understanding that the first blow landed on this whale had not been Halvard’s after all.
    The villagers went to their chapel and gave thanks to God for providing food and asked for protection from the Skræling devils.
    Asa said a special prayer for her unborn child, that he or she would not live in suffering. What she meant by that, she didn’t allow her imagination to pursue.

Chapter Seven
     
    Kelly stumbled again and went down, landing on two hands and a knee. She lowered herself to rest on the rock she’d tripped on. Her legs were wearing out. The few miles between their break spot and town belied the difficulty of the journey. Without finding the official trail, she was left to scramble over loose rocks, climb steep hills and skirt dozens of lakes. She had ended up having to backtrack for an entire mile at one point because the route she had chosen dead-ended at an impassable fjord. Now she was a quarter mile into crossing a low area that had seemed like an easy path when she’d chosen it. But it had been a mistake. It was a bog. Her boots were soaked through. Her legs were splattered with mud up to her knees.
    If it was winter, she thought, my feet would freeze and fall off . But it wasn’t winter. What would she be doing here in winter anyway? She shook her head, realizing she was having trouble staying focused.
    She again conjured up the image of the coconut bunny cake and tried to remember if she had gotten her first bicycle for that birthday. Or was it Christmas? Her memories from that early age were too sketchy. She began to realize that she couldn’t really even remember the bunny cake itself. The clear memory she had of it wasn’t a memory of the actual cake at all. It was the memory of a photograph taken that day. In the photo, she sat on a booster seat at the kitchen table, wearing a pastel yellow dress with a yellow ribbon in her hair, her eyes wide with the prospect of the amazing cake. Her mother faced the camera, standing beside her with the most wonderfully happy expression on her face. That was why she loved that photograph so much. It was because of her mother’s beaming smile. That sort of happiness had gone out of reach for her later, in times Kelly remembered much better. But the photo proved it had once been possible.
    Photography was a kind of magic. Some aboriginals wouldn’t allow themselves to be photographed because they thought the image would steal their souls. Remembering that photo of her mother, Kelly could see how one could imagine it had stolen something from her. Because there it was in the photo, a joyful vitality in her eyes that had gone out in later years. But the magic of a photo wasn’t that it stole your soul. It was that it stopped time.
    In those days, her mother had dutifully put the photos in albums in chronological order. Like everyone’s albums, the pictures were of special occasions—holidays,