The White Wolf | Page 2

untended, but stiff with rime; and drawing
yet nearer, they saw an ice-line about her hull, so deep that her timbers
seemed bitten through, and a great pile of frozen snow upon her poop,
banked even above her tiller; but no helmsman, and no living soul upon
her.
Then Snorri let lower his boat, and was rowed towards her; and,
coming alongside, gave a hail, which was unanswered. But from the
frozen pile by the tiller there stuck out a man's arm, ghastly to see.
Snorri climbed on board by the waist, where her sides were low and a

well reached aft from the mast to the poop. There was a cabin beneath
the poop, and another and larger room under the deck forward, between
the step of the mast and the bows. Into each of these he broke with axes
and bars, and in the one found nothing but some cooking-pots and
bedding; but in the other--that is, the after-cabin--the door, as he burst it
in, almost fell against a young man seated by a bed. So life-like was he
that Snorri called aloud in the doorway, but anon, peering into the
gloomy place, perceived the body to be frozen upright and stiff, and
that on the bed lay another body, of a lady slight and young, and very
fair. She, too, was dead and frozen; yet her cheeks, albeit white as the
pillow against which they rested, had not lost their roundness. Snorri
took note also of her dress and of the coverlet reaching from the bed's
foot to her waist, that they were of silk for the most part, and richly
embroidered, and her shift and the bed-sheets about her of fine linen.
The man's dress was poor and coarse by comparison; yet he carried a
sword, and was plainly of gentle nurture. The sword Snorri drew from
its sheath and brought away; also he took a small box of jewels; but
little else could he find on the ship, and no food of any kind.
His design was to leave the ship as he found it, carrying away only
these tokens that his story, when he arrived at Brattahlid, might be
received with faith; and to direct where the ship might be sought for.
But as he quitted the cabin some of his men shouted from the deck,
where they had discovered yet another body frozen in a drift. This was
an old man seated with crossed legs and leaning against the mast,
having an ink-horn slung about his neck, and almost hidden by his grey
beard, and on his knee a book, which he held with a thumb frozen
between two pages.
This was the book which Snorri had brought to Brattahlid, and which
the Bishop of Garda read aloud to him that same afternoon, translating
as he went; the ink being fresh, the writing clerkly, and scarcely a page
damaged by the weather. It bore no title; but the Bishop, who
afterwards caused his secretary to take a copy of the tale, gave it a very
long one, beginning: "God's mercy shown in a Miracle upon certain
castaways from Jutland, at the Feast of the Nativity of His Blessed Son,
our Lord, in the year MCCCLVII., whereby He made dead trees to put

forth in leaf, and comforted desperate men with summer in the midst of
the Frozen Sea" . . . with much beside. But all this appears in the tale,
which I will head only with the name of the writer.

II.--PETER KURT'S MANUSCRIPT [1]
Now that our troubles are over, and I sit by the mast of our late
unhappy ship, not knowing if I am on earth or in paradise, but full-fed
and warm in all my limbs, yea pierced and glowing with the love of
Almighty God, I am resolved to take pen and use my unfrozen ink in
telling out of what misery His hand hath led us to this present Eden.
I who write this am Peter Kurt, and I was the steward of my master
Ebbe while he dwelt in his own castle of Nebbegaard. Poor he was then,
and poor, I suppose, he is still in all but love and the favour of God; but
in those days the love was but an old servant's (to wit, my own), and
the favour of God not evident, but the poverty, on the other hand,
bitterly apparent in all our housekeeping. We lived alone, with a
handful of servants--sometimes as few as three--in the castle which
stands between the sandhills and the woods, as you sail into Veile Fiord.
All these woods, as far away as to Rosenvold, had been the good knight
his father's, but were lost to us before Ebbe's birth, and leased on
pledge to