Independent People by Halldor Laxness

THE SAME weather, no sign of improvement, ugly skies, frequent hail-showers. The whole croft stank with the putrid smell of maggoty dung, the worms were growing more virulent, the rattling cough of the ewes blended with the moaning of the cow. The maggots wriggled out of their nostrils and hung like threads from the matter about their noses; every morning one or more would be lying trodden in the muck, sometimes still faintly breathing, and he killed them, dragged them out to a turf grave, wiped his knife on the moss, swore. Twenty-five gone, all of his own rearing. He had known each one's pedigree, had been able to recognize every one of them from the day of its birth; a picture of each was graven on his mind as sharply as the features of any close friend, both appearance and personality. Beyond his memories of these animals he saw the passing of many seasons; he remembered them healthy and heavy-fleeced as they came down from the mountains on autumn days, proud of their frisky sons; he remembered them in the spring as they licked their lambs, new-born and helpless, in some green dingle. Each of them had had its own characteristics, its own temperament. He remembered minutely how each one's horns had been, tufted on one, grey-spotted on another, yellow-streaked on a third; one was as timid and as shrinking as the shyest maiden, another would spring impudently on to the walls or swim out into impassable rivers, a third liked to slink about in the gullies-and he had had to cut their throats. The worms had writhed out of their bleeding trunks, their lungs had been as riddled as rotten carrion. Hringja, Skella, Skessa, and the others-these creatures had been the mainspring of his existence and its strongest support. Twenty-five. Which will be next?

Heavy snow, not a chance of letting the sheep out to graze today, three ewes doomed to death this morning, Kupa, Laufa, Snura. Not a word spoken in the croft; the last of the hay broached; the cow had refused to stand on her feet. As day advanced, the intervals between showers grew shorter and shorter till once more a blizzard was raging. There was darkness on the little window, and the smoke blew down the chimney to add its discomfort to the stink of polluted dung from below; it was almost impossible to breathe.