The Fjord Cabin – Part 1: The Fjord Cabin

"You're in my light," said the woman in the rowing boat.

Dana looked up from the cabin's wooden jetty, laptop on her knee, mug of coffee in her hand. The fjord lay silver and still, ringed with steep green mountains and a thin white mist. A seabird cried. In the water below her, a small wooden boat had slid to a stop, and a woman sat at the oars, with a large black dog in the bow.

"Sorry?"

"I fish here every morning. You're casting a shadow."

"I'm sitting."

"You're very tall when you sit."

Dana laughed. The woman was thirty-six, strong-featured, with iron-blonde hair in a thick braid, a battered yellow oilskin and a wry look. Sigrid. She lived in the red house across the cove. The dog, Fisk, wagged his whole body.

"I'm Dana. I'm writing a book."

"What about?"

"I don't know yet."

"That is how the best ones start." Sigrid lifted a hand. "Shall I stay? The shadow is not so bad."

For a month, she rowed past every dawn. She brought fresh trout, wrapped in newspaper, left on the jetty. She taught Dana to gut a fish, to row, to read the weather from the colour of the clouds. Fisk adopted the cabin's rug. Dana wrote in the mornings, staring at the water, and found, to her astonishment, that the words came.

Late one evening, with the northern sun hanging pink at the edge of the sky, she knocked on the red door with a bottle of wine.

"I wanted to say thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For the shadow."

Sigrid's whole face softened. "Come in. I have bread."

"Can I ask you something?" said Dana, over the table.

"Yes."

"What does the book want to be about?"

"I think," said Sigrid, slowly, "that it wants to be about a woman who rows."

"Green?" said Dana, a buoy, a hill.

"Green," said Sigrid, going pink. "Very green."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Long Light.