Tom looks from the river to Ragnar. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You can’t do it or you won’t do it?”
“Both,” Ragnar says with a grimace. He looks down at the small lick of water that trickles weakly over the stones in the groove of land that acts as a riverbed. “You have no permit from the environment agency.”
Tom shifts his feet. He hadn’t thought he’d need approval for something like this. “The what?”
“The Norwegian Environment Agency. They have to check the threats posed to the river from alteration.”
“Threats?” Tom says, folding his arms. “What kind of threats?”
“The river runs into the fjord; the fjord runs into the sea. The alteration might cause harmful substances to suddenly enter the ocean. We have big problems with sea lice in the fjords just now because of people like you. Wild salmon numbers falling. Genetic mixing. Big problem.” Tom bristles at people like you. “Wildlife will use this river as their water supply,” Ragnar continues, stepping to the other side of the river. “Wolves, bears, elk. They might be affected. One river we worked on had sixty-five different species using it on a daily basis. Sixty-five.”
“I’ve not spotted anything using the river,” Tom says, knowing as soon as he’s said it how petulant this sounds.
“They’ll be using it at night,” Ragnar says. “If you set up a night camera you’ll be surprised. Ecosystems are very sensitive to human interference.”
“How long does it take to get a permit from the environment agency?” Tom asks.
“Very big backlog. Problems with overdevelopment, you see. Lots of people like you building houses just now. I’d say . . . six or seven months.”
Tom can’t conceal his dismay. He thanks Ragnar for his time, says he’ll be in touch. Lies. Even as the man is getting into his car he’s thinking of how to do the job himself. He hasn’t got six or seven months. And the river is hardly Niagara Falls.
He relays this news to Aurelia, who is disappointed. Such is the dejection in her face that he tells her not to worry. He’ll do it himself.
The next morning he pulls on his wellies, thermal gloves, and Gore-Tex jacket and takes a spade, a flask of tea, and a wheelbarrow of concrete blocks to begin damming the river. It’s a mild, silvery morning, a white scarf of mist draped over the hills, the sun a splash of orange against mother-of-pearl sky. There are cataracted slabs of ice here and there, some of them several inches thick, but for the most part the river runs fresh and clean through the trough of pebbled earth carved out over millennia. The insistent movement of the river is startling, even touching, among so much stillness—the land’s vibrant pulse. No signs of any salmon, or fish of any kind. It’ll do no harm to divert it.
He sets about digging a new riverbed at a right angle from the river, trailing his spade all the way through the earth to the cliff. It takes him several hours. By the time he’s done he can barely lift his arms. But then the river begins to siphon off into its new bed, and he holds his breath, worried that it’ll suddenly seep into the earth. But as he begins to lay the stones across its old path the new river blooms like a strange new flower.
He gives a loud whoop of joy to see the river taking hold in the land, funneling away, undefeated, brilliant in its new life. He wonders if this is how women feel when they’ve given birth: a sense of awe at something that now lives because of you.
He sits on a tree stump to pour a cup of tea from his flask, triumphant and starving. How stupid not to accept Aurelia’s offer of a slice of lemon cake this morning; he is ravenous. The light is already fading. Even so he can make out the red blur of Granhus through the trees. Why on earth did the original owners build the house so far back from the cliff? Why not build it where the view is best? They would have to have moved the river, he thinks. As Ragnar said, the river’s probably been here for hundreds of years. He figures that the builders of that old house had had the same dilemma he faces now. To move the river or leave it be.
He finishes his tea, rinses out the cup in the water, and then gives in to a boyish