pain, but I did not know the Öræfi region well then, I had only just started working at the vet’s office, he must feel the way other men do but just does not like to show it, not in front of others nor to himself. One time, up in the mountains, a fox bit Flosi on the thumb and would not let go. Flosi strangled the fox with his free hand and walked for a whole day with the dead fox dangling on his thumb. He grew tired of the carcass by nightfall so cut the head off the fox and slept like that through the night; the next day he finally gave up on the head, cutting off his thumb with a pocket knife at the breakfast table. Muggur from Bólti was at the meeting, a hot-tempered fellow, gruff, someone with whom few dared speak, neither at the meeting at the hotel in Freysnes nor outside, old Muggur is broad-shouldered and repulsive, with a glowering face and a paltry scraggle of toothbrush beard, eyes like ball-bearings, loud-mouthed, impulsive, he once got struck by lightning when he was laying telephone lines across Skeiðarársandur, he fell screaming down from the pole, some eighteen feet; he simply got up unharmed, but steam rose up off him, however, and his fellow workers’ eyes smarted; they noticed he smelled like a grill, and that gave them hunger pangs. At seventy years old he took a charging bull in a chokehold and flipped it over, a bull which had gored three teenagers and done some serious damage, Muggur held the beast down and stuck a lynch-pin through its nostril and fastened it to the back of the tractor and dragged it home to his house; the bull has been tame ever since, friendly, even.
In Öræfi the weather can be awful, Dr. Lassi’s report says, everything gets blown away, things which people in other parts of the country would never imagine could blow away. During a great sandstorm rocks fly about and then a boulder flings through the air and shatters everything in its path. One time, the fresh haybales were being protected from the weather, tied onto a truck so they would not blow away; that night, the truck was blown on top of the haystack, which was lying under it like a squashed cranefly when the men came out to the farmyard the next morning. Not long ago, a tractor was blown out of the farmyard in Svínafell and flew over the nearby houses. In Svínafell there was a church once; that got blown away. A new church was built but it flew away, too, so people stopped bothering to have a church in Svínafell. Here in Öræfi, cars blow off the road like empty plastic bags; bus windows explode in a hail of rocks and the lacerated tourists on board freeze to death, perishing in large numbers; afterward, a new highway gets unrolled like a licorice curl, slung across the sand. One time, the farmers clubbed together; they were getting tired of visitors to the region constantly being killed by the slightest gust, so they flew to Germany and bought a tank from the military and transported it back to Öræfi; the tank is a tremendous, heavy vehicle which proves successful when it’s necessary to go out onto the sand in bad weather to collect trapped people. At first, the Öræfings simply used the tank as a school bus, but Runki from Destrikt had once been on a course with the Regional Rescue team and decreed that the tank could only be used in storms, whether for transporting children from school, fetching old people from a crumpled bus, or bringing dead tourists to the Visitor Center. Runki from Destrikt is not from these parts and his mentality is very different from the Öræfings: an uneasy man, he took the tank under his command, saying it seemed like the Öræfings wanted to use the tank in mild weather to drive sheep to pasture or kids to school, to cruise around, count birds, survey the sand … at the time Runki invited everyone to a summit at the hotel in Freysnes, wanting to establish a special regional rescue force with the tank at its heart. There was certainly a need, the countryside was full of tourists run amok, ever since the river, Skeiðará, was bridged once the National Park was established at Skaftafell, something he considered entirely outrageous … a National Park! Instead of utilizing the country, Runki from Destrikt said at that meeting, Dr. Lassi wrote in the report, everything these days gets protected, he said, are they going to protect foxes next!? Minks!? Today, farmers can’t think about cattle or agriculture, they’re always having to deal with tourists, the tourists want to camp in the hayfields, they want to go horse riding, they want to poke around the farm, they want to birth a lamb, they want to drive a tractor, they want to make hay, they want to stay on the farm, they want to eat lamb for dinner, to eat with the family, to experience a real country atmosphere, coffee and toast in the morning, helping with farm chores; they start driving after us, they ideally want to become the farmer himself during their damn vacations! And, of course, they get in the way! I never get any peace, said Runki, you can’t move without a busload of tourists taking your picture, whether you’re mowing a field or pissing against a wall, better to have sheep in Skaftafell rather than these tourists who trample all over everything, that way the national park would be protected because this nation lives on sheep, at one time there were herds on the slopes and now tourists go walking with their worthless currency in all directions! … (they all had to think a bit to understand this last assertion) … you cannot survive on beauty alone; if anything defines beauty, it’s livestock on a mountain.
The old farmers, Flosi from Svínafell and Muggur from Bölti and Jakob from Jökulfell, had all of a sudden become Tourist Service Farmers and Regional Rescue members and had ill accepted their lot. They tootled about the beach and slopes in the tank and herded sheep, no matter what Runki said. Öræfings are used to heavy vehicles; during World War Two all kinds of powerful off-road vehicles came into being (nothing advances technology better than war); pictures of this apparatus appeared in newspapers and magazines and some of them spread east into Öræfi, which gave rise to the idea that it might be possible to get such a vehicle to Skeiðarársand, the most rugged place in all the Nordic countries. A debate took place and a parliamentary resolution was agreed; a large barge with caterpillar tracks was brought in and transported east over the sands. This astonishing machine was christened Water Dragon, a name soon simplified to the Dragon; it puttered across rivers and was able to ferry large commodities, implements, and building materials. Afloat, the belts functioned like oars, but it was difficult to control, taking considerable practice to master the Dragon. In the wake of this, Jón from Austurbær brought the first car to the region and, taking his lead from the Dragon, he placed empty barrels under the car and floated it across the river. The Dragon reigned over the beach in the years after the war until modernity arrived in the form of bridges, killing off culture entirely. The Dragon got worn down traversing the sand and was costly to run; it did not provide public transportation and was chiefly used to search for the treasure ship that was supposedly somewhere on the sands.
The Tvísker Brothers came to the meeting at Freysnes—Hálfdán, Helgi, Sigurður, and Flosi—even though they didn’t own cattle and aren’t farmers but self-taught scientists; they were planning to use their trip to collect insects, count birds, observe plants, and measure the glacier. Hálfdán is a naturalist, Helgi an inventor, Sigurður a scholar, and Flosi a glaciologist. Then there was Fippi from Núpsstaður, crossing Skeiðarársand in his old Willis, made in 1953, an SUV that has lasted half a century because it doesn’t have a computer in it, Dr. Lassi wrote, computers have destroyed modern cars, every year brings ever greater luxury and ever more junk.
Some claimed the wild herd belonged to Fippi from Núpsstaður, who welcomed the damage to the National Park, that these were the notorious wild sheep from Núpsstaðurskógar’s forests. Fippi wasn’t inclined to respond, having told people a thousand times already that the whole herd population was annihilated in a blizzard from the north and by blinding weather and by falling from the cliffs above the farm; they were all killed at once in the late nineteenth century. These days, a great flood of travelers can be found about the farmyards of Núpsstaður, with tourists wandering off in all directions and popping up at the windows. People come to see the old houses and the chapel dating back to the sixteenth century and the hundred-year-old hermit Filippus Hannesson, the son of the rural mailman Hannes Jónsson; tourism has transformed him into a museum exhibit. Fippi felt he couldn’t refuse to go on the round-up; you never know where you stand with a wild beast, he said, sarcastically, though it’s probably not a wild beast after all, but a very everyday animal. The wild Núpsstaðarskógar herds were quite special, a highly evolved stock, the report continued, they would stay out grazing in the mountain woods the whole year round, and were on the glacier, too, for centuries, perhaps as far back as the Settlement—there were rarely humans about and the animals lived their lives undisturbed in the wilderness, growing fat, sizeable animals yet less well-built than other sheep, because their organs never grew larger than standard lambs’ organs; they were noticeably long-legged, typically multi-colored, mottled, thick-necked