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mild—the cattle stayed out in the fields all winter, for one thing, as there was no snow—but in the spring skraelings came in fleets of canoes, waving staves that made a great whistling noise, and they came with many, many skins, anxious to trade, especially for red cloths, and as always with skraelings, the Norsemen could cut the cloth into smaller and smaller pieces, but the skraelings would trade as much for the small as for the large. And then Karlsefni’s bull came out of the woods and bellowed, and the skraelings ran off in terror.
    The Norsemen laughed at the ignorance of these demons, but, Osmund said, they were not laughing so heartily when the skraelings returned three days later, and in greater numbers—numbers so great that the water was black with their boats, and this time they were waving their staves in the other direction, and they stormed upon the land and attacked, and they had so many and such strange weapons, and they knew so well how to use them, that the Norsemen took to their heels this time, and, Osmund reminded Thorleif, this was in early days, when iron wasn’t so scarce, and all men carried axes and swords and shields, as well.
    There was with the party a woman named Freydis, who was the daughter of Erik the Red and the sister of Leif the Lucky, and she had been resting in her booth. When she heard the commotion, it was said, she came out of the booth and shouted her contempt after the fleeing Norsemen, but they did not turn to aid her, so she made her way after them, though she was with child and feeling poorly. The skraelings pursued her. But the fact was that she happened upon the corpus of one of the Norsemen, and she grabbed the sword from his hand and turned. The skraelings were nearly upon her, but she pulled the front of her gown back from her breasts, and beat the flat of the sword upon her chest, yelling all the while, and the skraelings were frightened by this display, and fled.
    Thorleif found this tale very diverting.
    “The case is,” said Osmund, “that Greenlanders have been back and forth to Markland time and again since then, and the skraelings in Markland have always been just as numerous and unpredictable as they were in the beginning, and the Greenlanders have been steadily less numerous and less well armed, so it is not a land that Greenlanders feel at home in, though it is a more welcoming land than their home.”
    Now Hauk Gunnarsson spoke up, and said that the skraelings in the waste parts of Greenland were not so fierce nor so strange as these Markland skraelings, and by this time it was late, and so the party of travelers rolled up in their furs and slept.
    The next night, Osmund Thordarson spoke up again, and said, “Indeed, Markland is rich enough, though dark withal. And we have found what we sought here.”
    The men greeted this remark with silence.
    Osmund went on. “But few folk have seen such a land as Vinland, which lies to the south.”
    “Even so,” said Thorleif, “I can see far enough. Small islands, narrow straits, and upthrusting rocks make for bad sailing.”
    The men continued silent, sleepy with their meat.
    Now Erlend Ketilsson sat up and leaned forward in the firelight. “It seems to me that this Norwegian has come by a great deal of praise in this past year. What a fine man, what a fine ship, what a lot of goods he has brought us.” He fell silent, and some of the Greenlanders set their bowls beside them on the sand. “Mostly, though, folk chatter about what a fine sailor the fellow is, how he might sail through the eye of a Nuremburg needle if he wished. Now this Thorleif sits back and eats up this praise like sourmilk with berries in it.”
    There was a long pause, when all of the men, Norwegians and Greenlanders alike, were silent, and the silence was filled with the dark sounds of the great Markland forest, and then Thorleif laughed in his usual way, but loudly, and so suddenly that men started in their places. But he made no reply