Spin wool straight off the sheep into thread

The wool still has the lanolin in it, off sheep that grazed the headland at the south end of the island, and it is spun raw. It is greasy, it smells of sheep, and it does not behave.

Nólsoy is thirty minutes on the ferry from the harbor the group has walked past all week. Two hundred and twenty people, one village, one grocer, and a heritage path north of the houses that runs two kilometers and takes about an hour at the pace anyone actually walks it.

The spinning takes around three hours and the first forty minutes belong entirely to the wool. Nothing about it is intuitive and no first attempt produces thread. Then at some point the hands stop being told what to do and start doing it, and the rest is quiet work with a great deal of talking over the top of it.

The best thing on Nólsoy is invisible in daylight. Under the boulder field on the east side is the largest colony of European storm petrels in the world, somewhere around fifty thousand pairs. The bird weighs twenty-six grams, spends the entire day out at sea and only comes home in the dark, which is why the man who has been studying them here for decades takes people out at night rather than at lunchtime.