“What’ll happen to the lodge once the new house . . . the one hanging off the edge of a cliff . . . is completed?”
“Ah. Well, Tom wants to restore it,” Clive said. “But between you and me, I think the place is past it. Lots of damp and draft . . . Derry can’t stand it. Can you, darling?”
Derry shook her head. “It needs tearing down, made into a nice pasture. A vegetable patch, or something along those lines.” She threw me a look of grave concern. “You’ll know what I mean when you get there.”
We dropped Derry off outside a ferry port, where she said she was getting a ferry to Trondheim to work on a new college. She gathered her bags before getting out and flashed me a smile. “So sorry I’m heading off just as you’re arriving,” she said. “But I’ll be back in a few weeks. Good luck!”
We pulled off the motorway and took a road that gradually got narrower and less road-like by the mile. In more positive terms, the scenery got more and more intense, to the point where Clive rolled down the windows and encouraged me to stick my head out instead of pressing my nose against the glass in awe.
It was like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones all wrapped up and multiplied by a trillion. The road climbed steadily up the side of a shark-fin mountain range, so that we were driving along a stone ridge looking down over a fjord with postcard-blue water. A white dot moving through the middle of it turned out to be a cruise boat, but the water was so still that the boat looked like it was a zip being pulled up a sheet of turquoise velvet. On the other side of the gorge were black zigzags of rock speckled with snow, rich green fields, and gushing waterfalls crowned with rainbows. The clouds were so dramatic that I couldn’t decide where to look—the sky or the fjord—so I spent most of the journey with my neck craned out the window, nodding up and down.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Clive said. “That’s Hjørundfjord,” he said.
“Hjørund,” I repeated. I had the sense that Clive enjoyed knowing things and telling them to others. But I didn’t mind. I would remember Hjørundfjord for the rest of my life.
A red house came into view at the end of a long path through a forest of enormous fir trees. It looked like something straight out of a fairy tale, with a pitched black roof, a white-framed gable end, and a cute round window set against the pillar-box red, ivy trailing up one side, and a name, GRANHUS, spelled out in wood-carved letters above the front door. A dozen ravens circled the chimneys, their large wings fanned out like black sails. Beyond the house was a dense patch of hard hats carrying iron girders through the woods.
Suddenly some of the men came running up the hill toward us, looking back and waving their arms at Clive as though something had happened. Clive jumped out of the car. I wasn’t sure whether to stay put or follow. Overthinking this decision entirely, I slowly got out of the car and decided I’d tell him I needed the loo if he asked why I’d followed.
Six men—clearly Norwegian, given that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying—were all frantically shouting at Clive and pointing back at the patch of trees down the hill. It was clear Clive couldn’t understand them either, because he held up his hands and shouted, “I can’t understand any of you! English, please!”
One of the men stuck his hands at either side of his head, the palms facing forward and his fingers splayed.
“Moose?” Clive said, and the man nodded.
“Big moose.”
A few seconds later, we saw it—this huge, dark brown creature with a staggering set of antlers on his head, around five or six feet wide. The moose was both gigantic and irate. It walked slowly toward a wooden frame and butted it with its antlers.
Standing on a rock I could make out a handful of men near the moose, all of them with their hands up in surrender. One of them was waving something, evidently trying to get the thing to back away, but with the effect of making it more pissed off. Clive seemed to think the waving thing was a great idea, though, because he pulled off his jacket