while before landing on the ice. They approached the cat cautiously, as if suspecting a trap. Then they started eating.
Life and death, he thought. My life, my death, my tins of American meat. The life and death of the cat, eagles on an endless expanse of ice.
He added more wood to the fire, stuck his feet into the rucksack and tried once again to think calmly. When he got up it had turned noon. He kicked snow over the fire, divided the contents of the rucksacks so that he could leave one and take the other with him.
The eagles were gone. All that remained of the cat was a dark patch of frozen blood.
CHAPTER 95
He approached the cottage from the inlet where the boat was, paused uneasily behind a rock and observed the scene. The cottage door was closed, thin smoke drifted up from the chimney.
He would wait for one minute. He would give himself a minute in which to have second thoughts. Even if he had run out of food he would still have enough energy to walk as far as Harstena where the biggest fishing village in the archipelago was. He could still turn back.
I'll leave, he thought. I'll walk back over the ice. Sara Fredrika has nothing to do with my life. I am risking something I do not want to lose.
He set off towards the inlet, then turned on his heel, marched up to the cottage and hammered on the door. She did not open it. But he was only going to knock that one time. He stepped back a pace, so that she would be able to see him from the window.
When she opened the door wide, not just a few centimetres, he knew she had seen him.
'You,' she said. 'Are you here?'
She did not wait for a response but let him in. The room was empty, he could sense that he had the upper hand. She had hidden the stranger in the cupboard with the nets and barrels and decoys. He could smell something unusual, old engine oil perhaps, or rifle grease. He squatted by the fire and warmed his hands.
He had prepared his story carefully. It is easier in a desolate winter landscape than in cities, he had thought. It is more difficult to check the truth in the outer archipelago.
Everything depended on the open channel.
He had once met a petty officer in Karlskrona who had been bosun on the Svensksund. In the summer of 1896 the Swedish hot-air balloon expedition to the North Pole led by the engineer Salomon Andrée had set off for Spetsbergen on board that ship. It had been fitted with reinforced bows so as to be able to sail through iced-over water and even force its way through pack ice. That was almost twenty years ago, nobody had ever heard a thing from the three ballooners who vanished in the fog over the Arctic Ocean.
They talked about the expedition and about the ice and its mysterious qualities. The bosun had described how ice could suddenly crack, forming enormous open channels for no apparent reason. The crack appears out of the blue. The ice seemed to carry a secret inside itself. The bosun claimed that the Eskimos call it 'the frozen soul'. As recently as 1893 seven Swedish seal-hunters had been marooned on an ice floe by a gigantic crack that had made it impossible for them to get back to land. The only one to survive, a farmer from the island of Öland, had told the bosun that the ice was thick and there was no wind when the seven of them had set off. Suddenly the hunters heard a roaring sound, the ice cracked and the sea rose up like the back of a gigantic whale and they were unable to turn back. They were doomed, the open channel grew longer and wider, and he was the only one to survive, albeit having lost both feet to frostbite; the only one who could tell the tale of that sudden crack.
The ice was alive, it was not to be trusted.
Tobiasson-Svartman now told Sara Fredrika that he had been one of a party of eight that had set out from the mainland to make holes through the ice and check some of the soundings made last autumn. Just on the other side of Kråkmarö but before coming to the outer skerries, maybe Lökskär or Tyskärsarkipelagen, he had left the others to reconnoitre. The ice had cracked and he had