TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
[Illustration]
The Trail of the Elk
[Illustration: THE RÉ VALLEY SWEDE]
The Trail of the Elk
_from the Norwegian of_ H. Fonhus
_illustrated by_ Harry
Rountree
[Illustration]
Jonathan Cape
Eleven Gower Street, London
_First published 1922_
_All Rights Reserved_
The Trail of the Elk
[Illustration]
The Trail of the Elk
§ 1
THIS is the story of a wizard elk—Rauten, as people called him. He was
a human being in animal guise.
The story begins in Ré Valley, which lies like a yawning gap between
mountains, long and flat with borders of forests so dark that they look
as though part of the blackness of night lingered in them. A river
moves sluggishly along the bottom of the valley, making its way slowly
and carefully between stretches of light-red sand. It runs northwards,
a rare thing in Norway.
There are bogs along the banks of the river, bearing tall, stiff sedge,
and when the weather is calm they appear to be bristling. But in
sunshine and wind they sway to and fro like undulating carpets of silk.
Sometimes a long neck appears, and a crane moves with his measured
stride, in which there is peace and contentment. For the crane does not
trouble himself about the past or the future. The present with its
long round of days suffices for him.
An ancient mountain farm lies there with its fence all tumbled down.
The thin pasture is covered here and there with copses. The houses rot
and are never rebuilt. At one time bears were so troublesome round
about Tolleiv Mountain Farm that it was impossible to remain there, and
even to-day it often happens, especially in the autumn, that a bear is
seen feeding on berries far up the mountain side.
But in the spring, life seethes in all the animals of the valley.
The capercailzie stretches his neck, shuts his eyes, and hisses
passionately towards the sunrise. Each night is a time of fierce
unrest. Wings flap, claws tear and rend, and slavering rows of teeth
snarl angrily at each other in the purple moonlight. Above the forests
the Ré Mountains rise like white swans.
§ 2
It was in the summer-time a good many years ago. On the slopes between
Svart Mountain at the upper end of Ré Valley there might have been seen
an elk with her calf. The strange feature of the calf was that it had
lost half one of its ears. I will tell you later on how this happened.
The calf was born amongst the patches of hard snow below the region
where the snow melts in spring, and at the time of which we write
he was still quite small. But as by degrees the weeks passed by he
developed gristle, he gained in bulk, marrow formed in his bones, and
he grew heavy. That calf was bound to grow into a giant elk if only he
were allowed time enough.
[Illustration]
Even the elk oxen with their seven-tined antlers, who scrub the young
trees in Ré Valley, were once young calves like this.
He is feeding from his mother; the warm milk, trickling slowly from her
body into his, gives him his first sensation of pleasure. Consciousness
grows clear just as the clouds roll away and leave the blue sky above
him. He gains his first notions of time, which is made up of light and
darkness. He learns that still water is silent, and that running water
makes a sound, and may lick his legs as with wet and cool tongues—and
that when the wind rises the trees wail like young fox cubs. He also
learns how to distinguish the shrill call of the hawk and falcon that
hover beneath the sky like shivering leaves. At night countless little
eyes gleam from the vault above him; they are stars. But stars may
gleam even from dark copses and gullies, from marten and from fox, from
all the animals that rise when the sun sets.
The nights of midsummer draw their soft veil over the valley, and the
glaciers, forgotten and abandoned in the mountains, light their shining
silvery lamps. Deep down in the Gipsy Pond a golden cloud has gone to
rest like a pyre in the night, a sacrificial fire to the god of peace
and loneliness. And above its flames the leaves of the waterlilies
sway on the face of the water like great green hearts. Some days bring
thunder and lightning, as if the heavens would be rent asunder, and
after the storm the sun gleams on showers of rain trailing over the
mountains like dew-wet shimmering cobwebs.
But on autumn nights the earth seems to be wrapped up in a golden
fleece and the moon glares from the sky like a yellow eye.
About this time the elks of Ré Valley grow strangely restless. Old
bulls stand snorting against the wind, and they may be observed to veer
round for nothing more than the fresh tracks of a man. What ails them?
They do not know. But here and there spoors of dog and man form, as it
were, zones of terror across the wilderness.
There they go, the man and his dog, across the bogs along the Ré River,
where tufts of dying dwarf birch lie blood-red like open wounds. The
man and his dog walk for an hour. They go on for another hour.
The man is short and compactly built, and people never call him
anything but Gaupa (The Lynx). His beard is long, dark, and bristling
like lichen. His eyes have almost the same colour as his beard, and
they are so piercing and cold that a glance from them seems to give
physical pain, and so small that they appear to be on the point
of disappearing. Around the left corner of his mouth the skin is
everlastingly twitching; it started years before when he was a lad, but
it still goes on whether he is awake or asleep.
Gaupa wears grey homespun, with real silver buttons on his waistcoat.
The buttons gleam in the sun, becoming in their turn tiny shining suns.
Over his shoulder hangs his rifle, which he has named the “Tempest” and
the dog he leads is large, dark and shaggy, and his name is “Bjönn”
(The Bear).
Gaupa does not walk like other people, he is always half on the run.
When his path is barred by a fallen tree or such like he does not
stride across it, he jumps. He seems to be in incredible haste, and yet
few people have more time to spare.
Wherever he goes he reads the signs before him. A bog to him is a
written page, a short story written by the animals themselves with
their hoofs or claws. There is the spoor of an elk, but somewhat old,
for dry weather has fallen in and the grass has straightened itself.
Bjönn puts his nose to it, but remains indifferent.
And the man and his dog walk on and on.
Late in the day a rumble is heard from the Ré Mountains, long and
heavy. The lesser mountains catch the sound and send it on. It floats
along the slopes from one side to the other till it dies away behind a
shady hill far to the south. One might imagine it was Silence itself
moving only to listen for more. And throughout the valley startled elks
raise their heads. That is how things were when the shot cracked.
The warm evening sun glows on a pine-clad hillock on the western slope.
Moss grown rocks take a deeper tint. Two elks come running out of the
forest, a cow and a calf. A shaggy deer-hound follows, his dripping
tongue lolling. The cow starts walking again, but stops as if suddenly
remembering that there is no longer any hurry. She sways a little and
nearly falls, but regains her balance. Her flanks work furiously and
with each breath golden-red clouds emerge from her nostrils, falling
like a red rain on the little calf frisking before her. He seems to be
ruddy all over his back from his mother’s breath.
Standing thus the cow begins to nod her head. Her eyes are moist,
shiny, living, like mirrors catching the picture of the little calf
before her—oh, so clearly, as if they would fain take the memory of him
away with them far away into the land of shadows.
In a little while she falls on one side, felling a young pine with
her weight, and now the animal has no more soul than a tree-stump, a
monstrous heap of flesh and bones devoid of life.
Bjönn follows the calf, baying deeply. After a while he is heard once
more, more shrill and eager. Then once again the evening sun throws a
peaceful glow over the pine-clad hill. The huge grey heap on the moss
does not move.
Very soon Gaupa is there; he leans his rifle against a tree and draws
his knife, and whistles softly, coaxingly, for Bjönn.
§ 3
It is night, and cloudy weather; no stars twinkle coldly over the Ré
Mountains. Outside a tiny wooden hut on the eastern banks of Gipsy
Lake Gaupa stands, his hands covered with blood. The tree-tops crowd
together against a background of cloudy sky, and somewhere in the
western mountain a brook murmurs.
Gaupa is bareheaded and his hair is raven black. With his hand on the
door handle he stops suddenly in the act of entering. Was there a
sound in the silent darkness? He thought he heard something, but could
not decide from which direction it came. Yes—there it is, quite clear
now. From somewhere up in Black Mountain a strange animal cry reaches
his ears. It is not a bear or fox—it is most of all like a despairing
moan of a human being. Icy waves seem to run down his spine. He remains
immovable, listening for more cries from the Black Mountain. But
nothing more is heard and the man enters his hut, locking the door.
Soon after he is outside again, listening. But there is nothing to be
heard, and he re-enters the hut.
The Gipsy Lake Hut is cosy and warm. The roaring stove devours the
logs, and from the draught-hole in the iron stove door a light steals
out to flit in ever-changing play over the timber walls. Gaupa and
Bjönn lie on the bed side by side, the dog barking in his sleep once in
a while.
For a long time nothing is heard but the deep contented muttering from
the stove.
Then Gaupa rises with a start and sits immovable.
“There it is again,” he thinks. But soon he sees clearly that no animal
cry could possibly have reached him from the Black Mountain through
those walls of timber.
He understands what animal it was that uttered the cry. It was the elk
calf whose mother he had killed. Now that poor mite was searching the
wood calling upon his mother. Gaupa had heard such calves in distress
call often enough, but the cry from the Black Mountain that night made
him shiver. No ordinary elk calf could wail like that.
Gaupa lay down again. Sleep had left him, and strange memories visited
him instead.
Some ten to twelve years before a half-demented old Swede roamed about
in Ré Valley. People called him the Ré Valley Swede. For two whole
summers he wandered about with a divining rod and a pickaxe, looking
for the Ré Valley treasure. According to an ancient old legend, seven
pack-horses loaded with church plate passed up the Valley at the time
of the Black Death. Four men led them. When they reached the bogs near
the Tolleiv Mountain Farm, the plague overtook the men. They had barely
the strength to bury the silver, before they lay down to die with the
name of Our Lady on their lips.
This treasure lived like a ghost in the imagination of the people.
Somewhere in the Ré Valley lay the plate, that much was certain. When
the half-witted old Swede heard of it he commenced haunting the Ré
Valley from end to end. He used his pickaxe diligently enough. Every
wound in the bogs bore traces of his exertions.
Thus he went on one whole Summer. During the Winter he went
timber-cutting in the lower valley, but Spring saw him in Ré Valley
once more wielding his divining rod and his pickaxe untiringly.
People met him when they happened to pass that way. At times he was
starved to the point of exhaustion; but when they gave him to eat of
the food they carried, the old Swede grew strong and full of energy
once more. He would half bury his pickaxe in the earth, then straighten
his huge body, saying: “To-day I am as poor as a church mouse. But
to-morrow I shall be as rich as the King at Stockholm.... I am pretty
certain of the treasure now.”
And his voice, which began in a deep bass, would rise upwards to the
shrillest falsetto.
Once some lads placed a few bits of an old stove in a pit where the
Swede was digging. He found them, and the next day he went home to the
Lower Valley delirious with joy. When he understood that it was not the
real Treasure after all, he wept like a child, but went straight back
to Ré Valley and resumed his digging.
The Ré Valley Swede suffered from epilepsy. Sometimes when he reached
the summer mountain farms he fell down in a fit. Therefore people
either expected some day to find him dead up in the lonely valley or
else never to see him again.
During the third summer of the mad Swede’s digging Gaupa stayed near
Gipsy Lake fishing. One night he took his road northwards across
Ré River. A few stars twinkled. A glacier shimmered in the Western
Mountains, long and narrow like a white bird with wings outstretched.
Gaupa moved slowly, slowly northwards along the River.
Towards morning he observed a light coming from a small pine-covered
mound, and he went to investigate. A few sparks flew up, and the pine
needles were still pink in the glow from a burning log.
He heard a noise, the loud though not unmusical sound of iron on stone,
and he thought, “There is the Swede.”
A moment later he saw him. He was bent towards the earth, digging, and
Gaupa could not help thinking of a bear digging his winter shelter,
just as he had seen one some years before about Michaelmas time. Gaupa
advanced and the Swede straightened himself, his face streaming with
perspiration.
Gaupa greets him with “Evening.” “Now I shall soon have the Treasure,”
mutters the Swede. “It is in here, and to-morrow I shall be a rich man,
as rich as the King at Stockholm.”
Then he tells his tale, how the night before he was sitting on the
slope resting, when he suddenly saw a tiny blue light moving along the
banks of Ré River, bounding along till at last it stopped at the mound,
where he saw as it were a bluish shimmer for a long time, much like a
firefly on a summer night. He at once understood that this was a sign
to him. He went round the mound with the cleft birch wand, and when
he reached the spot where he was then digging an invisible hand seemed
to pull the wand downwards, until it seemed to writhe in his hands,
pointing to earth like a finger.
Gaupa saw that there was a small cellar where the Ré Valley Swede had
been digging, with reddish sandy soil and small round stones heaped up
round about. Gaupa gave the old man food, which he wolfed down like a
starving dog, but he had no time for rest, for as he said, when the sun
rises, it will sparkle on the Ré Valley Treasure, which has not been
exposed to the light of day for hundreds of years.
Gaupa remained near the fire watching the Swede as he dug. He wore an
old pair of sheepskins, stiff with dirt like dried deerskin. He would
never leave Ré Valley though, he said. When he got rich he was going to
build a small palace on Black Mountain, and there he would sit drinking
fine wine and gaze upon the earth stretched out before him.
Then he straightened himself, the pickaxe hung loosely in his right
hand, and with his left he wiped the perspiration from his bald head,
and the hand left a mark, it was so dirty with digging. The red bearded
face worked itself into a half-witted smile, the eyes grew large, lost
all keenness and became troubled. Then he said: “And when once I die,
then I will return to Ré Valley in the shape of a beast.”
Gaupa saw how the Swede was becoming strange, as if he were listening.
Then he uttered an ugly roar, and fell on his face almost into the fire.
Quick as lightning Gaupa pulled him away, and there lay the old Swede
prostrate in a fit. His hand held the shaft of the pickaxe too tightly
for Gaupa to wrench it open, but he succeeded in forcing a stick
between the teeth of the sick man to prevent him from biting off his
own tongue. His legs were pulled up crooked under his body, a muffled
groan from the depths of his throat was heard off and on, his mouth was
smothered in foam.
At last the body twitched no more, the Swede began to breathe evenly
and heavily; he slept like a man tired to death.
“He’ll soon be himself again,” thought Gaupa. He had seen epileptics
before and knew that such attacks most often end in deep sleep.
But the Swede slept on and on, and Gaupa noticed how his breathing grew
fainter. At last he had to lie down close beside the body to catch it
at all. The time came when the Ré Valley Swede did not breathe any
more. He lay crouching over the plate which was to have been the great
adventure of his life. But the pine-log fire burned on beside him red,
resinous, and alive.
After that night Gaupa was unable to rid himself of the last words of
the old man with the glassy troubled eyes: “in the shape of a beast.”
When evening spread her dark mantle over the sky, when the tree-trunks
ceased to be, and he saw the wild beasts gliding like living shadows
across the wooded glades, then he heard it: “in the shape of a
beast—beast.” And however much he willed it not to happen, his heart
would beat in his breast like the sound of far-off muffled guns.
When at dawn he waited for the capercailzie’s love song, the mystical
peals of bells of the forest, he heard what he had noticed since
his earliest youth: although the silence was absolute, there seemed
to be someone talking somewhere, far away in no particular direction
only far away. He had often thought of the People of the Hills, for
Gaupa believed in them most sincerely; he had both seen and heard
inexplicable things, but ever since the death of the Ré Valley Swede
the low distant murmur became words, “Beast, Beast, Beast....”
Gaupa was constantly expecting something to happen. The tension of
it was like music to his soul. Ever since that time when he watched
through the night beside the dead Swede, felt his hands growing cold,
saw his lips growing blue, ever since that time the night and the
forest seemed to attract him even more strongly than before. The
possibilities hinted at by that one word “beast” ran through his brain
like an icy trickle, became a sweet pain—“Beast, Beast....”
Gaupa had never known fear in the woods, not even when once he killed
a bear cub and the mother bear rushed straight towards him with huge
leaping strides—even then he was not afraid. He just sent a bullet
through the head when she was four paces away. And it is easy to
understand that the last words of the Ré Valley Swede did not frighten
him.
Only he acquired a strange habit. After shooting an animal he
invariably looked into its eyes. It had become such a confirmed habit
that he did not think about it, for ten or twelve years had elapsed
since the corpse of the Ré Valley Swede had been carried away to
civilisation on the back of a horse, and in Gaupa’s thoughts the memory
had grown somewhat blurred. All the same he could at will recall the
face of the dead man in the glow of the fire, a face as red as the
trunk of a pine tree in the evening sun.
The old Swede had said he would return to Ré Valley in the shape of a
beast.... Gaupa remembered what had happened some time before on a farm
north in the Lower Valley, a farm where the outlying meadows mingled
with the highest birch copses just below the bare mountain.
The farmer’s son married the prettiest maid in all the valley—oh, what
a beauty she was!—but pale and delicate as a winter’s moon. And just
as the moon dies and vanishes before the light, so life ebbed out of
her slowly, oh so slowly. But she clung to life, and she said that if
she died she would return to her boy husband in the shape of a bird.
And she did die.
The following summer the people of the farm were astonished to see
a mountain grouse amongst the poultry. At first she was shy and
disappeared every night, but she was always there in the morning. At
last the bird grew so tame that the lad who had lost his girl-bride
could hold it in his hands.
When winter came the grouse changed her feathers and became snowy
white, and one day she flew to the mountains straight towards the sun.
The shimmering sunshine absorbed her, and to the lad she seemed to be a
white angel flying into heaven.
When Gaupa first heard the story he felt himself start. The girl had
kept her word. Would the half-witted Swede keep his?
Then in the Spring, something happened. Gaupa was stealing through the
wooded slopes of Ré Valley one morning about four o’clock. The surface
of the snow, thawed once and frozen to hard ice afterwards, bore his
weight. Big socks outside his boots allowed him to walk without a
sound, for the capercailzie is easily alarmed.
A tiny fluffy cloud flamed red in the eastern sky. Water from melting
masses of snow rushed down the mountain-sides, making a sound like
gusts of wind in the forest-clad mountains.
Then he heard a raven croaking above him, and he raised his face to
the sky in search for it. What might the black bird be crying out for?
Gaupa saw warnings in many things, and he knew that a raven’s croak
generally means something sinister. He remembered an autumn night when
he was spearing trout somewhere west in Three Valley Mountain, how in
the moonlight he saw such a bird fly up from the ground. Gaupa went
up to the group of young spruce out of which the raven came and there
he found the skeleton of a man, with a half-rotten leather pack lying
beside him. It was the wandering pedlar who many years before had
insisted on crossing the mountains to the next cultivated valley, and
had never been seen again.
Gaupa felt quite convinced that the raven is a sinister bird. What
might that black eater of carrion be croaking about now? wondered Gaupa
as he stole along lightly on the Black Mountain slopes. The raven was
sure to have seen something down there in the forest, quite sure.
“Arrp!” he cried—“arrp!”
Gaupa continued his way southwards, stopping once in a while to use
his ears when the snow did not crunch under his feet. He had not known
sleep since the evening before, when day fled from the horizon and he
threw a lump of snow on to his fire farthest up the valley and walked
into the darkness, for Gaupa preferred the darkness to broad daylight.
He loved night.
Dawn was approaching and he was growing sleepy, a heaviness in his head
took away his interest in everything about him. But when he reached a
ridge overlooking Gipsy Lake, all drowsiness left him instantly, for
before him in the pearly dawn he saw an enormous grey elk cow bending
over and licking a newborn calf. He stopped short, but the elk cow
seemed to think that Gaupa himself was nothing more than an animal,
black as soil, with hairless skin round eyes and nose. Terror engulfed
her, and when Gaupa drew near the cow fled. He went up to the calf. The
little animal was wet and warm, steaming in the cool air of the dawn,
its breathing laboured, uneven—it was newly born.
Gaupa caught his eyes and gave a start; he felt an icy chill run
through his being, and he remained kneeling holding the animal’s gaze.
Those eyes were not soulless and empty like those of other newly-born
animals. They were human eyes, plainly and undoubtedly the eyes of a
human being.
Above him the raven circled round and round croaking its steady “Arrp,”
“arrp” until the bird turned westward and the cry died away, an ugly
threatening sound amongst the dark clouds.
Gaupa held the elk calf with both his hands. He felt the pulse shaking
its frail body, and he noticed that it was a bull. Once more he had
visions of the Ré Valley Swede, and heard the ugly roar that opened the
epileptic attack, heard that last gasp—“Beast, Beast....”
Gaupa felt for his hunting-knife, wrenched it out of its sheath, and
drew it straight across the left ear of the calf. Then he walked away
with crackling steps.
The sun reached the pine-clad ridge behind him, played softly round the
little calf’s head, kissed him and wished him welcome to life and to
the forest.
§ 4
But Gaupa lay awake in Gipsy Lake Hut, full of memories. The dog was
lying silent in sleep. Once Gaupa struck a match to light his pipe, and
in one corner his rifle reflected the glow. “The Tempest” had roared
once that day, and there was one elk less on the slopes of Ré Mountains.
But what Gaupa saw that morning, when aiming at the elk cow, was the
calf’s left ear—it was only half an ear. It was the same calf he had
handled the spring before, the elk calf with human eyes. It was he who
had just cried out so uncannily like a human being under the Black
Mountain, more weirdly than Gaupa had ever heard a beast cry before.
There was also something strange about the calf’s spoors that day. The
clefts were not side by side as elk clefts usually are. They spread out
obliquely from each other. He knew he would be able to distinguish that
spoor from a thousand. Gaupa had seen many elk spoors in his life, but
never any like these.
The stove in the hut ceased muttering. The flue cooled down with tiny
dry cracking sounds.
Below the hut a fox stopped to smell the smoke which still lingered in
the air.
Up in the mountain the brook murmured incessantly. Under the Black
Mountain an elk calf was licking the skin of his mother which was hung
up on a pole fastened to two trees. The calf kept poking at it with his
muzzle, but the skin was dead, lifeless, with no warmth of blood in it,
and the young elk raised his head and whimpered plaintively, hoarsely
and brokenly.
In Gipsy Lake Hut Gaupa was on the point of going to sleep when he
suddenly became wide awake again. The hut was quiet as the tomb, but
the silence slowly grew pregnant with that inexplicable murmur which
Gaupa knew so well. It was as if spirits were whispering around him.
“Beast, beast, beast.”
§ 5
The next day Gaupa went northwards to Lower Valley, where people were
living. They struggle through life as best they can, and when they die
they are taken to the ancient tarred wooden church that calls them back
to earth with dismal deep-toned bells.
Gaupa’s home was a timber hut on a stony birch-clad ridge, jutting out
into the river. The building was so near to the water’s edge that if
the spring flood was unusually high the water almost lapped against its
walls.
There Gaupa and Bjönn lived alone. Gaupa was a confirmed old bachelor,
over fifty years of age. He had reached the evening of life, and women
and love had never been anything to him. No one had ever heard him sigh
on account of a petticoat.
His real name was Sjur and he hailed from a spot far north in the
valley, a crofter’s place called Renna. His parents died when he was
young. Sjur was not cut out for a crofter, and so he built the little
hut for himself down by the river, and it stands there to this very day.
Sjur was believed to be a shoemaker by trade and he was handy both with
awl and thread. But what use was it to take your shoes to him when
he never finished them? If you left them with him during the potato
harvest in the autumn you could not expect to get them back until the
cuckoo was heard in the following spring. Therefore work grew more and
more scarce, and heaven only knew what he lived upon. But Gaupa would
gorge like a dog when there was food, and could starve like a dog when
food grew scarce.
People gave him his nickname “The Lynx” because of his strange habits.
He slept during the day and was up and about at night, like a wild
beast—like a lynx in fact.
When the dalesman locked his door, blew out his candle, and crept into
his sheepskins, then the light gleamed as bright as ever from Gaupa’s
hut. About midnight he would often steal out into the forest only to
return at day-break, when he would creep into his hut, lie down and
sleep as a wild animal does in its lair after its hunt for food. Gaupa
was indeed a strange man.
There was an old schoolmaster in the valley, who went from one farm to
another teaching for a time at each place. He wore spectacles and was
exceedingly learned, and he always sang the corpse out of the house
at funerals. He was the oracle of the valley. He knew everything, and
could tell you why Gaupa slept by day and went out by night.
There were two kinds of people, he used to say. Some were born by day
and some by night. Those born by night often had a strange longing for
darkness. “Look,” he would add, “at that singular being at the Lynx
Hut. He was born by night and avoids the day.”
The schoolmaster was quite right about that. To Gaupa the sunshine
was not warm, but cold, while the moon was quite different. In the
moonlight the shadows in the forest moved like the shades of dead
animals, a steady movement, hardly noticeable and yet unmistakable.
Then Gaupa felt as if he himself were stealing about on hairy soles.
What a delightful thrilling, silent restlessness there was around him!
He seemed to be watched by unseen eyes from the heaps of rocks and
wooded copses, where soft paws trotted over the moss, sinewy bodies
crouched, the whole copse felt like one mighty enchanting mystery.
There was magic music in the air about him, a subdued melody, and he
seemed to hear the burning stars sparkle in the firmament.
On such nights Bjönn would often accompany him. The manner of Bjönn’s
arrival at Lynx Hut was as follows. One winter a dalesman from Lower
Valley was travelling towards the plains with a load of butter and
cured fish. When he left the town of Hönefos on his return, he noticed
a large deer-hound following him. It was dark in colour with a grey
head and grey legs. The man drove on, wrapped in his black sheepskin
coat, with his old horse drawing the sledge. The dog followed.
But on the evening of the second day the dog disappeared, and a week
later the same animal, all skin and bones, crawled up to Lynx Hut.
Gaupa gave him food, and the dog remained there. No one asked questions
about him, and Gaupa named him Bjönn.
Towards the spring, in April, Gaupa happened to show the dog a huge
spoor in the crusted snow under Ré Mountain. Bjönn went absolutely mad,
and the elk ox who was at the other end of that spoor was unprepared
for such a terrible pursuit by such a tiny animal as Bjönn appeared to
be. The elk sank through the snow crust, but Bjönn kept on top, and
three days later Gaupa carried home venison which no one was allowed to
see.
From that day Bjönn grew to be the best elk-hound in the valley.
Wonderful stories were told in the district of Gaupa and his dog. When
those two started to follow a spoor they never gave up. They had their
meals on the spoor, they rested, and even slept there. They followed it
from one horizon to the other, from one county to another, till at last
the elk lay dead.
Gaupa and Bjönn were like the animals they were called after, wild and
ferocious. People would say to Gaupa, “You’ll kill yourself yet with
such mad chase”—but the prophets fell ill and died, whilst Gaupa ran on
as mad as ever.
He was a great teller of stories and a popular musician at dances.
Then he played on a fiddle on the head of which the devil himself,
horns and all, was carved out. And when he had had a little brandy
the stories would come pouring out between his bearded lips. He was
inexhaustible like a spring, and in everything he told there was an
alluring mystery.
One night he was at a dance, telling of the Ré Valley Swede and the elk
calf from Black Mountain—of the elk calf whose mother he had killed two
weeks before and of the ugly cry he had heard the night afterwards,
while he spoke silence reigned, and the young girls shivered.
A few days afterwards these things were the talk of the Valley. Such
a story amongst those people was like leaven in dough. It grew and
grew. Old sagas and old superstitions were added, and even the Sacred
Word of God. For in those days the people of Lower Valley had nothing
else to speak of but what actually took place within the limits of the
mountain ridges before their eyes. Kings might die in the great world
beyond—that was a matter of minor interest to them as compared with the
death of a six-weeks-old piglet belonging to a crofter at Cool Hill.
Therefore it is nothing to wonder at that when Gaupa told the story of
the elk calf of Black Mountain, the Ré Valley Swede was in a manner of
speaking resurrected from his tomb.
Then suddenly everybody remembered a number of things about him. The Ré
Valley Swede was not a true believer, he did not accept the Word humbly
with a Christian’s heart. The Bible says that when people die they
either go to heaven or hell, and no one in Lower Valley doubted for
one moment that as a rule they all went straight to heaven from their
Valley—that is, if we may judge from their funeral sermons.
But the old Swede believed that many things might happen after death;
he even seemed to believe that the dead might return—as beasts!
The schoolmaster explained that there was another religion which
taught such a belief. But people did not care two straws about other
religions. The Ré Valley Swede was a mocker, a free-thinker; a cold
blast followed him wherever he went. Martin Ormerud recalled how when
he entered the barn where the Ré Valley Swede was laid out, a big
black bird rose from his head. “Mercy upon us!” people cried.
Thus they gossiped; old wives eighty and ninety years of age,
spectacles on nose and Bibles on their knees, read aloud with trembling
voices how “the Lord endures not a mocker.” The old Swede was a living
testimony to the truth of the Word. As a punishment for his sins and
his mocking of God, his restless spirit was now condemned to roam about
Ré Mountains imprisoned in an animal’s body. God have mercy upon the
poor soul when once the old sinner died, once more up there among the
pines along Ré River.
[Illustration]
§ 6
Years passed.
In the wilderness between Gipsy Lake to the South and Lower Valley to
the north there roamed about a wizard elk that no dog and no marksman
could conquer.
The dalesmen called him Rauten; why, no one could say. Such names come
floating on the north wind, and have no origin. Perhaps the name stuck
because when he was still a calf he would low, for all the world like
cattle on an autumn evening.
Rauten wandered about Ré Mountains, not like an ordinary earthly elk,
but like a being half body and half spirit. No lead bullets could wound
him. He was rarely seen by human eyes.
During the mating season, at dawn and in the gloaming, foresters
sometimes heard his mating call. It sounded more human than animal, and
it made the foresters realise that they had nerves after all.
Now and then they happened to see his spoor, unlike all other elk
spoors. The clefts pointed outwards, like the spoor of a man walking
toes outwards. The Ré Valley Swede had also walked toes turned
outwards. When he went along the high road northwards one foot pointed
east, the other west.
Long-limbed men strode miles and leagues after Rauten, but his spoor
never ended. Dogs chased him, and returned limping and moaning.
There was a black-bearded man whom they called Gaupa. He and his dog
Bjönn followed elk spoors from one horizon to the other, from one
county to the other. But whenever they happened to see an elk spoor
with the clefts pointing apart they turned away. Chasing a spirit is
like chasing a shadow.
Years passed.
§ 7
On Bog Hill, near the outskirts of Ré Valley, an elk bull was standing
immovable.
It was dawn, when light and darkness intermingle, when the wild animal
threads softly to his lair, tramples in a circle for a little while,
and then crouches down and closes his eyelids. The few hours out of
each twenty-four when death and life are locked in each other’s arms
have come to an end. Here and there a drop of blood lies on the earth
like some moist red flower, or a heap of loose feathers seems to tell
where a bird has undressed; only that particular bird no longer needs
feathers.
[Illustration]
Still the bull elk on Bog Hill did not move a muscle. His head stood
out clearly against the dawn which flooded the eastern sky like a lake
of yellow light. His antlers resembled young bushes, and between the
tines a dying star twinkled in silvery paleness.
It was no mortal animal standing there; it was a ghost from dead
generations, an animal spirit from the eternal hunting-grounds.
Daylight grew more and more whilst the elk stood still. A grey film of
dawn decked the side of the pine trunks turned to the east. The light
filtered through the pine needles as through a sieve. A bird chirped a
while and then became silent again, like a life that dies just as it is
born.
Then the elk’s head turned, quite slowly from west to north. In his
slightly curved muzzle there was the dreaming melancholy of wooded
dells. His nostrils worked incessantly, expanding and contracting, the
cold morning air running in and out of his nose. His eyes were large
and wide awake. For the call of sex burned in his mighty body—the call
to mating which rises and falls from time to time in eternal rhythm,
from generation to generation.
One ear of that elk was only half an ear. It was Rauten, the largest
and wildest of all elks between mountain and valley. Mating time had
come, when bull seeks cow, and cow seeks bull, when angry eyes stare
into angry eyes in the fight for the female, when antler meets antler,
breaking the silence of the forest with mighty crashes.
Rauten sniffed and listened. Into his nostrils entered the smell of
rottening leaves and boggy marshes. It was late autumn, and the life
which spring had created was on the point of returning to earth. But
no scent of the female was borne on the slight breeze from the north
that fills his nose. All the same he remained; now and then he cocked
an ear, backwards and forwards, but no sound was heard from any living
throat.
Then he lifted his head, opened his mouth and gave the mating call, a
deep nasal sound which floated over the bog and died away again.
Again Rauten listened. The western slopes took on a lighter shade, but
the valleys and gullies still yawned black.
Then he turned and went northwards along the ridge, with long strides,
covering the ground at great speed. One cleft hoof splashes into a tiny
pool of water, the other crushes a small spruce which has been ages
about sprouting in the shallow soil, and might have grown to be a big
tree.
Rauten knew of a cow living thereabouts. He had come a full league to
find her, and soon a strange scent greeted his nostrils—a kind of burnt
acrid smell, recalling a billy-goat at mating time.
Rauten went on till he found a marshy place with yellowing birches. On
a hill-top close by, a small hole had been dug out in the earth—and not
long before, for a couple of torn roots appeared fresh and white where
they had been broken, not brownish as they are when they have been
exposed for some time.
The hole had been dug out by mating-mad elk bulls, and the strong scent
emanated from it. The hole seemed to breathe out that scent, and Rauten
was in the middle of it.
He nosed the earth, but there was no breath of a cow. Then he rubbed
himself against a small spruce.
Suddenly a soft-eyed elk cow came out on to the marsh below, and both
animals stood still for a moment, heads raised eyeing each other.
Rauten felt as light as light; he ran—no, he floated towards her.
Passion was boiling inside him. He ran in rings round her, that shy
female with lowered ears and patient, expectant eyes.
Then he broke loose upon her: He followed the same almighty law of
Nature which compels the unconscious capercailzie and his cackling hen,
the valiant wood-cock—yes, and even the little anemone which stealing
the blue of the heavens spreads new life out of tiny soft stamens.
For a short time silence reigned over the marsh, except now and then
for the crack of a breaking twig under the elks’ hoofs.
Then another elk appeared. It was a three-year-old, with slender horns.
He saw the two in front of him and made as if he would jump. In him
also the forces of nature were at work. Strength pulsated through
his young body, each muscle trembled impatiently with longing for
a contest. For that cow with Rauten belonged to him, to him alone.
She had gone with him the day before; she was his, his own. The
three-year-old grew large-eyed and wild-eyed, his withers bristled like
a brush. Rauten must be vanquished, Rauten must die.
The two elk bulls faced each other on Bog Hill like two living springs
of force. There were four eyes full of madness, four antlers, and those
antlers mean death.
Rauten was like one suddenly waking from a trance. He was quivering,
wide awake; for the cow who was peeping at them curiously from behind
a crooked spruce was his. He had mastered her, he had floated with her
through golden sunlit mists; she was his, his own. That youngster must
be conquered. The youngster must die.
The first war-cry was raised, a hoarse cry from a savage soul on fire.
“Yah! Yah!”
The younger elk lifted his upper body, a hoof was flung through the
air, making a dark line across the pinewoods, stopped and fell.
“Crack!” The sound was at once soft and firm. Rauten felt a fierce
burning sensation under one ear, a slight mist shadowed his brain for a
moment, then all was clear again.
In that brief second the other hoof from the youngster struck his neck.
Hair and skin was flayed off, a fire licked Rauten where the hoof
struck, and then....
There he stood, half rampant, a thunder-cloud, a storm. He turned his
eyes, turned them slowly, threateningly. They were no longer brown,
but white. It was as if all madness raging in that huge body had
concentrated in the eyes, turning them white. Rauten towered as tall
as the young pine beside him, his jaws opened, breath steamed out and
his tongue protruded, long, wet, slavering. Then Rauten struck back.
His forelegs were no longer skin and bones and muscles belonging to a
body. They were shadows, spirits, ghosts, sinister forebodings of blood
and destruction. Lightning gleamed and thunder crashed. The storm had
broken loose and the three-year-old was there to meet it. The God of
the wilds have mercy on his body!
The sun had not yet risen, but was still resting somewhere behind the
hills. But when Rauten struck, the three-year-old saw the sun all the
same, not only one, but a number of suns, a swarm of them. They danced
in his head like round sparkling disks of wonderful colours. They
gleamed green like fireflies, metallic like a bluebottle, copper-red
like the harvest moon.
Another blow fell on the heels of the first one. It struck above
one eye. And once more the tapestry of the firmament was rolled up
before the sight of the youngster. There were no suns that time, but
stars—what a host of stars, as numerous as dewdrops on the grass,
sparkling like snow in spring! They leapt and danced inside his head,
whirling madly together.
They went out suddenly, all of them, disappeared like a mist, and then
he saw the old sun peeping red-eyed from behind the eastern mountains.
The three-year-old went backwards and retreated, for this was so
sudden. He had attacked a rocky wall and found it hard. But Rauten did
not let go; he followed, followed, and up from hot gorges and reeking
inner bodies came the war-cry again: “Yah! Yah!”
Their antlers met writhing into each other. Snouts touched the earth,
the bulls groaning as if to rid themselves of something. The sinews
of their hind-quarters shivered, trembled, rage gave life to every
hair in their manes, their stumpy tails were raised angrily. Two sharp
backs stood out against the sky like monsters. Every fibre of their
bodies was taut, muscles writhed like worms and red-hot blood boiled
rhythmically through their veins.
Their antlers were still interlaced in fierce contest; those of the
youngster pale grey, Rauten’s brown, watered, lined like iceworn
rocks, as if some unknown hand had written strange runes on them. They
hammered and crashed, their hoofs cut gaping wounds in the moss, the
dew fell like tears from the sedge, and dark spoors appeared on the bog
where the mighty ones walked. But the three-year-old went backwards.
Their antlers released each other, their bodies rose, and once more
legs turned into fleeting shadows. The blows sounded as if someone
were beating sheepskins with a stick; hoarse sounds escaped from their
throats, hair flew in the air like driven snow.
The cow looked on, slightly dazed, nodding as it were her approval, for
that was what she liked. The tension between the bulls invaded her; she
could not remain calm any more, she leapt forwards, stopped, stamped a
little, and once she lowed loudly, out of sheer excitement. It was for
her they were fighting, for her their sharp hoofs made their bodies
bloom red with blood.
The red rose over Rauten’s shoulder grew and lengthened into a long
narrow leaf, changing shape continually, but not changing colour. The
three-year-old wore a number of such roses, which easily grew out of
his young, well-beaten body.
The cow’s sympathies, however, were all for Rauten. He was the
stronger, and she wanted the stronger. Even then she felt deliciously
faint after their mating.
Rauten’s madness was that time sky-high, his muscles tautened and
relaxed and in their rhythmical movement made a wild song.
Both bulls had now begun to feel the strain. The mouths of both were
white with bubbling foam, and their heads felt heavy, but their
haunches stood up like bushes, and Rauten’s eyes were alight with
savage madness. It was as if he wanted to use to the fullest extent
that opportunity of working off all the superfluous vitality which had
accumulated in him in the course of a long, long year.
A few small bushes seemed to jump forward in the bog to see the fight.
Tree-tops stretched their necks one behind the other, staring. Sparks
of light flew up from the grass; it was the cool breath of night which
remained like dew on the earth.
Once more the cow lowed with excitement. A woodpecker sat on a dry,
hollow spruce tree. She was green as the slimy stones in the brook. She
turned her head, listening in shiny-eyed astonishment at all the noise.
Then her beak hammered on the wood once more. “Knrrr!” said the hollow
tree-trunk.
Rauten’s skin was wet with sweat, and under his belly, on his flanks,
flakes of foam boiled as if on a fleeing horse. And still his muscles
sang their mad song, and again the three-year-old saw suns and stars.
He staggered, retreated to the edge of the bog, sank on his knees, but
rose at once. He had fought and lost, he had become a smaller beast in
the woods. He was giving in, only he did not want to turn round and
run away until he was obliged to do so.
At the edge of the bog the unexpected happened. A little hill runs
down there, and a high stump of a tree stood close beside a spruce.
The stump was about the same height as an elk, and it looked as if a
storm had once felled a spruce. The younger bull retreated towards
this stump, and without giving warning Rauten ran his antlers under
him. Then he made a mighty effort which will not soon be forgotten
in the Bog Hill forest. The three-year-old was raised on end, stood
for a second on his hind legs, was pushed over and fell down on his
back—between the tall stump and its neighbour the spruce tree, and was
wedged in securely between them, fast as if in a vice.
Rauten stood with head uplifted looking at his helpless foe whose legs
uselessly beat the empty air. Rauten wanted to use his antlers again,
to kill, but he could not reach. The younger bull’s legs worked like a
windmill, and a blow from them would hurt. Rauten remained there a long
time, the youngster on his back, mouth wide open, steaming.
Then the cow joined him, and Rauten went to meet her. The storm within
him calmed down. For the cow began to lick him, and her tongue was
soft, so caressingly soft. His shoulder blazed red like the sunrise,
and his neck wept warm tears on to the moist earth. Every touch of the
cow’s tongue was a reward, humble admiration of him only—the greatest
and the strongest among the elk bulls of valley or mountains, the
crowned king of elks in Ré Valley. Nothing could stand up before him.
He broke down everything before him like a falling tree in the bushes.
He trotted southwards with the cow by his side across Bog Hill, like
Victory itself, even though one ear was but half a one, and his body
wept blood. Round their legs the white heads of the bog down-grass
moved like fat white birds, while the elks ploughed their way, dark
grey under the sloping rays of the newly-risen sun.
* * * * *
The three-year-old lay on his back all the morning, wedged in between
the stump and the tree-trunk.
There was no possible means of getting out again. He could not turn,
the space was too narrow, and his legs could get no hold in the
empty air. He worked till he grew weak. Then he lay still, knees bent
heavenwards as if he were praying to the sun for help. His tongue
lolled limply out of one corner of his mouth, and the sun burned his
face pitilessly. Then he shut his eyes.
§ 8
That same day in the afternoon Bjönn from Lynx Hut was following an elk
spoor southwards through Ré Valley.
Bjönn ran quickly, nose to earth. He crossed wide marshes and small
bogs where the dwarfed pines spread their wide, flat crowns like noses.
He crossed ridges and valleys, and at last his course went towards Bog
Hill.