off, but no elk bull, only to the farmer’s eye the cow looked strangely
shamefaced. He also found elk spoors, so evidently the lad had spoken
the truth. But that spoor was Rauten’s, for Martin recognised it.
Now, as the dairymaid knew, “Drople” had been ready for play, but
strange to say she did not seem to care for a strange bull which
happened to come near their mountain farm.
Nine months later “Drople” was kicking and raving in the Lyhus cowshed
in the Valley and she could not give birth to her calf. The dairymaid
went in and woke up Martin Lyhus. Her white kerchief gleamed in the
light of her cowshed lantern, the ends hanging under her chin like long
ears, when shaking her head she declared that the farmer himself had
better come out and take that calf. He wasn’t no real cattle crittur,’
that he was not, for “Drople” had mated with that wizard devil’s beast
in Ré Mountain. Now she could not drop her calf.
Well, Martin went out, but for all he strove and laboured he could not
bring that calf. Then he fetched Tolleiv Skoro, who was something of a
vet. And Tolleiv bit his tongue, as he always did when treating cattle,
and he worked and worked till that calf lay beside “Drople” in the
straw.
But what a miracle of a calf! Mercy upon us!
Its legs were half as long again as they should have been, its colour
was dark, snout long like an elk’s, and there was next to no tail!
The dairymaid trampled across the shed in her dirty boots.
“Martin,” she said, “you look into its eyes.”
Martin did not see anything remarkable in the calf’s eyes.
“You kill him as soon as ever morning comes,” said the woman. “I won’t
handle no crittur with eyes like human beings.”
They killed the calf and buried it.
“Such foolish womenfolks,” Martin Lyhus pooh-poohed; but he had to give
in; for his wife was at one with the maid in the matter, and you know
the ways of womenfolks....
Only that was not the end of it all.
“Drople’s” milk had such a queer taste that no one in all Lyhus farm
would drink it. They could only use it for cheese and such-like, and
the next autumn the skin of “Drople” hung inside out on the back wall
of the barn.
Something else happened the summer after “Drople” was killed. It was
at the Lyhus Mountain farm, which lies in a wooded valley west of Ré
Valley, and elks used to live there in summer.
One night the dairymaid saw a head in the forest, half a human head and
half an elk’s head it was, poking out from a closely grown spruce tree.
She saw nothing else but the head, nobody, only a tremendous pair of
antlers.
The head stared at her and did not move, only stared. She felt as if
she were standing in icy-cold water up to the chin. She whispered the
name of Jesus towards the head and then took to her heels towards
the hut, mumbling bits of the catechism while she ran, from the Ten
Commandments to the Creed, and she was half dead when at length she was
safe in the hut.
“What’s the matter?” asked the farmer’s wife.
The maid was silent. She sat down and said nothing.
“Dear me, what ails thee?” the housewife asked again.
“I am too scared to tell.”
“Scared?”
“Yes, it’s more like blaspheming, it is. I saw a deer’s head round by
Grey Hill.”
Anne Lyhus had rolled up her sleeves. She was at work salting and
kneading a lump of butter.
“Haven’t you seen a deer’s head before this?” she asked.
“Yes, but that deer’s head had eyes like a human being. And worst of
all I recognised them!”
Anne gasped.
“Recognised them?”
“‘Twas the eyes of the Swede. If it’s my last words on earth. I swear
they were the eyes of the Ré Valley Swede!”
§ 11
The moonlight had reached Gaupa in the hut. Bjönn jumped up to him in
bed, nosed his head and licked his hair, tail wagging. Gaupa stroked
Bjönn’s head.
“Poor doggie mine,” he whispered. The dog lay down beside him, but with
raised head, and stared through the window across the marshes.
In a little while the bed started falling over. The bed turned over and
Gaupa turned over against the table. It felt as if the bed was trying
to throw him out and get rid of him, and he grabbed the skins with both
hands, holding on as tight as tight. He had never felt such a sensation
before.
There now, he was level again—how delightful! The bed calmed down;
but what a number of lakes and brooks there were in that square of
moonlight on the floor! A flood of little brooklets.... And then the
bed began to tilt again, it turned upside down, and Gaupa clenched his
fists, holding on for dear life till the perspiration ran down his
skull.
Day dawned. Gaupa was talking to himself with eyes closed, while the
stars vanished one by one.
On the brink of the precipice towards the Ré Valley stood Rauten.
He could feel that gadfly constantly stinging in his left shoulder. He
nosed the place, but only found the hole where the gadfly had crept in.
His skin bled from the bite of that gadfly which bit into him, when the
thunder roared, over near Morsæter. What a strange gadfly!
But that gadfly was lying close by a bone, on the shoulder-blade. It
was hard and thick and flat. Once it had lived inside the barrel of
Gaupa’s rifle, but the night had been so bright and it had flown out
into the moonlight.
Another day came into being.
The man abed in the mountain hut cried out aloud again and again,
“Bjönn!” he called, and each time the dog crept up to lick the man’s
face.
About noon a wind arose, blowing somewhat hard. The broken pane rattled
and there was a draught in the room. The wind falling down the chimney
played a little with some fine cobweb under a beam in the roof and
escaped through the window again.
The wind blew hard and then calmed down, blew hard and calmed down once
more, and between each gust the hut only seemed to wait for the next.
Suddenly there was a sharp noise in the lock of the door and Bjönn
jumped down from the bed, barking. But the door swung on its hinges,
and made a yawning gulf out towards the sunlight outside. Probably
the wind did it, or was it the forewarning spirit of a man following
behind? Several hours passed and no man entered, so it could not have
been a spirit after all.
And there was another night and another day.
Outside Bjönn wailed to the heavens, while the wind thrashed the forest
till it waved like a dark green sea.
After a while the dog trotted eastwards along the path by the lake. He
grew smaller as the distance increased, he trotted steadily along the
beaten path. When there was a dip or a mound he disappeared, to dive up
again soon afterwards, but finally there was no reappearance.
Then Gaupa was quite alone in the mountain hut.
Only he was not there at all. Suddenly he had entered strange
underground passages where breathing was difficult and which were so
narrow that he could scarcely move. He lay flat, he tried to bend his
knees and sit up on his haunches, but the place was too narrow. Then
he attempted to pull himself forward on his stomach, tried with all
his might, for soon there would be no more air in there. It was half
dark and he could not find his way out. The passage was crooked like
a fox’s lair, with no beginning and no end. He crawled forward in mad
terror, lest he should never find a way out.
Then suddenly a shot rang out there, and all was blank.
After a while he crawled again, crawled—crawled to find a way out which
he could not see.
§ 12
Bjönn trotted down the path to Spænde Lake. Here and there yellow
and brownish leaves were in his path, and when he trampled them they
rustled like a fire of twigs.
Where the slopes began to fall steeply towards Lower Valley, a
wood-cutter stood beside a marked spruce. At the height of a man’s head
a strip of bark had been flayed off so that bare flesh of the tree
could be seen. The strip of bark hung down like a long tongue; one
might imagine the tree putting its tongue out at the forester.
But the wielder of an axe is not one to defy! “Bang!” said the tree
trunk, when the lightning steel cut a chip from its body.
The strokes of the axe sounded even and regular from the forest; they
might almost be the pulse of the woods.
Bjönn stopped a little to the west, listening. The sounds reminded him
of something and called up a picture of Gaupa outside Lynx Hut cutting
firewood, bending and straightening his body as the axe was lifted and
fell. The stroke of axe and human beings go together, Bjönn knew that.
Over there in that woodland slope there must be people.
Soon afterwards the wood-cutter heard the heather whispering behind
him. His axe was still in the middle of a branch, and he turned his
face bearded with a week-old stubble.
He saw a dog standing there, looking at him, wagging his tail, and
saying as plainly as anything:
“Good day to you. I see you are cutting timber.”
“That is the deer-hound belonging to Gaupa,” the wood-cutter thought,
for everybody knew Bjönn just as everybody knew the parson or the
sheriff. Bjönn was an elk hunter by the grace of God; he provided long
elk hams for their store-rooms and long elk antlers over their doors.
Yes indeed, everybody knew Bjönn.
“Is that you, Bjönn?” the wood-cutter said softly; he left his axe and
went up to the dog to stroke him with a hand sticky with resin.
But the dog behaved very strangely—just like a puppy. He jumped off as
if in play, made a leap and stopped to look backwards at the forester.
He wagged his tail a little as puppies do when they want to play.
“You’re a funny dog,” the wood-cutter thought.
The dog made several leaps, looked backwards, asking the forester to
follow him. But that wood-cutter had only a tiny space in his head
where his wits lived, barely space enough to contain the idea of
timber, axes, pork, and coffee. Therefore he understood nothing at all
of what the dog wished to say, and started cutting timber again. An
enormous spruce fell down, a giant of the forest which stood at his
post and fell there like a faithful veteran.
Bjönn waited. The man cut off a slice of bread and gave it to him.
Bjönn wolfed it down. He would have liked more for sure, but the
wood-cutter could not afford it, for a man who fetches his living from
between the bark and the wood does not readily throw away good food
into a dog’s mouth.
Bjönn waited. He wanted the man to go with him to the Morsæter Hut. It
was not as it should be that his master remained in bed day after day
without moving, and without getting up.
“You be off and find your master,” said the wood-cutter, making as if
to chase him with one arm. “You go along after Sjur.”
Bjönn only cocked his ears and remained.
“Fool,” said the man; “changeling,” he said.
Evening came, and the man met two of his mates at their hut. Bjönn was
still with him, and they soon agreed that he must have lost his way,
and God only knew where his master was.
Then the wood-cutter told the others of the dog’s strange behaviour
when he first arrived. One of the men, who had much beard, many years
and much experience, said thoughtfully:
“It can’t be possible that something wrong has happened to Gaupa?”
“Certainly not,” the first one replied. “No wrong’d ever befall Gaupa,
he who is for ever making his bed under the nearest tree. Gaupa can
look after himself, no doubt about that.”
Bjönn had been sitting still near the door, but then he scratched to
get out. The door was opened and fastened again. Pork spluttered in a
pan, a kettleful of coffee boiled over and vomited at the spout.
§ 13
Bjönn trotted westwards again. The wind had calmed down, and in the sky
above a low ridge God had lit a tiny star.
In a brief hour Bjönn entered the fence at Morsæter.
The door of the hut had been thrown back and was only slightly ajar. A
narrow grey nozzle entered the gap, and Bjönn stepped in. Breathing was
coming from the bed.
The dog jumped up and crawled lazily forwards to the sack of provisions
which formed the sick man’s pillow. Gaupa was uncovered, lying on his
back fully clothed, his beard streaming over his chest.
He was conscious now, and clearly recalled how he shot the elk in the
moonlight, but how long ago that was he did not know. Time was blurred
in his mind. Anything not connected with the elk he could not recollect.
There was Bjönn. The dog placed a cool wet nozzle against his chin. He
saw that the door was open and remembered seeing him enter, and the
thought begot the idea that sooner or later the dog would seek people,
and the important thing would then be that he should carry something
which would take a message to anyone he met.
After some reflections he loosened his watchchain from his waistcoat
and tied it round the dog’s collar.
Was it morning or evening, dawn or gloaming? It might be either, but
after a time the darkening dusk, which came like something soft and
fleecy, convinced him that night was advancing.
What about that shot at the elk?...
Perhaps he had struck the beast somewhere in the body. It was
impossible to say, for the deer might well run as it did even if it
were hit. Perhaps he struck the belly, and Gaupa’s imagination clearly
pictured how that bullet would tear the intestines until their contents
would run out like a thick butter. The elk would run with a flaming
fire inside—Gaupa could almost feel it inside himself.
He wondered at himself for his pity—it was more like a woman than like
him, Gaupa, who never before had cared whether he only wounded an elk
or killed it. But now a curious tenderness invaded his whole being,
and the bare thought of a wound gave him pain, downright physical
pain. Most distinctly of all he could feel the possibility of a hit in
the lungs—if the elk could no longer draw a full breath, but had to
gasp for air. The lungs filled with something that stopped breath and
blurred sight. The nose began dripping blood—the elk would be choked....
And Gaupa thought that if he went out alive from that mountain hut he
would never more be careless where he sent a bullet into an animal.
Either he would be sure that his shot could kill, or he would not shoot.
He was fully conscious throughout the evening.
Those eyes came back to him, as he had seen them off and on during
later years, when dreaming or half asleep.
He saw a forest at dusk, it may be one summer evening. Everything was
asleep about him, but over there amongst the spruce something was
alive, two moist, brownish, living spots side by side. And in another
direction he also saw two living eyes, and he knew them. They were the
eyes of dead elks shot years ago, calves bereft of their mothers. Such
eyes looked at him from behind every tree and every bush; they blamed
him and accused him, the elk souls from the land of shades.
A trembling fear assailed him; he turned and turned to get away from
the staring glances which caught his own irresistibly. He ran with
feet like lead that would not move; but the eyes were everywhere, they
seemed to move, staring till madness entered his soul.
Then he noticed two unlike the others. They were deer’s eyes and yet
they were not. They were the ones he had met eight years before on the
slopes of Black Mountain. Then he threw himself forward, his face in
his hands.
§ 14
The next day the farmer Halstein at Rust in Lower Valley saw Bjönn, the
dog from Lynx Hut, trotting towards the farm. The dog came into the
passage and scratched at the door. Halstein opened, and noticed that
the dog was soaking wet. Big wet marks on the floor showed where he
placed his paws. He had probably swum across the river.
What was hanging on the dog’s collar?
Halstein loosened the well-worn brass chain, looked at it, and said to
his wife:
“This chain belongs to old Gaupa. I’m thinking something must have
happened to him.”
Halstein had often followed both Bjönn and his master in the forest,
and that was why the dog fetched him for help. The dog behaved exactly
as he did with the wood-cutter the day before, running from the door to
Halstein and back again.
“Well, well, I’m coming sure,” said Halstein, packing his sack. He took
his gun from the beam in the roof, and the two walked quickly across
the meadow. When he reached the bank of the river the dog jumped first
into the boat, and on the other side they were swallowed up by the
forest.
The man and the dog walked for hours, along narrow forest paths, across
murmuring brooklets, and through birch bush. Bjönn never wavered, he
was going back on his own tracks, and he never walked so far as to be
out of Halstein’s sight.
All the time Halstein was wondering what might be the matter with
Gaupa. Perhaps he had had an accident, broken a leg.... As far as
he knew Gaupa was on the Buvas Slopes a week before, and since then
nothing had been heard of him.
The man and the dog walked on, not towards Ré Valley, but farther east.
Once they crossed a mountain ridge and stood with their feet on earth
and their body in the clear sky. Then again they descended into a
narrow valley. Morsæter Lake regarded them like a bright blue eye. They
came to a dense copse of healthy young trees, as is usually the case
near mountain summer farms, and then they were at their goal. They saw
a hut with a brown mossy roof and a cowshed with bright, new-shingled
roof.
Halstein Rust stopped outside the door. Bjönn forced his way in,
leaving the door ajar. Where Halstein stood in the sun he could see
nothing of the interior of the hut, it being darker in there, and he
was blinded by the sunlight. He heard Bjönn’s steps on the floor, but
no sound of man. Why did not Gaupa say something? Surely he must have
heard them both coming.
He cleared his throat and struck his iron-shod heel against a stone
with a loud noise, but not a whisper came from the hut. He noticed a
thin, worn-out horseshoe lying on the ground before him, and a bunch of
fir twigs which the dairymaid had made to scrub her wooden milk-pans
with last summer. He hesitated to enter, with the same icy feeling
which seized him when about to enter barns and other outlying houses
where corpses were laid out....
Then he cleared his throat once more, decisively this time as if
driving away an uncanny feeling. He walked to the door with the long,
fine steps of the forester, the latch clattered, and he stood before a
bed with a man on it. It was Gaupa. Gaupa was alive.
“Good day to you,” said Halstein, half astonished with a question in
his voice, as if he had not expected to find Gaupa there. “Are you in
bed?” he asked.
“I’ve been sick,” Gaupa replied.
Soon afterwards smoke curled up from the chimney, and Halstein Rust
carried a wooden pail to the well, north of the pasture. When he
returned Gaupa had something ready, which had occupied his thoughts
while the other was away.
“The first thing you must do when you go home,” he said, “is to send a
message to Christopher Hovtun, that there is the flesh of an elk bull
awaiting him near the little bog under Bog Hill.”
Halstein could not keep back a smile.
“What about a doctor? Would he not be almost as important?”
That same day he returned perspiring to Lower Valley, harnessed his
mouse-grey mare in his carriole and drove away northwards through the
valley, his stiff, black, Sunday-best hat on his head. And that same
night a man with starched linen, spectacles, and thin white hands was
riding along the forest paths towards Morsæter. The moon hung in the
heavens like a yellow lantern lighting his path, while the farmer’s boy
from Rust followed him.
[Illustration]
When they reached the hut they heard a deep bark from within. The
doctor descended stiffly from the saddle, and it was quite ridiculous
to see that from town-habit he knocked at the door before entering.
For three weeks afterwards there was smoke curling up from the Morsæter
chimney every day. One day in the fourth week Gaupa and Bjönn stood at
the door of Lynx Hut. Gaupa was sickly pale.
But farthest out in Ré Valley where the round head of Ré Mountain seems
to bend forwards to look down into the valley, Rauten stood in a marshy
place still feeling that nasty gadfly which bit his shoulder. He could
not reach it with his tongue, and could only lick the hole where it had
crawled under the skin. He did not get rid of that gadfly until winter
gleamed on the mountain peaks and Gaupa’s lead bullet was surrounded by
a covering of tissue.
§ 15
Gaupa was not his old self all that winter.
He stayed indoors making shoes, and felt cold if he went out. His body
seemed to have become open so as to let in the wind and the cold.
But he recovered when spring came. He resembled a strong tree. A
wound is covered with resin and the tree is whole again. The same
thing happened to Gaupa. Slowly but surely weakness grew out of him.
And by the next autumn any number of old footwear lay under his bed
awaiting his treatment. But Gaupa had no time for work. His short,
muscle-hardened legs were trotting over ridges and far horizons.
That autumn neither he nor any others learned any news of Rauten, and
not even the spoor was seen of the wizard elk. Very likely he had gone
to some other forests.
Let me see now—did anything worth recording happen to Gaupa?
Yes, he shot an elk bull on a prohibited ground. If the thing had
been made known it would have resulted in a thumping big fine; and as
Gaupa had nothing with which to pay a fine, it would have meant prison
instead. Therefore he did a very sensible thing. He cut off one of
the elk’s legs at the knee, then went outside the preserve and made
a beautifully clear elk spoor all up to where his elk lay. Then he
fetched people and said:
“Here ye are, folks. There is the spoor. I was raising him outside the
preserve, and then he ran away in there where he lies.”
Well, the men saw what there was to see. The elk had been raised
outside, though lying in the preserve. That was clear enough. The spoor
was sufficient evidence as good as a sworn witness. The men bit off a
screw of twist and would have sworn ever afterwards on their souls that
Gaupa raised the elk on lawful ground. The man who owned the forest had
half the meat, as is the custom. The sheriff had some of it for his
Christmas dinner, and proposed the health of Sjur Renna whom people
called Gaupa, the sprightliest man in the forest who fetched such
dainty food from the wilderness.
Well, it was no unusual thing. Elk hunters have a special catechism,
with the ninth commandment left out, the one about bearing false
witness. But when Gaupa skipped that commandment he made an extra
special churchy face, as candidly innocent as if his good conscience
was covering it externally.
That winter an elk fell through the ice in Lower River, a league or so
to the south. Four men helped him out again with great difficulty. That
deer had half an ear, and ran off to the western slopes, having come
from the east.
The following autumn Gaupa received a letter. It was brought to him
specially by a little boy from Rust who had no other errand.
“I was sent with a letter for you,” he said.
“A letter?” Gaupa could scarcely have been more surprised if one
morning the sun had risen in the west and had crossed the sky
backwards. A letter? A letter for Gaupa?
He put down the fat pork he was eating, wiped his hand on his trousers,
and took the letter as gingerly as if afraid it would burn his fingers.
The envelope bore some printed letters as distinct and black as those
in the Prayer Book: “H. Braaten & Co., Drammen.” Below he read “Mr.
Sjur Renden, Lower Valley.” But that was in pen-and-ink writing.
Gaupa opened the letter with his sheath knife much as he would cut open
the skin of an elk’s belly. The rustling white paper in his hands for
once brought home to his mind the fact that his hands were extremely
dirty. The paper seemed too nice for them to touch. Even that bore the
printed inscription “H. Braaten & Co., Drammen,” and below: “_Wholesale
Hardware_,” which two words he did not understand in the least. The
handwriting did not look like what he had learnt at school, round and
readable. That before him was nothing but straight lines and broken
ones crowded close together. And what a man he must be at handling a
pen, he who wrote it! The words raced across the paper like gusts of
wind, and below a whirling curl stood by itself; Gaupa guessed it was
meant for “Braathe.” He went off at once to find the schoolmaster and
have the letter read aloud. By himself he could only puzzle out a few
words here and there, like “elk,” “Ré Valley,” “superstition,” and
“Yours truly.”
H. Braaten & Co. was a man from Lower Valley who had turned genteel. He
hailed from a croft called Vermin Camp, and left home as soon as he was
out of school. He sat on a loaded trading cart when he left, and the
whole outfit reeked of well-matured old cheese.
But when he returned!...