Free The Day is Dark by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir Page A

Thóra wondered for a moment whether she should be lazy and lag behind, but she pushed away the thought. They would all have to contribute.
    The hunter Igimaq watched the four people emerge from the big building. Three females and one male, all dressed in colourful outdoor clothing that contrasted with the environment. Despite their thick clothing and their distance from him, the man realized at the same moment that all the women were too tall for his taste, and two of them too thin. The man was no good either: he was scrawny and weak-looking, though he was not exactly a runt. It was like that with all Westerners. Their worship of skinny physiques was the best example of how they had broken all ties with nature. Despite their winter clothing, those three women would freeze to death in no time if they were forced to fend for themselves without the food and shelter they took for granted. They probably ate meat, but would puke if he took them hunting and showed them how such food was acquired. That was in the unlikely event that he would manage to catch anything with them or their ilk tagging along. They couldn’t even see him right now, even though he did nothing to conceal himself. He simply stood still and allowed the blowing snow to play about his warmly dressed body. His hood shielded his eyes, but he still had to squint from time to time in the strongest gusts. He watched them walk over to the other big building, where others were standing, from the look of them two men and a woman. They spoke together briefly, but he could not make out the words and would not have understood them anyway. He did understand Danish, although he had difficulty expressing himself in that language; not because he didn’t know the words, but rather because they were not sufficiently descriptive for what lay in his heart. It was a language that had developed under different circumstances than Greenlandic, based on an easier struggle for life and different values. The faint sound of the people’s conversation died out and he watched the group enter the building. Shortly afterwards, one light after another went on inside it. He continued to stand there, expressionless, though he felt uneasy. This couldn’t end well.
    Igimaq turned and walked away. It was useless to stand here any longer; he had heard the helicopter and wanted to find out whether those it carried were on their way to this area. It was bad, but following every single movement of the newcomers wouldn’t help. Although they were defenceless out in the open, they were on their home field indoors. In any case he could change nothing, any more than he could anything else in this life; things went their own way and providence was often unreadable and illogical. No one knew that better than him. More than ever it seemed to him that trying to grasp what mattered most to human beings was like grabbing at sunbeams; they disappeared at the same time as one was still enjoying them, and one could never get a grip on them. Similarly, whatever a man loved always disappeared; he would come to possess something only to lose it later. The hunter had hardened his heart regarding all the things that had disappeared from his life over the years, and thankfully he had largely succeeded; he was even starting to feel the same about the family he’d lost. Perhaps he had already succeeded there, too. Igimaq could not be sure, because the thought of his family’s fate was so difficult for him to bear that he had refused to allow himself to think about anything since the time just before it happened. Had he been left in peace, this would have worked; until just recently, his mind had never turned to the woman he had loved and lost, and very rarely had he given a thought to the daughter and son who had also gone from him.
    The hunter grimaced at the broad expanse of ice and snow. These outsiders and those who had come before had torn open an old wound. Triggered memories of a son who had awakened in him