Independent People by Halldor Laxness

BJARTUR of Summerhouses knew better than most people all those nooks and crannies of the far mountain pastures where sheep are still to be found after the last of the round-ups. It was on the eastern slopes of this extensive moorland plateau that he had spent his childhood, on its western border that he had worked as a shepherd all the years of his youth, and in one of its valleys that he now lived as a freeholder, so he knew it from spring to the end of winter, in fragrance and the song of birds, in frost and silence, through innumerable journeys in search of the sheep that bound him so closely to it. But the high heath had also a value for this man other than the practical and the economic. It was his spiritual mother, his church, his better world, as the ocean must inevitably be to the seafarer. When he walked along over the moors on the clear, frosty days of late autumn, when he ran his eyes over the desert's pathless range and felt the cold clean breeze of the mountains on his face, then he too would prove the substance of patriotic song. He would feel himself exalted above the trivial, commonplace existence of the settlements and live in that wonderful consciousness of freedom that can be likened to nothing except perhaps the love of native land shown by sheep themselves, for they would die on their own mountains were they not driven back to the farmsteads by dogs. On such autumn journeys, when he walked from watercourse to watercourse, from crest to crest of the undulating tableland, as if his path lay through infinity itself, there was nothing to trouble the proud eye of the poet. Nothing nurtures the poet's gift so much as solitude on long mountain journeys. He could chew over the same words for hours on end till he had succeeded in beating them into verse. Here there was nothing to distract the mind from poetry. Today when he once more greeted his old friend the moorland breeze, he allowed no sentimental twinges about his parting from Rosa to delay him longer from enjoying the true freedom of the wastes. Nothing is so alluring in the autumn as to make off into the wilderness, away, away, for then the Blue Mountains gleam with a greater fascination than at any other time. The winged summer visitors of the moors have most of them flown, but the grouse has not yet left for the farms and remains to skim the frozen peat in low flight, gurgling much, blinking an inquisitive eye. Most of the ducks have flown down to the seashore, or to the warmer lakes near the coast, for the moorland tarns are frozen over and the rivers edged with ice. Occasional ravens may be seen flapping round, croaking horribly, and this may often be an ominous sign that a sheep, dying or dead, lies somewhere in the neighbourhood. On this occasion there was still very little snow, but where the ground was bare of turf it was covered with little flat cakes of ice. In one place a fox darted behind a hummock, and an hour or two later he crossed tie spoor of a number of reindeer in the snow.

Bjartur that day explored two valleys, in one of which he remembered sheltered slopes with ling on them, and in the other, evergreen swamps round a spring which kept the same temperature all the year round. But in neither place was there living creature to be seen, except a family of mallards in an open pool in the river flowing through the more southerly of the two valleys, just below the swamps. Evening was now falling and there was scarcely light enough left to search for sheep, so Bjartur headed for a place in the Blue Mountains where he knew of hospitable night quarters, intending also to search the mountains on the morrow, especially those to the south, where there are valleys in which the ground is warm and sheep have been known to live all through the winter without harm. Early in the evening the moon peeped over the horizon and swept first the moorland bluffs, then the valleys, with its blue light, making the dusty ice-flats shine like gold. The silence of the moors was perfect. In this silence, this light, this landscape, the man also was perfect in his harmony with the soul within him.