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bears, the white bear is the most fur-clad, every inch of it covered except its nose and paw pads, and the fur is dense and soft. It has forty-two teeth, including long, sharp canines for piercing flesh. It eats meat but can also survive on berries and grasses if it has to. The white bear’s strength is legend. It is said it can kill with one swipe of its paw.
    I even wrote a white-bear poem. It began
    Ghost bear wanders, always alone;
    king of the north,
    dispensing death from his travelling throne.
    It was shortly after this effort that I decided I wouldn’t be a poet after all.

The day Rose came home with her finished cloak she seemed different, as though something had happened, something important. Neddy, too. They were both quiet, inside themselves. It didn’t seem to be a quarrel between them. I asked Rose if Widow Hautzig had been unkind or hurtful that day, but she said, “No worse than usual,” and then shook out her cloak to show me.
    I stared at the cloth, amazed. I was hardly able to fathom that my own Nyamh, my Rose, had created such a thing. It had more colour and inspiration than anything Widow Hautzig could even have dreamed.
    â€œYour wind rose,” I said.
    â€œYes, Father. I hope you do not mind that I copied it.”
    â€œOf course not. It is…” I faltered, suddenly realizing that the lie was there, too. Unknowing, Rose had woven the lie into her cloak.
    I began speaking again, expressing my admiration for her artistry. I think Rose sensed something, though, for I felt her puzzled glance on me several times as everyone gathered around to exclaim over the cloak. Eugenia prepared a special meal that night, scraping together what she could from our sparse larder, in honour of Rose’s accomplishment.
    I think that day, the day Rose brought home the cloak, was the last our family knew of happiness. She was almost fifteen years old then, but we had been suffering ill luck for a long time, since the year she was born. Occasionally the thought would cross my mind that our “luck” had been affected by the lie of Rose’s birth, but I would quickly berate myself for being as superstitious as Eugenia.
    I was not cut out to be a farmer. When we first moved from Bergen to the farm, we were fortunate, but when things went poorly, my decisions made them go still worse. By the autumn when Rose finished her cloak, we were barely scraping by and my children knew more of hunger than I could sometimes endure.
    One of the factors that had contributed mightily to our reversal of fortunes was the fact that Eugenia’s cousin, who had fallen on hard times of his own, had been forced to sell all his landholdings. Our farm had been purchased by a prosperous merchant who lived a distance away, in the city of Oslo. It was more than a month’s journey by horse to Oslo, and thus we never saw the merchant, nor even heard directly from him. All of our communications came by messenger from the merchant’s deputy, a man called Mogens. Our rent did not go up right away, but slowly, over time, it did rise, and eventually the rent was nearly equal to what we could produce, with very little left for us. Over the years our two eldest children left the farm. Nils Erlend set out for Danemark, where he hoped to make his way, and Selme Eva married an ironworker and moved with him to a village in Njord far distant from us. We rarely heard from either of them.
    The day after Rose brought home her cloak, we received a final blow. A letter arrived from Mogens saying that due to lack of payment of rent, we must vacate the farm in less than a month.
    Except for the cousin who had originally owned the farm and Eugenia’s sister, who had emigrated to Iseland after her husband deserted her, there was no one left alive in Eugenia’s family. We would not have considered burdening our two eldest children with the dire news, especially since neither of them were doing much more than