The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.1942, Blaðsíða 26

22
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Broken Shackles
A FRAGMENT
By RAGNHILDUR GUTTORMSSON
Jon always says that that particular
July morning was the most important
day in his life. He says that all his
other Red Letter Days may be traced
back to that one.
He was sixteen years old then, the son
of the farmer at Holmar on the east
coast of Iceland, and he was watching
his father’s ewes beside the Salmon
River.
The day had started like so many
other days with fog, the distorting,
menacing fog that he hated. By the
time he got up to Giant Falls where
he meant to stay that morning, it had
lifted from the uplands and the moun-
tain tops showed through, tipped with
the gold of the morning sun. The low-
lands were still bathed in fog.
He took the saddle and bridle from
Goldmane, his pony, and turned him
loose to graze with the sheep, while he
and Snati sat down to watch the ewes
settle down to the business of filling
their stomachs with the bittersweet
herbage. _ Snati, alert, twitching his
pointed ears, watched his master, ready
to run at a moment’s notice to bring
back any stragglers to the flock.
In his pocket Jon had the mos'
wonderful book he had as yet read.
“Urania,” by Flammarion, had just been
translated into Icelandic, and it opened
unto his thirsting soul a world of
strange new wonders. In early child-
hood the stars had always filled him
with religious awe. They must be
treated with respect. For instance, you
must never point at a star! A star fall-
ing was a soul on its way to God.
“Somebody has died,” said Gunna, the
servant-maid, when a bright meteor
went flaming down the sky. But now
the reading of “Urania” made Jon feel
that the stars were his next-door neigh-
bors, but no less fascinating because
of that.
It also made him feel restless. He
longed to be one of the doers in the
world. His secret ambition was to get
to America and to go to college. He
knew he would never have a chance
to do that in Iceland, where even rural
schools were so few that he had had
no formal schooling at all; still, he was
well-informed; every year a travelling
tutor spent a month at his home teach-
ing him whatever could be crowded into
such a short period, and then he read
all the books he could get. The famous
old Sagas he knew almost by heart.
From them he had learned the three
cardinal virtues of a man: courage,
loyalty, honesty.
But today before he had even time
to open his book, he saw the eagle
soaring aloft in the sky. He had often
seen it before but it never failed to
excite his eager interest. The king of
the skies seemed to add to the grandeur
of the landscape, seemed a part of the
mountain scenery. Somehow Jon felt
akin to the eagle. To him it was the
symbol of his ambition: he too longed
to soar above “the common light of
day,” and to see with the keen, flashing
eyes of the eagle.
Now the great bird seemed to be
poised almost directly overhead, un-
doubtedly it was scanning the river for
salmon. Jon walked over to the river
and found himself on the brink of
Death Leap Gorge, the one thing in the
world that he really feared and hated.
Death Leap Gorge was a narrow cleft
in the rock, not more than twelve feet
wide, through which the mighty waters
of the Salmon River hurled themselves
in a thunderous greenish mass of un-
tamed energy that fell with deafening