The Place of Tides

In this soulful account, nature writer Rebanks (The Shepherd’s Life) reflects on working alongside one of the last traditional “duck women,” who care for eider ducks during nesting season, on Norway’s Vega Archipelago. He explains that each spring, septuagenarian Anna Måsøy kept alive the ancient practice of building seaweed nests for eider ducks on one of the archipelago’s small, rocky islands, protecting the birds from predators, and harvesting the eiderdown left behind. Viewing Måsøy’s work as an antidote to a “modern world I didn’t like very much,” he convinced her to let him assist her for a 10-week season, her last before retiring. Rebanks captures the slow rhythms of life on the island, with days spent clearing out the previous season’s moldy nests from wooden huts and nights spent drinking wine in the quietude of Måsøy’s house, which lacked electricity and running water. In Rebanks’s well-observed portrait, Måsøy emerges as a Sisyphean figure fighting courageously if futilely to preserve old ways in a changing world. For instance, he tells how she once enlisted the help of Vega’s mayor to force her manager at the nursing home where she worked to allow her to spend each spring with the ducks, and how she insisted on assisting with the grueling task of building nests even as her health declined. A wistful depiction of a vanishing way of life, this will move readers. (June)