Five hundred years before Columbus, a Norse captain from Greenland named Leif Eriksson sailed west with thirty-five men and found a land of tall forests, rivers full of salmon and grass that stayed green in winter. They built sod halls on a grassy terrace by the sea. The sagas say that Leif's old foster-father, Tyrkir, wandered off and came back excited, babbling about berries he called wine-grapes, and so Leif named the land Vinland. The ruins of their camp were found at L'Anse aux Meadows in 1960. The words are imagined.