Original subtitles

Thank you.

What were you and my daddy talking about?

Children, your mother needs her sleep if she's going to get better.

Just let her listen to her music.

Come sit with Amma.

Have I ever told you the story of Einar the Lonely?

No?

And Snowfreezer, the beautiful young girl who was dying?

It all happened in a Gimli we no longer know.

Beneath the sod rooftops of that sleepy town was a...

A stirring at that hour stolen and kept by little girls.

Softly.

She can't be mine and I'm...

Thank you.

Thank you.

The patient, Gunnar was his name, was telling the nurses stories from the

sagas. He described for them the happy winter of the warm snow, the settlers'

only season of joy since landing on the shores of Lake Winnipeg one long ago,

October 21st.

He told them about Sigvalda Sigurdsdottir of Uwe district, a woman

scarves and mittens using wool carded from her own hair trimmings.

This, in her own wise way, she felt would bring luck to her ailing son,

Valdemar.

Valdemar had been a sickly lad from birth.

A fevered gallbladder made him absent -minded and prone to queer decisions.

With one of his puzzling pranks, he brought down upon his family a curse for

generations.

Then Gunnar told the nurses about the Thorvald's daughter sisters of

Long hours did these three spend together at work, rest, and play.

For nine years, they filled Fioreland with their promise, their scent,

and their song.

One day, they strayed deeply into the woods.

Too deeply, I fear, for it was a hungry summer.

and the week's past was neither the scent nor the song of the little girl.

Then came gliding down the river three tiny wooden coffins.

Reposed within were the sisters, still together,

drifting.

Were they dead?

Or were they merely sleeping in the quiet boxes?

by the water of the sad Icelandic river.

The night flower scent in the wood tells us that they live.

That they play tonight.

Play to the tolling of bells.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Now Envy is a terrible ogre, children, and Einar was fully in its jaws during

Gunnar's storytelling.

Later, the nurses returned to their chores, and Gunnar rested in bed, having

been tucked in by Elfa, Angel's daughter, beneath the woolen blanket.

In the following weeks, Einar's frustrations mounted.

A feeling that he was perhaps invisible was joined by a conviction that he must

be a mute as well.

He tried a new grooming strategy, growing a sideburn to match the fissure

cheek. But the gambit went completely unnoticed.

He tried to ingratiate himself with the nurses by doing their laundry chores.

But absolutely no one seemed to appreciate his sincere thoughtfulness.

He took up Gunnar's hobby of bark fish cutting and bark

fish appreciation.

But nothing changed Einar's painful status with the nurses.

A desperate attempt to match Gunnar's prowess as a storyteller gave Einar a

momentary cause for hope.

An account from his own childhood.

An example of his bravery.

But no.

The minstrel in the next bed had died.

The audience scattered forever, and the story was left untold.

Now, as you know, children, beneath every bed in New Iceland was a hole in

floor, leading to the manger below, where the heat would rise from the

keeping the sectors warm.

In that hole went the friendship of the two men.

For once Einar was to lend Gunnar his fishing shears, their relationship would

never be the same again.

On the

first

day of spring, I was looking for lucky stones.

When upon the beach, I found something else.

A strange pile.

Tangled in a fishnet with books and driftwood.

I was so curious.

I think we scared each other.

She was beautiful when she fled.

Soon I came calling.

Her name was Snowfeeder.

I don't think she liked me, but we spent a lot of time together.

I don't know why she... It was very nice of her.

We did favors for each other.

And I learned many new things.

The hours melted beneath her touch.

But one day, she noticed a mark.

And another.

We both knew it was the epidemic.

She brought me to the quarantine and tucked me in and led to me from the

For some reason, she made herself busy with me.

When my fever made me sad, she taught me.

The art of cutting, with her special scissors, a piece of bark

into the shape of a fish.

She was nice, but why did she do this?

She couldn't have anything better to do, because she started sleeping here too,

in that very bed you are in now, Einar.

Soon there was music in my ear, and there was to be a wedding.

Pastor Osbaldisson came from Sandy Bar to make the ceremony, standing up for me

was John Ramsey from Meekly Island.

I, of course, was still very sick, and the pastor would not cross the Icelandic

River for fear of the epidemic, so we had to shout our vows back and forth

across the water.

We could not hear the pastor very well, and I was too weak to shout.

So Snowfeeder said, I do, for me.

Back at the quarantine, John Ramsey and the nurses made a cozy little room for

our first evening together.

Thank you, nurses.

Thank you, John Ramsay, for watching over us on this special night.

who have a bird fish in my net.

It is a shameful thing that I have yet to tell anyone.

One night, near the Indian burial grounds, where I often

take a shortcut around the Willow Swamp, I heard a scary noise in the bushes.

It was the cracking of a fire.

I thought it was a new Indian funeral bed, so I looked closer.

I could tell from the painting on the bark wrapping that it was the body of a

young woman.

I don't know what made me do it, but no one was around, and I started to take

the tokens the dead are given for their journeys in the afterworld.

As I peeled away each layer of the birch bark, I found more and more tokens.

My head was very dizzy with the ebony moonbeams of that black night.

And Gunnar, I say it with shame, from that young girl that night,

I took much more than just tokens.

Einar, you did not let me finish my story.

To bury my bride.

upon the help of my good friend, John Ramsey.

He put us in his canoe.

She felt so alive in my arms and took us to the cemetery.

I was too sick to dig, so I rested while John Ramsey, my devoted friend, worked

on Snowfeeder's grave.

I was very surprised when instead of a Christian grave in the ground, He showed

me the Indian funeral bed.

There's no feeder on it.

John.

John, why do you make this when you should be making the hole in the ground?

But I was too sick to do anything about it.

So I just gave her the scissors that taught me to bark fish.

She could have them with her always.

Those scissors.

The same scissors that you took, Einar.

Einar, you took my presence.

You took my Sjofrida.

You took her goodness. It is gone, and it is never coming back.

blind. I'm blind.

Where are the pleasures I gave you?

You were always kissing the other man, maybe.

I wish you wouldn't.

Why do you tell me this?

What are you saying?

When Einar next awakened, he was back in the quarantine.

All the other patients had either left or died.

Einar had been lucky enough to recover and would soon be back at the lakeside,

back at the smokehouse.

She's gone to heaven, children.

Will she be coming back?

No, but she'll be watching over you day and night.

Will you be our mother now?

No, but I'll visit you if your father lets me.

What's heaven like, Grandma?

Heaven? Well, now, if you'll be good, I think I feel a story coming on.

See, so I took the mistletoe and came back.

I don't know.