whom they called Mrs. Braathe, and who talked town language. And there
was so much gold in his teeth that when he laughed his mouth was like
an entire sunrise.... That grand gentleman was Hans from Vermin Camp
who left the district on a sledgeful of old cheese.
The schoolmaster first took two or three readings of the letter, his
lips forming the words but not his tongue. Then he read aloud:
“MR. SJUR RENDEN,
“From my good friend up there I learn that there runs in the woods a
remarkable elk, which no forest-men can manage to kill. Of course a
great deal of superstition is connected with the animal, the dalesmen
of Lower Valley being presumably as superstitious now as when I was a
child. Lower Valley is on the outskirts of civilisation. But if you,
who are, as I have heard, the greatest hunter in those parts, would
consent to guide me on a trip after the mysterious elk, you would give
great pleasure to an old acquaintance. I long for Ré Valley.
“Please send me an answer.
“With kind regards,
“Yours truly,
“H. BRAATHE.”
The schoolmaster folded up the letter looking as if he had accomplished
a great deed, something that no one else in all the valley could manage.
“You’ll answer for me, won’t you?” said Gaupa. “You’ll say he can come?”
And going home to Lynx Hut he felt himself greater than before. A
gentleman from Branæs had sent him a letter, saying it would be a
pleasure to have his company. The last “Yours truly” sounded so full of
respect and so courteous that one might think it had been written in
mockery.
§ 16
One day Mr. Braathe knocked at the door of Lynx Hut. Gaupa was at home,
but did not answer. What did that knocking mean? After another knock he
went to open the door.
Mr. Braathe was a long lath of a man, who seemed to have been pulled
too hard length-ways and grown too narrow. Everything about him hung
loosely—his cheeks, shoulders, even his clothes. He was as shrivelled
up as a bat.
“Please sit down on the bed,” said Gaupa; “there are no more lice there
than the fleas have managed to eat.”
That was a joke he usually quoted to strangers, but this time he swore
to himself the moment he had said it. The man before him hailed from
Vermin Camp, and might think the words an allusion to his past.
But Mr. Braathe kept smiling, and asked Gaupa to call him plain Hans
just as in the old days.
That same evening they stood on the slope above Tolleiv Mountain Farm
in Ré Valley. Bjönn was not with them, because Hans did not want him,
and in Gaupa’s opinion even a dog could not avail when he was hunting
Rauten.
If Gaupa had nursed any ideas about the townsman being worth but
little, he was mistaken. Gaupa walked quickly all day, but Hans kept
up with him, and there was not a sign of perspiration about him. Once
he took out from his bag a strange instrument, a short trumpet of
birch-bark with a kind of mouthpiece at one end.
Hans was a much-travelled man. He once saw nothing for nights and days
but sea and sky. He had smelt the smoke from Red Men’s camp fires.
While he spoke, Gaupa grew silent and his eyes sought the far distance.
He was not there in a boggy hollow on the Ré Valley slopes. He followed
this tall man through endless woods on the other side of the earth,
in a country which to Gaupa’s mind had always been more dream than
reality. They seemed to be under a tree, and beside them crouched a
copper-coloured Indian with burning eyes. He had a similar birch-bark
trumpet in his hand. The wilds of Canada spread out under the clouds.
It was early morning. Somewhere a beaver splashed into a calm pool.
Farther away a duck was heard.
Then the Red Indian, their guide, moved his moccasins with infinite
care, turned towards the rosy dawn over the earth in the east and
lifted the birch-bark trumpet to his mouth. At first he only breathed
into it as if to warm it. It was a cold autumn morning, as silent as
death, except for the occasional splash of the beaver....
The Red Indian lowered his instrument, raised it again, and out of
it floated the mating call of an elk, loud and living, luring and
treacherous.
Hans arose, saying that that night they would lure the wizard elk. The
birch-bark instrument had accompanied him in the wilds of Canada, and
more than one crowned head had been turned by it. It would be a strange
thing indeed if Rauten were not fooled also.... All that talk about the
Ré Valley Swede was the most arrant nonsense, he declared.
Gaupa did not care to show himself superstitious to his companion,
for superstition was old-fashioned amongst the genteel. Therefore he
guessed that Rauten was an elk like other elks. He ate grass, mated
with the cows in the autumn, and when he died he would die like a he
goat. No restless spirit would fly out of his nostrils.
§ 17
It was the following night.
On the slopes of Black Mountain Rauten stood on a rock, listening, his
ears waving alternately backwards and forwards. His beard hung stiff
and awe-inspiring. He was listening for a cow. They usually can be
heard at dusk during mating time.
The weather was not quite calm. A darkish cloud sailed slowly above
Black Mountain. Just below him in the river there were mild rapids and
the water bubbled incessantly against the rocks like a boiling kettle.
Farther up the slope Hans and Gaupa sat under a spruce tree, the lower
branches of which touched the earth. They sat as if in a tent, on soft
reindeer moss, hardly daring to move. Hans produced a flask, and Gaupa
poured the golden brandy down his throat without a word. Little by
little the forest grew veiled. Over the east mountains daylight faded
away, the roar of Ré River seemed incessant and more wide awake than
ever. The sound was uneven, which meant that there was movement in the
air. That was bad luck.
Hans bent towards Gaupa. “I wonder if we shall have an answer
to-night,” he whispered.
“This is the best elk ground in all Ré Valley,” Gaupa whispered back.
Then once more they sat as still as stones, and Gaupa felt the brandy
on his tongue for a long time.
The night before they had tried the trumpet trick, but no bull answered
them.
That afternoon they found Rauten’s spoor just below where they were
then sitting. A young pine showed white spots on its bark and several
branches were broken.
There the wizard elk had rubbed his antlers; the marks were so fresh,
perhaps only made that day.
As darkness came on, Gaupa’s excitement grew. Hearing seemed to fill
every part of his body. He was nothing but ears....
Hans regarded this strange being beside him. Gaupa’s face was so very
short, with next to no chin, and that is rare, for surely energetic
people generally have strong chins. Now and then he jerked his head
sharply and suddenly, as if he heard something that made him jump
every once in a while. Then Hans saw Gaupa smile, and a smile had not
been seen on Gaupa’s face all that trip. He was smiling, a strange,
stiff-lipped smile, and turning to Hans he asked:
“D’you hear him?”
Hans had not heard a sound. But Gaupa’s keen ear had caught a sound so
faint as scarcely to be one at all—the mating cry of a bull elk. The
sound seemed to come from below and from the north. Silence reigned
around them once more. Gipsy Lake had a silvery streak along its
eastern banks. It was the reflection of the northern sky.
Hans carefully pressed the birch-bark mouthpiece against his lips,
stuck the other end out through the pine branches, and blew. The call
of a cow elk rang out: “Come, come.”
Then all was silence.
A quarter of an hour later Hans once more lifted his instrument.... He
stopped, startled.
Immediately to the north, silhouetted against the bright sky in the
opening of the valley, an elk bull stood on a mountain ridge. Hans
could see the sky between its legs and also two ears and enormous,
shovel-shaped antlers.
The elk did not move, and stood out like a statue against the sky above
the valley.
Gaupa cocked his gun. “Rauten,” he whispered, and it sounded like a
sob. He had seen the mutilated ear. At that moment the bull stepped
down from the ridge, straight towards them, and darkness hid him from
their view.
Then they heard “Örrke—örrk,” a kind of nasal grunt, approaching
nearer and nearer. A dry twig cracked, and in the clearing a pine
stump shimmered with a greyish gleam. The roar from Ré River seemed
far distant, as if withdrawn, but suddenly it sounded close again, the
forest gave a sigh, and Gaupa saw a lichen tuft move slightly just
above Hans’s head.
Then the noise of the elk ceased as if suddenly cut off. There was not
a sound. The minutes crawled past. There was still silence.
Gaupa turned.
“Weathered!” he whispered.
But Rauten trotted northwards along the edge of the long Ré marshes
hour after hour. He had heard the luring call of a cow, went to meet
her, and found man. What a strange thing to happen!... And Rauten ran
on. It is bad to be where man is.
[Illustration]
§ 18
It was the same autumn, later on in September, one night at Lynx Hut.
Bjönn was asleep on the bed. “The Tempest” hung on the wall. A wooden
box, converted, formed Gaupa’s cobbler’s workshop. A tiny paraffin
lamp gave him a sleepy light for the work he had in hand, mending a
shoe. On the box awls, plugs, tacks, waxed thread, and heel irons were
heaped together, for Gaupa was very far from being a tidy man.
The patch finished, he pulled out from under the bed a violin case,
took out his instrument and turned it round in his hands as softly as
if caressing it. Then he lifted it to his chin and made a stroke to
test the tuning, but when he touched the tenor and bass strings the
violin sang so sadly, sweetly, and wildly at the same time, just the
tune that will sometimes rise up out of black, hidden river-filled
gullies. The violin was tuned for magic.
A lively country dance leaped from the strings. Bjönn woke up and
opened his eyes, but shut them again. A few dying embers glowed red
through the draught-hole in the stove, and when Gaupa had finished and
sat in deep reflection the sound of a watch ticking filled the silence.
It was getting on for one o’clock in the morning, but that was Gaupa’s
most wide-awake hour.
Steps were heard outside, and Bjönn barked. “Whisht,” said Gaupa. There
was a knock, Gaupa unlocked his door, which as it happened he had
locked that night.
“Evening,” said somebody in the dark.
“Evening,” Gaupa replied; “are you out walking so late?”
Hans Holmen stood outside, exactly in the line between darkness and
the yellow lamplight from within. His coat was unbuttoned and a nickel
watchchain gleamed across his waistcoat. He carried a fishing-rod over
one shoulder, and Gaupa saw the white top move softly in the dark.
“Oh,” said Hans Holmen again, “it’s early rather than late. It is just
about one o’clock.”
Gaupa waited. Full well he knew that Hans must have a very special
reason for coming in the night like that.
Then Hans began to relate how he was fishing along the river. There
was a dense thicket of bushes growing along the bank and he was well
hidden. While he was baiting his hook an enormous animal came out of
the undergrowth just to the south of him. At first he thought it was a
horse, and wondered why it had no bell, and besides it was not quite
the shape of a horse either. When the animal waded out into the river
he saw it against the sky-line and recognised it as an elk of unusual
size.
Hans Holmen went close up to Gaupa. He lowered his voice as if telling
a secret.
“‘Twas the wizard elk I saw,” he said; “I saw the mark of your knife.”
He waited.
“Well,” he summed up the situation, “I thought I’d better tell you,
when I saw the light in your window. That elk waded across the river
and went up the other side, so now you know where to find his spoor.”
Hans Holmen left, and Gaupa closed the door. He remained for some
seconds staring down on the floor, standing in his shirt and trousers.
But out on the high road Hans Holmen went straight homewards and not
towards the river.
In Lynx Hut the petroleum lamp was still burning. Gaupa went to and fro
slowly, busy as usual. He baked potato flap-jacks on his stove, filled
the wooden butter cup, and made ready for a tramp with his knapsack,
Bjönn, and “The Tempest.”
About three o’clock he went to the corner cupboard, and after some
fumbling produced an old-fashioned leather purse. Out of it he took
a slightly flattened lead bullet, as big as a small potato, dirty,
knobby, and rough.
That bullet had a name, for it was called the Swede’s Bullet. Gaupa’s
father was a soldier at Matrand in 1814, and he shot a Swede who was
standing against a tree-trunk. The bullet went straight through him
and into the bole of the tree. Afterwards his father picked out that
bullet, and ever since the family had regarded it as a priceless
possession.
It could heal wounds and cure illness as well as any doctor. Gaupa
never forgot the old crofter who had an ulcer in his leg. Gaupa went
to him with the Swede’s Bullet and stroked the leg with it in a circle
round the ulcer. From that day the ulcer stopped spreading; it could
not pass outside the circle where the Swede’s bullet had touched the
skin.
But then Gaupa reflected whether he should sacrifice the priceless lump
of lead and melt it into a bullet for Rauten.
Rauten, being no ordinary elk, could probably not be killed by ordinary
bullets. All the old people believed that there are many animals which
demand a special ammunition if you want to shoot them.
But should he really give up the Swede’s bullet?
If it could assist him to kill the wizard elk, the whole district would
look upon him as a great man. He would be famous in the valley, and
the fact would not easily be forgotten that he was the man who killed
Rauten.
For many years he had avoided the beast. For to be quite honest he had
to admit that bad luck followed the one who hunted it. Why was he so
ill when he shot at the wizard elk at Morsæter? They saw the spoor and
knew what animal it was which he saw like a vision in the moonlight.
But while he was conscious of his childish fear of Rauten, he always
felt a tantalising desire to see the end of him, to kill him, and cart
that enormous body down into the Lower Valley, to exhibit it to the
dalesmen and listen to their comments.
Oh what a day that would be! The small boys would gaze at him and Bjönn
in deep admiration not unmingled with fear, and the old women would
shake their heads knowingly and predict disaster to him....
The Swede’s bullet weighed heavily in his hand, heavier than ordinary
lead. Unknown forces were imprisoned in the metal, and it must not
go out of the family’s possession. But Gaupa had no relatives in the
Valley. He was an only child, his parents were dead, all his other
kinsmen had gone away across the Blue Atlantic. When he died the
Swede’s bullet would be homeless, so to speak, and that ought not to
happen.
Gaupa decided to melt down the Swede’s Bullet.
He made a big fire in the stove under a kind of small pan in which he
usually melted his lead. He gazed very earnestly at the Swede’s bullet
as it lost form and flattened down until at last it was one big drop of
lead in the pan, glittering like a flame, as mysterious as a mountain
lake under the moon.
Suddenly Bjönn, who lay upon the bed, grew restless. He looked up at
his master, whimpering softly. What on earth was the matter with the
dog? “Quiet!” said Gaupa.
Bjönn rolled himself up again, head under tail. But when Gaupa poured
the molten lead into the bullet mould, the dog once more raised his
head and whined.
How strange! Was the dog ill? Perhaps it was rheumatism. For Bjönn was
growing old. He had the pale-blue eyes and the dimmed pupils which
indicate age. But he was fairly brisk as yet. What was it he carried on
like that for?
[Illustration]
Gaupa went up to the dog and stroked his head. Bjönn flattened his ears
as a sign of content and calmed down.
The lead had cooled, and Gaupa took out the bullet, fresh and shiny.
But it was not like other bullets. It had killed once; it knew its way,
and wherever this bullet hit the elk’s body, death would radiate from
it as if from a poisoned arrow. Heaven have mercy upon Rauten!
Bjönn again raised his head, whimpering, when Gaupa placed the bullet
in the cartridge.
It was four o’clock in the morning. He extinguished the lamp and crept
to bed beside Bjönn. Now and then he opened his eyes to look for dawn
through the window.
§ 19
That morning an elk bull lay quietly at the upper end of Owl Glen. It
was Rauten. He had come from the other side of the valley from the
eastern mountains. A dog with a terrible voice in his throat had chased
him for half a day, and at last Rauten had swum across Lower Valley
River.
But he wanted to go back to Ré Valley, for that was his home. There for
months peace reigned in the woods until it entered his own shaggy body
and made him at one with the deep silence of the mountains.
Peace was the depth of his nature. He wanted to see, unseen. He liked
to stand at the edge of the bogs, looking at the capercailzie hen with
all her brood. He liked to see the ever-frightened hare nibbling the
grass undisturbed. That was peace, and each day offered fresh joys,
however old—a feed of juicy grass not yet withered in some marshy
place, a few waterlilies in a mountain lakelet. For him life was food,
sleep, and rest, and then feeding again. Life was light and darkness,
sun and rain, heat and cold.
He slept at all times of day and night, but as lightly as if even
in his sleep all the tiny sounds of the wilderness reached his
consciousness. They floated about his ears, and the least unusual
crackling let them all into his brain at once, and he was wide awake.
Rauten lived on his instinct—that is, on the experiences accumulated
by countless generations through all ages and in all countries.
Experiences had glided into him as murmuring brooklets run into the sea.
When he ran towards the wind, and not before it, it was because he had
to do so. When he ran away from the scent of man, elks long since dead
whispered soundless warnings in his ears. The fear of man was a seed
which had been growing since the first arrow flew twirling and singing
into the shoulder of an elk and caused life to ebb out of it.
Rauten was lying in Owl Glen this grey morning, with the sleepy murmur
from Lower River before him, and a tiny trickle of water over the rocks
beside him. That little trickle was a tiny life. A drop fell, and there
was an attentive silence, then another drop splashed. Higher up in
the glen an owl sat immovable, big sprouts of feather sprouting from
the head, yellow eyes staring blindly at the daylight, her beak still
bloody after the night’s hunting.
Far below Gaupa was following an elk’s spoor, breathing heavily. He
held Bjönn on the leash, and the dog nosed the earth as if seeking
something. Once in a while he would snort and tug hard, straight into
the mountain, into Owl Glen.
The glen was narrow, with walls of rock on either side, the mountain
ash glowing in autumnal glory, and the bracken turning gold. A hawk
flew out with a cry, and the sound echoed backwards and forwards from
rock to rock, growing into a strong volume of sound, like a loud call
in empty space.
The man and the dog crawled upwards. Suddenly Bjönn threw up his head.
He had caught the open scent, and Gaupa unfastened the dog’s collar,
quietly and carefully.
When the foresters lie in their huts on long winter evenings they often
tell of Gaupa and Bjönn and the wizard elk.
The old men amongst them still remember from their boyhood the wild
chase which began that morning in Owl Glen, and lasted one day, two
days, three days. The end came on the night of the third day.
Rauten lay peacefully in Owl Glen, his ears on the alert, one cocked
forwards and the other backwards.
Then he started up from his lair, and ran. The wakeful conscience
of the woods had been disturbed. A small pebble loosened and fell
clattering downwards, a black deer-hound with a grey nose and grey legs
ran out from amongst the scrub, the elk bull turned tail, and strode
westwards on his long legs. That was the beginning. Down in Lower
Valley the parlour clocks struck seven, and the chimneys gave forth
light smoke into the grey morning.
A little later a man stood where the two had left, staring into the
west.
He opened his mouth as if to inhale something from the air. He placed
his hand behind his ear, inclining his head, his mouth always open.
His eyes were far away from the world about him. They looked at the
earth, but in the far distance.
The hills swam westwards towards the naked bulk of Ré Mountain, wave
upon wave in long, easy swell.
Two animals were running towards Ré Mountain, a big one in front, a
smaller one after. They were fighting over the distance between them,
at times increasing and then again diminishing. The elk ploughed
through the undergrowth with his long, heavy body, his antlers swishing
through the green pine needles, his legs clip-clapping evenly and
surely. When he lifted them his hoofs touched with a sound like dry
sticks beating each other. Once in a while an antler would bang heavily
against a tree-trunk.
Rauten kept up a steady, even trot; his flight was unhurried and
unafraid, as was in keeping with the greatest beast in the forest, the
strongest and wildest of elks, between valley and mountain. He ran
because somehow it seemed wise, not because he was afraid. His nozzle
was raised almost horizontally and his antlers lay along his back.
Bjönn ran after him. His tongue had grown too long—protruding out of
his mouth, his eyes were wild, and the earth burnt his paws, which
barely touched the ground only to fly up again. He divided up the
distance in lightning leaps. Pine needles clung to his fur, and the
shaggy body of the dog flew along like some enormous insect.
Gaupa was forgotten in the dog’s mind, all men were forgotten. He went
back thousands of years when the wolves howled along elk spoors in Ré
Valley. He was one of them, a dog which no man’s hand had caressed, and
no man’s eyes had subdued.
Those grey, fleeting elk legs in front of him called up a bloodthirsty
song in his sinews. Passion howled within him, and off and on when he
gained on the elk his throat howled out. It was not Bjönn from Lynx
Hut, it was the voice of dead wolves returning.
His nose no longer sought the earth, he ran through a thick reek of
scent. Every breath filled his nostrils with the maddening smell of
game, and everything about him seemed to run. Red pine trunks ran to
meet him and Rauten, spruce trees crawled forward, jumping across the
marshes. They were left behind, but fresh ones came again and again and
again.
Gaupa lifted his head. His eyes returned from the far distance and
sought a certain point on the western slopes, a spruce-clad hillock
where the silver birches blazed like a flame, and there his gazed
fixed. From that hillock came a sound, sudden and unexpected, like a
spark from a fire of thorns.
“Wow!” It was a dog’s voice, clear and strained, let out of a throat
which had quite enough to do with mere breathing.
The voice on the hillock spoke no more.
Gaupa remained in Owl Glen. He did not hurry. He wanted to be quite
sure where Rauten was going, and from his post he could hear half a
league away.
A short time afterwards Bjönn barked from the same place, deep-voiced
and growling, as a watch-dog barks at strangers. Rauten was at bay!
“Wow! Wow! Wow!”
Then Gaupa began to run, his gun in his hand, its muzzle glaring black,
and inside there was a cartridge with the Swede’s Bullet.
Gaupa was hidden in the forest, but appeared again on a hillock
farther on, stopped listening as he pushed back his lucky cap. Then he
was submerged in the greenery once more.
The dog’s voice to the west was the only token of life on the slopes,
breaking the silence incessantly at short, regular intervals like the
ticking of a grandfather’s clock.
Bjönn was barking at some close-grown spruce copse. It looked as if he
were talking to it, again and again without receiving any answer.
In there amongst the spruce bushes some thin, grey tree trunks seemed
to move once in a while. They were the elk’s legs. Some rough boughs
with brown bark, just like a small bush, moved amongst the spruce
needles. They were the elk’s antlers.
Rauten stood there. Apparently he was not very much concerned about the
dog. He turned his head here and there, as if he had a suspicion of
something intangible yet dangerous in the forest around him.