the hills, hampered by his wounded foot, he had no idea how far he had come from Toftefjord, and before he expected it he found himself facing the sea again. Below him on the shore there were some houses and a jetty, and from Eskeland’s description he recognised the shop. He had crossed the island already. He remembered that the shopkeeper had a boat, and he thought of trying to steal it. But the water in front of him was wide and clear, and the Germans would be over the hill behind him at any moment. He knew he could not get out of sight in a boat before they came.
He went on, down to the shore a little way from the jetty. There at least was a narrow strip of beach which was free of snow, and he could walk along it, slowly and painfully, without leaving any tracks at all. He turned to the left, away from the shop, back towards Toftefjord. He felt intolerably lonely.
There were two little haysheds by the shore. He wanted to creep into one and hide there and burrow in the hay and get warm and go to sleep. They were obvious hiding places. But even as he began to think of it, he knew they were too obvious. They were isolated. He pictured himself hidden there in the dark, hearing the Germans coming along the beach, and their expectant shouts when they saw the sheds, and himself trapped in there while they surrounded him. The very uselessness of the haysheds impressed upon him that there really was no hiding place for him in that dreadful island. If he stayed on the island, wherever he hid he would be found.
As he scrambled along the beach he was coming nearer, though he did not know it, to the sound which Eskeland and the others had passed through on their way to the shop. It is called Vargesund, and it is full of rocks, in contrast to the wide open waters to the north and south. The largest of the rocks is about half an acre in extent. As soon as Jan saw this little island, he knew what he had to do, and for the first time he saw a gleam of hope. He hurried to the edge of the water, and waded in, and began to swim again.
It was only fifty yards to the rock, and in spite of his clothes and his pistol and his one sea-boot, he had no difficulty in swimming across. But when he dragged himself out of the mixture of ice and water, and climbed over to the far side of the rock, the effect of this second swim began to tell on him. He had to begin to reckon with the prospect of freezing to death.
There was a minute patch of peat on top of the islet, and someone had been cutting it. He got down below the peatbank and started to do exercises, keeping an eye on the hills of the main island. His bare foot was quite numb, although running had made an unpleasant mess of the raw end of his toe. He took off his sea-boot and moved his one sock from his left foot to his right. It seemed a good idea to have a boot on one foot and a sock on the other. He stamped his feet, crouching down below the bank, to start the circulation and try to ward off frostbite.
It was only a very short time before the Germans came in sight, and for the next two hours he watched them, at first with apprehension, and then with a growing sense of his own advantage. They came slowly, in straggling line abreast, pausing to challenge every stone, with a medley of shouts and orders and counter-orders; and Jan, watching them critically in the light of his own field training, remembered one of the many things he had been told and had only half believed: that the garrisons of that remote part of Norway were low-grade troops whose morale was softened by isolation and long inactivity. Gradually, as he watched their fumbling search, he began to despise them, and to recognise beneath that formidable uniform the signs of fallibility and even fear. They were probably clerks and cooks and batmen, dragged out unwillingly at a moment’s notice from comfortable headquarters billets in the town. He could guess very well what they would think of having to hunt a desperate armed bandit among ice and rocks and snow.
It was dusk when the first party of them came along the beach, but he could see them clearly because they were using torches which they flashed into dark crevices. They passed his island without a glance behind them out to sea. So far, it seemed not to have crossed their minds that he might have swum away.
When it was dark, the confusion increased. They were scattered in small groups all over the hills. Each group was signalling to others with its torches. Men were shouting their own names, afraid that their friends would mistake them for the bandit. Now and then a single shot echoed from hill to hill. That could only mean that nervous men were firing at fancied movements in the dark. Slowly it dawned on Jan, with a feeling of instense elation which gave him new strength and courage, that for all their numbers, they were afraid of him.
That opportunity to study the German army at its worst was worth months of military training, because after it he never again had the slightest doubt that he could outwit them till the end.
At the same time, he was becoming more aware of the dangers of his natural surroundings. A human enemy, however relentless and malevolent he may be, has human weaknesses; but nobody can trifle with the Arctic. In immediate terms, Jan knew that if he stayed where he was in his wet clothes, he would be dead before the morning.
Of course, there was only one alternative: to swim again. He could swim back to Ribbenesöy, among the Germans, or he might conceivably swim across the sound, to Hersöy, the next island to the eastward. One way or the other, he had to find a house where he could go in and get dry and warm. He had only seen two houses on Ribbenesöy, the shopkeeper’s and the one in Toftefjord, and both of them were out of the question. He knew from the chart that there were others farther west, but by that time they were probably full of Germans. Across the sound, on Hersöy, he had seen a single lonely house, but he had no idea who lived there.
He looked at Vargesund, and wondered if it was possible. In fact, it is 220 yards across, but it was difficult for him to guess its width in the darkness. The far shore was only a shadow between the shining water and the shining hills. The surface of the sound was broken here and there by eddies: the tide had begun to set. In health and strength he could easily swim the distance; but he could not judge the effects of the tide and the cold and his own exhaustion. He stood for a long time before he made up his mind. He did not want to die either way, but to drown seemed better than to freeze. He took a last look behind him at the flashing torches of the soldiers, and stumbled down the rocks and waded in and launched himself into the sea again.
It is a mercy that the ultimate extremes of physical distress often get blurred in memory. Jan hardly remembered anything of that third and longest swim, excepting an agony of cramp, and excepting the dreadful belief that he was just about to die; an experience most people encounter once or twice in a lifetime, but one he had had to face so many times on that single day. It was after he had given up any conscious struggle, and admitted his defeat, and was ready to welcome his release from pain, that some chance eddy swept him ashore on the farther side and rolled his limp body among the stones, and left him lying there on his face, groaning and twisted with cramp, and not able to move or to think of moving.
Seconds or minutes later, in the mists of half-consciousness, there were voices. There were footsteps on the beach, and the clink of stones turning. He wondered with a mild curiosity whether the words he could hear were German or Norwegian, and from somewhere outside himself he looked down with pity on the man who lay beaten on the shore and the people who approached him; because if they were German, the man was too weak to get away. But slowly his dim enfeebled brain began to accept a fact which was unforeseen and strange on that day of death and violence. They were children’s voices. There were children, coming along the beach and chattering in Norwegian. And suddenly they stopped, and he knew they had seen him.
He lifted his head, and there they were, two little girls, holding hands, wide-eyed with horror, too frightened to run away. He smiled and said: “Hullo. You needn’t be afraid.” He managed to turn round and sit up. “I’ve had an accident,” he said. “I do wish you could help me.” They did not answer, but he saw them relax a little, and he realised that when they had seen him, they had thought that he was dead.
Jan loved children; he had looked after his own young brother and sister after his mother died. Perhaps nothing in the world could have given him strength of mind just then, except
