fuglaskítur

It is krækiber season. Little black, seedy berries hide under the tiny leaves of this ground-hugging plant, and if you are one of those who associates the taste of them with summer, you will find yourself picking them and popping them into your mouth, even though if asked, as I once was by a visitor, if they were good, you might not know how you would answer. You don't eat krækiber because they are good, but because they are krækiber, and because you can.

You might answer that the birds like them quite a lot. Some winged species seems to eat them, perhaps to the exclusion of all else, when possible. I have never seen it happen, but it must be so, for in summer every jutting stone in Iceland has an inky blue-black streak down one side or the other, just behind whatever ridge best presents itself as a perch. It is the veggjakrot of the avian race, graffiti illegible to us, yet unstudied by runologists and readers of hieroglyphs. If you yourself ate krækiber in sufficient quantities, you too could perhaps produce an ink of such enviable glossy hue, but even that would not endow you with the ability to read the writing of birds. Not even Sigurður Fáfnisbani could do that.