THE ENCAMPMENT MOSSE EURD.
“Our good house is there,
Though it be humble:
Each man is master at home.”
_Hávamál._
“Rouse out, Birger, my boy,” said the Captain; “recollect we have got
the Rapids of Oxea to pass before we get any breakfast, and that we have
our breakfast to catch into the bargain. Come, come,” continued he, as
Birger stretched himself on his Astrakan cloak, as if he was thinking of
another spell of sleep, “‘shake off dull sloth, and early rise,’ as Dr.
Watts says—see me rouse out those lazy hounds down there!” And that he
did, in good earnest, by firing off both barrels within a foot of their
ears; a salutation responded to by a chorus of yelping from the dogs, who
imagined, of course, that shooting was begun already.
This had the effect of speedily setting the whole party in motion; and
Jacob, who, with provident care, had prepared, over-night, a kettle of
coffee, raked together the embers of the still burning fires, presented
each with a full horn of it, a very welcome introduction to the day’s
labour; and then, as wood was plentiful, threw on some logs for a parting
blaze.
The river itself formed the fishermen’s washing-basin, and the boat’s
thwarts their toilet-tables. Bitter cold, indeed, was the water; whatever
the air may be, there is seldom much caloric to spare in the water till
autumn is pretty well advanced; but, at least, it had the effect of
thoroughly waking them, and causing them fully to appreciate the luxury
of the now blazing fires to dress by.
[Illustration: OPENING OF THE CAMPAIGN.
p. 78.]
No one who has any regard for his health should think of going on
a fishing expedition, however short, without a complete change of
clothes,—one set for work, and one for dining and sleeping in. No man
has any business, indeed, on such an expedition at all, who is afraid of
water; but whether he is afraid or not, he will be sure to be wet, at one
time or other, during the day. This, while the limbs are in exercise and
the sun above the horizon, is all well enough; but let no man, however
hardy he may think himself, sleep habitually in wet clothes, or in
clothes hastily and imperfectly dried by the camp fire. The very bracing
of the nerves during the day, which prevents the fisherman from taking
injury by what would be called imprudence by his stay-at-home friends,
makes the relaxation and reaction during the night more complete; and
during that time he is exposed to a host of dangers which vanish before
the face of the sun. With all his precautions, no man gets up from his
night’s sleep in the open air without a little stiffness in the limbs for
the first minute or so, though it may vanish at the first plunge into
the water of his morning’s ablutions. But without these precautions, he
is not unlikely to cut short his own expedition by any one of a dozen
diseases which no amount of animal courage will enable him to bear up
against, and thus he will be defeating his own object. It is very well to
bear hardships cheerily when they are unavoidable—cheerfulness itself is
a preservative. But it is only very young sportsmen indeed, who will seek
out hardships for the pleasure of undergoing them.
Our fishermen were not young sportsmen, they were men of experience. The
Parson and the Captain had both of them learned their lesson in Ireland,
where people soon begin to understand what wet means; and Birger was a
Swedish soldier, and had learnt these matters professionally. Before
they started, they had settled the invariable rule of a complete dress
for dinner, under any circumstances whatever, which implied, of course,
as complete a dress in the morning: it is necessary almost to bind
oneself to some such vow, there are so many temptations to break it; in
Norway especially, where, though the summer days are hot—hotter by many
degrees than they are in England, and the evenings in the highest degree
enjoyable, the morning air is generally sharp and bracing, and the water
which comes down from the snowy ranges bitterly cold.
Jacob, in the meanwhile, whose toilet did not take very long, and who
rarely occupied himself in any work which did not especially belong to
his own department, had been parleying with a young fellow, who, roused
by the Captain’s gun, had pulled across in his boat from the opposite
side, while the rest of the men were occupied in preparing the boats and
re-arranging the articles that had been taken on shore the preceding
evening.
They came up together to where the Parson was standing by the fire,
busily engaged in exchanging his salmon casting-line for one better
adapted for trout.
“The young man says that the river is dangy,” said he; for though he
spoke English well enough, he has his own particular words, which it was
necessary to make out.
“Dingy,” said the Parson, without any very clear comprehension of what
was meant, but rather reverting in his mind to the azure transparency of
the waters; which, in truth, he would gladly have seen a little stained
by mud. “Well, that is a good job. But I fear he will find himself a
little mistaken.”
Jacob evidently had not conveyed his meaning: he looked round for Tom or
Torkel to assist him, but they were both in the boats, working busily
under the Captain’s orders; so Jacob tried his hand again.
“The young man says that there is a great deal of water in the river from
the snow. He says that boats are very often sunk at Oxea.”
“Humph!” said the Parson, who began to suspect something.
Here the young man himself broke in with a long story in Norske.
“He says,” interpreted Jacob, “only last week, one boat was upset, and
two men were drowned.”
“Aye? aye?” said the Parson; “what! sober men?”
Jacob did not see the inference, or would not. “This young man is a
river-pilot,” said he; “he will take you up for two mark each boat.”
“I tell you what it is, Mr. Jacob,” said the Parson; “I will teach you
a lesson. When you engaged as our courier, you meant to fleece us all
pretty handsomely. Well, I have nothing to say against this. As courier,
it is your undoubted privilege so to do. But remember this, it is equally
your duty, as courier, to prevent any one else from fleecing us. And
if I find you only once again failing in that respect, off you go at a
minute’s notice. Now send your friend home again.”
Without looking behind him, the Parson, who had now finished fitting his
flies, took his place in his own boat, and, directing Torkel to shove off
to the other bank, threw his line across the mouth of a small tributary
to the great river, which he had marked the year before as abounding with
trout. Jacob looked for a moment inclined to rebel, but no man was more
alive to his own interests than the ex-smuggler. He had engaged in the
trip, not like Tom and Torkel, from sheer love of sport and adventure,
but as a profitable speculation. So, pocketing the affront, much as
“ancient Pistol” did his leek, he crept down to Birger’s boat, which was
his place in the line of march, where he sat sulky, but utterly wasting
his sulkiness; for Birger, anxious to keep up his yesterday’s character
of a fisherman, was much too intent upon the—to him—difficult manœuvre of
keeping his flies clear of the oars, to observe whether he was pleased or
not.
The Captain took the inner line skirting the shore on the right bank, for
it had been agreed that the flat below the Oxea rapids should be well
tried, in hopes of getting some fresh fish for breakfast.
Though last in the field, he drew the first blood, hooking and, in a few
minutes, landing a small salmon, and thus securing a breakfast. And by
the time the boats came together again, the Parson had brought to bag a
very fair supply of fjeld öret, or brook trout, from the little streamlet
he had been trying. And now began the serious business of the day.
Notwithstanding Mr. Jacob’s information, the rapids of Oxea are
perfectly safe to sober men. It is impossible that an accident can happen
in them, except from carelessness; for the water, though swift, is
everywhere deep. The stream falls with some force over a slanting ledge
of smooth, slaty rock, some three or four hundred yards long or perhaps
more, and acquires in its slide considerable velocity; but the bottom
is smooth, and the surface nowhere broken by sunken rocks. The stream,
therefore, is a steady current, surging up against the numerous islands
which dot the river, as if they had been pieces of a ruined bridge. Each
of these was crested with its half-dozen or so of ash or birch, which
looked as if it was they that were in motion, and not the clear stream
that was racing past them.
The passage was a sheer trial of strength, requiring no great amount of
pilotage, or local experience, or even skill. The ropes were got out and
made fast to two or three thwarts, to take off the strain; the boats were
lightened of their living incumbrances—except so far as the steersmen
were concerned,—and were then tracked by main force one by one, every one
of the party lending a hand, except, indeed, Jacob, who considered it his
duty, having once said the rapids were dangerous, to act as if he thought
so, and who had, therefore, been despatched by land to the head of the
rapid, with orders to light the fires and get the breakfast ready, as
nothing else could be done with him.
The principal difficulty arose from the uncertainty of the footing among
the crags, and the gnarled ash-trees that every here and there shot
almost horizontally from between the fissures of the rock, dipping their
branches into the stream. These rendered it necessary, every now and
then, to make fast the boat to the tree itself, and then to float down a
line to it from some point above the obstacle, for the river fortunately
ran in a curve at that place. Thus, by giving a broad sheer into the
stream, while the rest of the party hauled upon the rope, the boat would
swing clear of the impediment.
But all this was very hard work, and, as the sun was now high in heaven,
very hot work; and, moreover, it had to be repeated three times before
all the boats were in safety. Fully as much justice was done to Jacob’s
breakfast as had been done to his supper on the preceding evening; and
most luxurious was the hour’s rest which succeeded it.
The remaining part of the voyage was easy: there was a sharp current,
no doubt, too sharp for anything to speak of to be done with the flies;
but it was all plain travelling, and, with an occasional help from the
ropes, before noon their destination had been reached. This was the foot
of a low fall, or something between a fall and a rapid, called “The Aal
Foss,” in the middle of which was a picturesque rocky island, covered
with trees, and on the left bank an equally picturesque peninsula, which
was destined to be the head-quarters of the expedition, and the basis of
subsequent operations.
“There,” said the Parson, fixing his rod in the stern-rings, and
springing on shore as the boat’s keel touched a sandy, slaty beach in the
isthmus of the peninsula—
“Thus far into the bowels of the land
Have we marched on without impediment.
Here is the limit of my survey. Thus far have I borne the baton of
command; and I beg you to observe that we have reached the appointed spot
twenty minutes before the appointed time.” And he held out his watch in
proof of it. “I have, as you see, performed my promise; and thus I resign
the leadership of the expedition.”
“With universal thanks and approbation,” said the Captain; “and I propose
that now the leadership devolve upon Birger; he is the man of camps and
bivouacs, for he has experienced what we have only read about.”
“Well,” said Birger, “I will not affect modesty. Like others, I have
passed my degrees, and it would be a great shame if bearing his Majesty’s
commission, I did not understand what every soldier is taught.” Then,
suddenly recollecting that the Captain was a military man as well as
himself, he steered adroitly out of his scrape, continuing, as if his
concluding paragraph had been part of his original speech—“You have only
to wait for a war, Captain, and you will be in a situation to give us all
a lesson. No one understood these things better than your old Peninsula
men; but Sweden thinks her soldiers ought to learn their business before
we are called out to fight, and not afterwards.”
To pass the degrees—“gradar,” or rather “gradarne,” for no one ever
thinks of speaking of them without the definite article “ne,” as if there
were no other degrees in the world—is anything but a joke in Sweden.
Military service, so far, at least, as the Guards and the Indelta[7] are
concerned, is extremely popular. There is ample choice in candidates;
and very good care is taken that the officers shall be men who know
their business, and shall not be at a loss in what situation soever
they may be placed. The “gradar” consists of a series of lectures and
extremely strict examinations, in everything connected with the service,
both intellectual or physical, from the construction of an equilateral
triangle up to the sketch of a campaign, and from the musket drill to
a year of sea service. Passing out in seamanship is indispensable; for
Sweden, reversing our principle of hatching ducklings under hens, hatches
her young death-or-glory cornets and ensigns on board her ships. Properly
speaking, the Swedish navy has no midshipmen. The cadets, who fill pretty
numerously the midshipman’s berth, may possibly enter the navy, if they
are so inclined; but nine-tenths of them are candidates for commissions
in the army, and are thus learning a lesson which may be of use to them
hereafter, when they have troops of their own to embark or manage on
ship-board.
Birger had passed his degrees with credit, or he would not have been
selected as a travelling student; and his companions were now likely to
profit by this circumstance, for one of those degrees comprehends all
these mysteries of camping, and hunting, and cooking, and provisioning,
and, if scandal may be trusted, a sort of Spartan stealing, which goes
under the euphemism of “availing one’s self of the resources of the
country;” these little matters being taught by a three weeks’ actual
practice in the field every summer.
Birger was altogether in his element. “Now,” said he, “the first thing I
must do is to borrow all your boatmen, for I shall want every man I can
lay my hands upon; some for the camps, and some for cutting and drawing
fuel; I can find something to do for them all, and for more too if I had
them. And here, you Jacob, take a basket with you, and see what you can
forage out from the cottages and woods about, in the way of milk, bread,
butter, berries, and so forth; and hark you, Jacob, no brandy, if you
please; that is the first thing those scamps always put their hands upon.”
“You have not reckoned us,” said the Captain, “among your effective
strength; we shall not be of much use in foraging, as we cannot speak
Norske, but we have hands and heads too.”
“Do not forget how scantily the camp is provisioned,” said Birger; “we
have not had time or opportunity to catch or shoot anything since we left
Oxea, where, I am sure, we ate up most of our fresh fish. It will not do
to be drawing too largely from our supplies.”
“I have no objection, I am sure,” said the Parson; “but you must let us
have one boat, Birger; even if we are to fish this river from the shore,
there is half a mile of open space, certainly, between this and the great
falls of Wigeland; but best throws lie on the right bank, and we really
must have the power of crossing.”
“Well,” said Birger, “I cannot spare you Torkel, that is certain—he
is much too valuable; take your own boatman; you may halloo out ‘Kom
öfver elven,[8]’ if you want him, and happen to be on the wrong side;
and if he cannot hear you, say ‘Skynda paa mid baaten sáa skall du faa
drikspengar,’[9] and I will warrant he hears fast enough, deaf as he may
be to the first call. We must have one of the boats above this fall,”
he continued, musing; “and we may as well do it at once. We will set all
hands to launch it over this isthmus, before we do anything else, and
then you can use it for your passage-boat. And now for the camp. Tom,
Torkel, my own man Peter, my boatman and the Captain’s will be little
enough for what I have to do, though there are some good hands among
them, as I saw last night and this morning too at Oxea.”
“We must fish, then,” said the Captain; “for there is no use going about
after grouse, in this thick forest, without Torkel, or some one that
knows the place; we should be but wasting our time, poking about these
trees at hap-hazard.”
“And, I am half-afraid that we shall not do much in fishing either,” said
the Parson, as they got a sight of the upper reach of the river, which
lay calm and shining before them. “The sun is as bright as if Odin[10]
had got his other eye out of pledge, and were shining on us with both at
once.”
The Captain whistled a few bars of the Canadian Boat Song.
“Yes,” said the Parson, “it is very true, as you whistle, but, though
the sun be bright, and, though ‘there be not a breath the blue wave to
curl,’ we must try what we can do. It adds considerably to the interest
of fishing, when we know that our supper depends upon it.”
“If this were the old Erne,” said the Captain, “we might whistle for our
supper, in good earnest; but, it must be confessed, that the fish here
are very innocent; we may deceive one; it is not impossible; for, as Pat
Gallagher used to say, ‘there are fools everywhere.’ But—look here,” he
said, as he cast across the stream, “positively, you may see the shadow
of the line on the bottom, deep as the water is.”
“Let us cross,” said the Parson. “‘Gaa öfver elven,’ as Birger says,
for I see they have got the boat up: near the great fall there are some
strong streams that will defy the sun and the calm together.”
Thanks to the innocence of the salmon, which the Captain had hinted at,
their pot-fishing was not entirely without success: the upper part of
the reach, where the waters had not yet recovered their serenity after
undergoing the roar and fury of the great fall, did actually furnish
them with a graul or two; but the salmon that had arrived at years of
discretion were very much too cautious to be taken. They had never, it
is true, been fished for in their lives with anything more delicate than
a piece of whipcord and a bunch of lobworms, as big as a cricket-ball;
but, for all that, they were quite old enough to draw an inference, and
were perfectly aware that natural grasshoppers were not in the habit of
swimming about with lines tied to their noses.
Towards evening there sprang up a light air of wind, and the rises began
to be more frequent. The Captain, by making use of Birger’s prescribed
form of words, had got the boatman to land him on the rocky island which
divides the Aal Foss into two branches. There, concealed by a stubby fir,
not quite so high as himself, he was sending out twenty yards of line
that fell so lightly that it never seemed to touch the water at all.
There is no doubt that, of all the Erne fishermen, it was the Captain who
threw the longest and the lightest line, and well was the Captain aware
of that fact: but there is an axiom which “far and fine” fishers would do
well to bear in mind, and which, though apparently evident to the meanest
capacity, is very seldom borne in mind by any one; and that is, that it
is of very little use to fish “far and fine,” when the fish themselves
are lying, all the while, in the water close under your feet. This was
precisely the Captain’s position; the waters, divided by the rock on
which he was standing, were naturally deepest close to the rock itself,
and, as naturally, the best fish lay in the deepest water. The Captain
understood this well, but he could not deny himself his length of line,
and, therefore, contrived to fish the water close to him by raising his
arms, bringing the point of his rod over his right shoulder, and then
whisking his flies out for a fresh cast with a dextrous turn of the wrist
which no man in England but himself could have performed.
“I will tell you what,” said the Parson—who, not having met with much
success, had stuck up his rod, and had got himself ferried over to the
island—“it is not very likely that a fish of any size will rise this
evening, but if such a thing should happen I would not give much for your
rod.”
“I wish the biggest fish in the river——”
The sentence was never finished, for, at the word, the wish was granted;
and, if not the biggest fish in the river, certainly the biggest fish
they had yet seen, rose at the fly when it was not a foot from the rock.
The rod never stood a chance. Raised at a sharp angle over the Captain’s
shoulder, the whole strain came upon the top-piece, which, as he struck,
snapped like a flower-stalk, without effort or resistance; and away
rushed the fish forty or fifty yards up-stream with the top-piece, which
had run down upon the fly, bobbing against his nose.
The Captain did all that man could do. Carefully did he watch his fish,
anticipating every movement; instantly did he dip his rod, as the salmon
sprang madly into air—instantly did he recover it; promptly was the
line reeled in at the turn; tenderly was it given out at the rush; but
it was of no avail—the rod had lost its delicate spring; and, despite
the Captain’s care, every now and then the fish would get a stiff pull
against the stump, thus gradually enlarging the hold which the hook had
taken in the skin of the jaw, till, at last, just as the Parson, who had
been hoping against hope, was taking the cork off the point of his gaff
and clearing away the brambles to get a good standing place for using
it, the line came up slack; the hold had given way.
The Parson had the generosity to be silent about his warning that had
received so immediate a fulfilment.
“Well,” he said, “you have recovered your top; that is something, so many
miles from Bell Yard; and as for the fish, depend upon it that there are
more where he came from.”
The Captain mused a little. With the exception of Birger’s chance-medley,
they had not seen a full-grown salmon[11] since they had come upon
the river, and the loss was no light one. “I suppose,” he said,
interrogatively, “it would be hardly worth while to fetch another top
from the camp?”
“Not at all worth while,” said the Parson; “the wonder is, that you rose
one full-mouthed fish on such a day as this. You are not going to rise
another. Besides,” he added, “look at the sun! It is time for us to think
of cooking, rather than catching. Birger will be wondering what is become
of us.”
They were at no great distance from the camp, which, to their surprise,
they found tenanted by Jacob alone, who, having got over his morning
sulks, was busy in what he called a Långref, a miniature variety of which
is not altogether unknown to our Hampshire poachers; but Jacob’s was a
tremendous affair, more like what in sea-fishing is called a spillet or
bolter, consisting of three or four hundred yards of water cord, and half
as many hooks.
“Halloo,” said the Captain; “what has become of them all? Why, Jacob,
where is Lieutenant Birger?”
“He is gone with the men to make an offering to Nyssen,” said Jacob.
“Who the devil is Nyssen?” said the Captain.
Jacob looked distressed. It is not lucky to mention the mundane spirits
and those of hell in the same sentence; in fact, the less people
talk about either of them the better, so, at least, the Swedes think,
and therefore imprecate their curses by saying, “The Thousand take
you,” leaving it for your own conscience to determine whether they are
consigning you to saints or devils.
“There they are, you may see them yourself,” replied he, evading the
question, and pointing to a bare rounded rock which rose above the wooded
summits about a mile down the river.
The Parson’s telescope was in his hand in a moment; but all he could make
out was, that they put something on the ground which they left there,
and immediately entered the thick wood, which hid them from his sight.
Jacob could not, or at all events would not, satisfy their curiosity, and
they had nothing for it but to amuse themselves with admiring Birger’s
handy-work, till that individual on his return should make his own report
of himself.
And really the Lieutenant would have extorted praise from the head of the
Kong’s-öfver-commandant’s-Expedition himself, so well and so orderly was
the encampment made.
The sails were formed into three several tents, not very large ones,
certainly, and scarcely admitting of the inmates sitting upright, except
in the centre, but quite sufficient to shelter a man lying at full
length. At the back of these, where the ground rose a little, a neat
trench was cut, in order to carry off the drainings of any unforeseen
shower. These were the sleeping tents; and in front of them were spread
out a quantity of poplar leaves, which were eventually to form the beds,
and which were then pretty rapidly undergoing the process of desiccation
in the hot and bright sunshine which had hitherto been so unfriendly.
A birch trimmed in its weeping branches, and thickened above with a
few supplementary boughs of spruce-fir, was evidently arranged for the
dining-room, and several of the stores were gathered round its trunk
and thatched with fir-branches, while at some distance below, and not
far from the sandy beach, stood three or four neat green huts, built
with a framework of fir-poles, and thatched closely, both in roof and
walls, with the upper branches of the trees that had been cut down for
the frame. Not far from where Jacob was sitting over his långref, there
was an elaborate kitchen, built of rough stones against a natural rock,
with a cross-beam on the top to swing the kettle from, and beside it
rose a goodly pile of fuel, cut into lengths, and stacked into what is
called in the country fathoms, that is to say, square piles, six feet
long and three high. This had evidently been their last work, for the
axes and saws were still lying on the unfinished pile. By the river’s
bank at the edge of the peninsula was a curious erection, which Jacob
called the smoking-house. It was a pyramid constructed of outsides of
deals, hundreds of which, rejected from the saw-mills, were floating
about unheeded in the river, and drifting into every corner that was
sheltered from the current. This was by no means a place constructed for
the luxury of smoking tobacco, an amusement in which every individual of
the party indulged in every possible place and in all places alike. It
was erected for hanging up superfluous salmon which had previously been
slightly salted, in order, with the help of smoke from the green juniper,
to convert them into what in London is called “kipper.”
There was little use for it that evening, however, for the grauls brought
in by the fishermen would have been but scanty allowance, even for the
present supper, had they not been helped out by other provisions. But
Jacob had by no means been idle in his vocation. On a shelf of rock not
very far from the kitchen, and shaded by a friendly tree, stood gallons
of milk and piles of flad bröd, with a few raspberries, which were just
then ripening, and an actual little mountain of strawberries, for the
woods were carpetted with their bright green leaves and scarlet berries.
Jacob, as was his duty, rolled up his långref as quickly as such a
combination of tackle could be stowed away, and commenced preparing the
fish for dinner, while the fishermen changed their clothes, and hung them
to dry round a supplementary fire which had been lighted for the purpose.