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of it for themselves. This is Hans’s idea. They use it in their
own duvets like the genteel folk in towns, or they store it in
the driest loft above the barn, until prices pick up and they
can sell it for twice as much as they get on the market in
the summertime, or from Tommesen at Bruket, since the
price of down is lowest when people want to sell and
highest when only Hans wants to sell. He is the sole
islander to have any success with this policy. This may be
because the Barrøy islanders are a tiny bit better off than
others, as Hans has a full catch share in Lofoten, but it
might also be due to his family being more patient.
Islanders need to be more patient than other people.
Barbro doesn’t like carding down, her hands are not nimble
enough, so from the summer when she turned four Ingrid
had to pitch in and help her mother. Ingrid loves down, at
first she just wants to play with it, and makes a mess on the
tiny bench where they are sitting. But then she discovers
that if you hold a ball of uncarded down in one hand and a
ball of carded down in the other you can’t abide the
thought of not cleaning it all, it would drive you mad if you
didn’t remove the twigs and the grass and the small bits of
shell, it is so awful.
It was her mother who made her aware of this. She tells her
to sit still with her eyes closed and feel the two fistfuls of
down, one carded and one uncarded, while she counts
aloud and only gets to ten or eleven before she sees from
her daughter’s smile that she has realised what this is all