Chapter II: Part 2

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.

There his song grew wildly excited. Gaupa was half a league farther north, but he overtook the dog within an hour. He went straight up to the helpless elk, whose legs still pawed the air. He aimed, pulled the trigger, and the bull elk moved no more.

“H’m”—Gaupa wondered.

“That is an elk bull,” he mused, “but in what a strange position! How in all the world did he happen to lie on his back between that stump and the spruce tree? It is inexplicable.”

He investigated the bog, picked up a tuft of hair which was dark, and then another which was lighter. But the whole bog looked as if someone had driven a harrow from end to end, and from side to side criss-cross.

“H’m,” Gaupa mused once more. Lord, what a fight there had been! He walked about studying the spoors. His eyes searched the earth. Two bulls had been here. One remained down there on the slope, and he had blown life out of him with his own “Tempest.” But the other bull was larger—and why, of course it was Rauten, the wizard elk. The cleft spoors stood out with curved outer edges as the spoors of a bull generally are.

Gaupa raised his head reflectingly. Round about him the calm glow of autumn burned in the air and on the earth. The slopes were multicoloured with pinewood and leafage intermingled, spotted like the coat of a lynx.

He began to flay the dead elk; but as it was too late in the day to go down in Lower Valley with the news that he had killed an elk, he decided to go east and spend the night in the nearest highland farm.

On his way he meditated on Rauten, but he was not such a fool as to try to trace him. That would be sheer waste of time. He was not such a fool as to try that. For many are the hunters who have returned with sore-pawed and worn-out dogs when they have had the wizard elk before them.

Rauten had peculiar ways. He rarely ran faster than the dogs could go, but he never really stopped, never long enough for the hunter to overtake him. He sought out all the lakes and ponds in existence, and crossed them. You might follow him for hours and hours if your dog did not give up—as he was sure to do sooner or later. Very eager dogs were known to chase Rauten till they completely lost their way, and they had been found in far-off districts past the mountain gap. Also all foresters in those parts agreed that bad luck went with the wizard elk. Petter Kleivaberget fell and broke his arm when chasing Rauten. Arne Öigarden shot his own dog in mistake for the elk—a fine dog, too, worth a hundred dollars. And the man from Krödsherred who attempted to run down Rauten on ski one winter broke both skis and as nearly as anything died in the snow. He was so weak when he reached the Tolleiv Mountain Farm that he could not walk across the pasture—he crawled on all fours and was a whole hour about it too, so it was clear to anybody how near to death’s door he had been.

No, Gaupa would not follow Rauten.

He went east to Morsæter. The house lies in a little valley branching out from the Ré Valley proper. As he walked he felt uneasy. His head was heavy and he coughed now and then; he breathed heavily going uphill—he who never used to notice a hill, he who could mount the slopes at a run. Presently he began to perspire also. Gaupa did not usually perspire for just nothing.

It was probably because he had sat down on a peak last night and felt exceedingly cold, after sunset. He had been running pretty hard just before, so that he was a little moist. And that mountain peak was quite bare, and such places are invariably rather cold.

Some years before Gaupa had had pneumonia. An epidemic raged in the district at that time, and there were many funeral parties and many sad-looking pine branches along all roads. And the young people did not dance again until Midsummer Eve.

Gaupa had really been very bad at that time, and Harald Övrejordet, the lay preacher of the valley, the high priest as they called him, came up to him and begged him to be converted from all his sins. Perhaps he would have turned from his evil ways, if he had not felt that selfsame day that the sickness had taken a turn for the better, and that he was going to get well. Therefore he was in no hurry, he would wait and see. He recovered completely and remained in sin for the time being.

But ever since then Gaupa found that if he ran really very hard a sharp needle seemed to run through his right lung. That needle was a perfect nuisance. It had cost him several horse-loads of meat, for it had forced him to stop while the elk ran away.

He felt that needle now, but, curse it, it was sure to go away again.

Towards evening the sky grew filmy, the sun dull-eyed, the earth grey. A lake to the north was just then gleaming pale under the wooded slopes. The fire went out and the lake was nothing but water.

The wet, naked rocks in the east mountains were also fiery while the sun shone. They seemed to be drops of fire which had fallen amongst mountain peaks and forests. They too went out.

Gaupa walked towards Morsæter, Bjönn on the lead. The needle in his lung was burning—a confounded nuisance and no doubt about it. It came like lightning, and so unexpectedly that it jerked his whole body. But it was sure to go away again.

In the gloaming he saw the flat pasture round the Morsæter. The forest yawned, and he reached the fence. The roof had been freshly shingled, and looked very white and clean.

He searched for the key of the door. It was usually to be found in a hole in the wall, but not so that day. He tried other places, but there was no key.

As a matter of fact Gaupa was man enough to open a lock. He also knew how to take out window frames, so tenderly and carefully that they bore no mark of axe or knife. No house was locked to him, and if the worst came to the worst he would crawl down the chimney!

The padlock was opened without trouble. Gaupa merely gave it a few mysterious taps with his sheath knife. The hook released the body of the lock and seemed to say, “Please enter.”

While Gaupa was cutting wood for the night behind the house, the echo from his axe beat his ears like shots. The sky was sleepy and cloudy. Perhaps there would be rain.

He stood by the hearth cutting chips to start a fire, and felt his head reeling. But his will controlled the knife, so that the fat pine-root chips curled before him like small bouquets.

The fire was lit, and then three living things were in the hut—Gaupa and Bjönn and the Fire. Gaupa sat on the hearth stone, creeping close to the fire. For it was cold and shivery that night, ever so cold. The boiling-hot coffee helped a little against the cold, glowing inside him for a little while, but very soon he shivered again. Cold blasts went down his spine, and they made him start and say “Damn” to the fire.

He pulled his bed near the fire. Two sheepskin rugs were there, and he found another in the next room. He went to bed with one under and two over him, but even then he felt cold. It was as if his body had ceased to produce warmth, he was cold from within, and a pang shot through his right side and would not leave him, however much he rubbed himself with his hard hand.

After a short time he fell asleep and dreamed—that he was chasing Rauten, running till he was quite winded—it was quite absurd how very much he was out of breath. And Rauten with the half-ear stood before him looking at him out of deep human eyes, but Bjönn lay still beside him licking his paw—what an idiot of a dog! But when Gaupa fired he saw the bullet leap out of the muzzle of the gun and run slowly through the air as if time was of no account, and when at last it reached Rauten’s forehead the bullet rolled down as if it were a pea, which Rauten bending low picked up and chewed, very much as Bjönn did when you gave him sugar.... And at that moment Rauten was changed into a man, the Ré Valley Swede, only he had those enormous elk horns on his head. Gaupa’s hand fumbled for another cartridge, but then he woke up, perspiring.

Morning came—after a long, long night. Gaupa wanted to go to Lower Valley with news of the elk. He flung his legs out of bed and stood on the floor. But what the devil was the matter? His head had grown so heavy; the floor rose, he had to stretch out a foot to keep it from upsetting him. He had never felt anything like it! Perhaps he was going to be taken ill out there! Perhaps he would remain in that bed as helpless as a baby! “No,” he muttered, “I’m damned if I do.”

He sat down again and put his shoes on. That was better, but he could not swallow a bite. The food seemed to grow in his mouth as soon as he had bitten it. All the same he packed his sack and went outside.

Mist engulfed him like an enormous white wave. He saw the trees like shadows, and the little barn in the meadow was hidden from sight.

With Bjönn on the lead he staggered across the meadow; and when he opened the gate in the fence, nature was so silent that the slightest noise seemed to saturate the air with sound.

He crossed the brook that runs from the little lake, and a few fish ran back into the lake, their backs so high that they moved the surface of the water. They are playing already, he thought; the trouts are laying their roe now about Michaelmas time.

Gaupa sat down. Bjönn pulled at the lead as if wishing to investigate the mist.

Gaupa felt that he was far from being well. For by that time there was a hot pang in both his sides, and his chest seemed too small for his breathing. It was four full hours’ walk to the Lower Valley. He might meet people before that. He had seen wood cutters at a place near Spæende Lake, where he passed a couple of days before, but even that is two hours’ walk, and Gaupa, the Lynx, was so uncertain of himself that he doubted whether he could manage that little bit in two hours.

In fact he began to see himself as he was that winter with pneumonia, a helpless man, whom his legs would not carry. At times he was in this world and at times in another, where everything went awhirl and upside down.

If now he should lie like that under a spruce tree between Morsæter and Spænde Lake, it would be anything but funny, No one would find him, for who could know the ways of the Lynx? It would be better to crawl back to his bed of last night than risk a sick-bed under a spruce tree.

And then Gaupa behaved in a strange way. As usual he was wearing his brown cap with a very small peak, which he had worn for ever so many years. It may seem strange that he should drag about such a rag of a cap, but there is nothing so strange about it after all, for it was a Lucky Cap, and after Bjönn and “The Tempest” it was Gaupa’s most cherished possession. Gaupa, it may be said, never went into the woods without that cap, and it showed signs of wear, for in the middle of the crown there was a round hole all through to the lining. The branches had made that when he moved about under the trees.

Gaupa took off his cap as solemnly and earnestly as if he were entering the Lower Valley Church on a Mass Sunday, but he was sitting by a mountain lake, bareheaded and black-haired in the mountain mist.

Then he flung the cap through the air, watching its flight with tense eyes. The cap turned a few somersaults, described an arch, struck the heather with a soft whisper, and lay still. Gaupa walked softly up to it and noticed very carefully the direction of the peak. It pointed to the house, and Gaupa knew then that he would go back. There could be no doubt about it.

For he believed in the power of the cap, and had never had cause to regret it. Many a time the cap had shown its remarkable power of giving good advice. When uncertain about the direction to be taken in order to find game, he had often thrown his cap, and where the peak pointed when it fell, there he went, and there the elks were, even when he could never have dreamed of finding them there. The cap was as good as a dog with a supernaturally fine scent.

Gaupa returned to the hut, and one need not laugh at him for that. Anyone living like he did sees many strange things which sound even strange in the telling. Beasts and bird and fish, yea, even trees and grass possess strange powers and may tell the future to those who have ears to hear.

Inside the but Gaupa tore off some bits of stale bread, hard as stone, for Bjönn, and then he crept in under his sheepskins.

* * * * *

It cleared up later in the day. The earth changed her face and began to smile, the last flakes of mist vanished in the air as if by magic.

At sunset a red eye seemed to shut among the peaks. A long ridge of shadows made its way up an eastern slope. It rose slowly, inexorably, like water in a lock. The last rays of the evening sun covered a hill like a red cap.

Dusk fell, but the yellow birches round the bogs seemed to have drunk the sunshine and kept it in them, so that even in the gloaming the silver birches stood out like patches of sunlight that had been forgotten. On the fence round the pasture a tiny bird poured forth clear ripples of song into the stillness of the evening.

There were no signs of life near the hut.

Inside, Bjönn was crouching at the foot of the bed, his nose under his tail and his ears flat. The hearth was black and dead, under the sheepskin rugs Gaupa lay, a quick breathing was heard. Once the dog rose to lick Gaupa’s hairy head. Then a rough hand with black nails was extended to stroke him. “Poor doggie,” someone whispered.

Then the dog curled up again at the foot of the bed, swallowed noisily a few times, and then there was no sound but the laboured breathing from the bed.

A silent fight was fought in that lonely mountain hut. A hardened body rose up against something intangible something that could not be hit, a trembling of every muscle, a heaviness in head and chest not to be shaken off. At last he was conscious that his whole body noted every single sensation, and he could not ward off a feeling of dread. Nobody had any errand up there at that time of the year. The manure had been spread over the pasture, and he could not think of any other work for the people from the valley, knowing that they had no wood-cutting to do.

Then he thought of Bjönn, whom he could feel like a warm cushion across his feet. Bjönn was a wise dog. Often when the elk had fallen, far away, the dog returned to him to tell with eyes and gesture, and he followed him to where the elk lay. Would he not also be wise enough to fetch people, if his master rose no more?

Dusk came, even in Gaupa’s brain. The sheepskins were so hot that he longed to throw them off, only he knew it would be dangerous to do so.

Sometimes his eyes opened, and then they were moist as if he were moved to tears or as if he had done a long, hard sprint. The corner of his mouth worked incessantly; he was never without that, but it did not disturb him then.

A sharp gleam of light played upon a tin pan on the wall for a very long time. Then the face of night lay close up to the window panes, looking in, and the pan ceased to gleam! Only the newly-shingled roof of the cowshed stood out white in the darkness.

§ 9

On such September nights moonlight in the mountains seems like magic.

That night the moon was full and round, a glowing pupil in the blue eye of heavens. A light mist floated over the lake, the outlines of the mountains blurred like shadows. The western Ré Mountains looked as if they had opened to let out all their hidden treasure of silver. The streamlets wormed their way like molten metal down the steep slopes; far below they foamed like avalanches of snow. When the water went to rest in the lakelets down at the bottom of the valleys, the silver gleam moved lazily below the wooded slopes. A big animal crossed a moonlit glade. It was not an animal at all, but a dream which the forest and the night see in their sleep. Long shadows fell on the glade and the deer waded in them. But the rays of the moon caressed its back with soft, trembling touch, and its eyes were wet.

Noiseless like a cat Rauten went forward, no sound under his hoofs, no crack from a broken branch. He walked as if careful not to waken what sleeps about him; but he did not quite succeed. A capercailzie was perched in a tree just above him. Her head crept out from under her wing and her hairless eyelids opened; her neck hung down as she stared, but Rauten disappeared, and the bird hid her head under the wing once more.

A hare jumped up—a spirit in flight.

Now and then Rauten’s nose nearly touched the earth. He sought the scent of a cow elk. For he was alone again to-day. The cow he had fought for so valiantly the day before no longer wanted him. Cows are unstable like all females. Rauten was not the one and only elk for her any longer.

But Rauten might find other mates; he was never at rest, because of the cows. He wanted to fight for them all, to strike terror in the heart of every bull he met, beat them with his antlers till they would writhe limply like willow twigs.

He stopped sniffing towards a faint movement in the air, his ears eagerly caught a tiny sleepy murmur from the brooks. But there was no scent but that of bogs and woods.

He went on silently with enormous strides—a fairy-tale walk towards sunrise.

In the mountain hut there was nothing but that laboured breathing from the bed. Every once in a while Bjönn would sigh deeply as if he were greatly troubled. Then he would lick his jaws a few times and sleep on, while the moonlit square moved across the floor like a living thing.

A breath of wind soughed round the walls—hush—sh—sh; a loose window pane let in a tiny draught.

Then the dog’s head was raised instantly, suddenly as when a wild animal is disturbed in his lair. Bjönn was awake and alert. Eyes glowing, nostrils alternately large and small. He smelt some scent which that breath of air had carried into the hut.

He jumped on to the floor with a soft thud and stood with both forepaws on the window-sill. His triangular ears were stiff with eagerness; he saw something out there, growled deep down in his throat as if in anger. What did he see?

Suddenly he left the window and stood by the door. With an impatient bark he scratched the door to get out. Realising the futility of that, he rushed back to the window and the floorboards groaned beneath his weight. Again he stood up, his forepaws on the sill, howling as if in pain. What did he see out there?

In the bog below the pasture there was an elk. No bush could be more immovable than he. The elk seemed to sleep or to listen for something. His antlers appeared to float on the silvery lake below—full of shining silver bowls gently rocking on its surface.

Gaupa sat up in the bed. There must be something very special to make Bjönn carry on like that....

He could see through the window from where he sat, and it seemed to him that never before were air and mountains so fiery yellow and so strange-looking. They seemed to him to be burning with fever....

Farthest away and highest up he saw the sky, blue and teeming with stars. Below there swam a mountain, revealing its bristling back, and the slope was wrapped in a misty veil. Nearer to him at the bottom of the valley the lake flamed so brightly as to hurt his eyes, and on the bog nearer still he saw ... he saw——

He stroked his eyes with his finger and looked again.

An elk was standing on the bog between the pasture and the lake, asleep or listening.

Gaupa wondered whether he was losing his senses or beginning to see visions.

Once more his hand touched his eyelids, and he felt how weak and limp his arm was. He turned his head. There was Bjönn, whining and scratching at the door, so the fever had not quite mastered him. There was his rifle, “the Tempest,” leaning against the wall. It had the same flashing steel trigger as always, and he saw the elk’s head which he himself had carved on the butt. These could not be mere visions. He was quite in his senses, and there _was_ an elk down there on the bog.

He threw off the sheepskin rugs, stepped out of the bed, leaning on the bedpost. He was no longer the Lynx, the man of muscles and sinews—no, he was a staggering uncertain thing, bereft of his strength. His head throbbed as if a thousand little animals were trying to break out through his skull. His chest was too small, and he drew in air in short laboured gasps....

Gaupa somehow managed to get across the floor and seize “the Tempest.” How delightfully cool the steel felt to his hot palms!

After a while he reached the window and stared out. The elk remained immovable, looking northwards towards the Big Bear which unceasingly runs along its azure path in the sky.

Then Gaupa pushed the muzzle of his gun straight through the window-pane. A crisp clang of breaking glass followed, some pieces falling on the window-sill, others on the floor.

Dead silence reigned in the hut once more. The dog stood erect beside the man, his ears cocked, trembling with excitement, waiting for the shot.

Gaupa crouched, his knees bent, his chin pressed against the butt. How nice and cool it felt! He took aim, and when his eye caught the shining sight on the muzzle a calm relief seemed to fill his body, killing the fever....

Rauten stood down there. What was that he heard in the moonlight? The sound immediately begot a picture in his brain. He saw and heard an icicle breaking from a precipice and falling down on to the glacier below. It was broken to pieces and shattered with a shrill clang.... It was the sound of the falling window-pane.

Up in the hut Gaupa took aim. First his aim sought the starry flowers in the sky. Then it sank past the multitude of stars, sank lower and lower, crossed the mountain slope, skirted the lake, stole along the bog, fumbled for the elk’s antlers and found them. There it rested awhile, only to glide downwards along the dark body, stopped again, and remained.

Gaupa’s forefinger crooked. His eyelids did not move, nor did Bjönn’s.

Rauten was listening all the time for that icicle. Then a hot pang in his left shoulder startled him, but the sensation was drowned in a roar of thunder which broke upon the stillness of the night. The elk stretched out and lay flat in the air, touched the earth, and stretched out in the air again. Moonlight streamed between the tines of his antlers when he ran, each leap double the length of his own body. He was chasing a mad shadow in front of him, chasing it into the forest which swallowed shadow and elk alike.

Shortly afterwards something splashed in a lake to the north, and the water spouted white before Rauten where he started to swim. He swam across the lakelet, swam across molten silver. On the farther side he rose, dripping, and ran on.

§ 10

Gaupa lay in bed once more. The hut was filled with nauseating fumes from the powder, and Bjönn ran from window to door and back again. Finally he stopped at the door, nose to the chink, scenting the draught.

Gaupa knew what elk that was. It had incredibly large shovel-shaped antlers, like Rauten was said to have. Few elks in these parts have shovel-shaped antlers nowadays. Undoubtedly it was Rauten. Lead could not wound him, and he had vanished through the moonlight when the shot rang out, like one possessed.

After a time Bjönn lay down before the door. Once more silence reigned. But to Gaupa it was as if he and Bjönn were not alone in the hut. A breath of wind came down the chimney, and to Gaupa’s ear it was as if something breathed. The silence afterwards was filled with that strange murmuring which comes from nowhere and everywhere. Was it the voices of the dead returning? It sounded like a faint whisper, always the same intonation, always alike. The whisper grew into words: “Beast, beast, beast....”

Even the hills round that hut bore marks of Ré Valley Swede’s pickaxe, deep holes, mossgrown by now. Did he hear steps outside? Two stealthy steps at long intervals? No, surely not. Bjönn would have barked if there had been real steps.

And lying there with his eyes shut, Gaupa recalled many strange things which had been told in Lower Valley during those last years.

One day the cow-boy at Lyhussæter came running home struggling to regain his breath. The dairy maid stood agape. At the same time Martin Lyhus scrambled up with his packhorse, and he heard the nonsense the boy had to tell.

“An elk bull has mounted our 'Drople’!” he says.

Martin tied his horse to the fence.

“What ails ye, lad? Don’t you come here to grown-up folks with child’s talk. What you say has neither rhyme nor reason.”

“But it’s gospel truth,” the boy maintained, and Martin noticed that he was purple with running.

“That elk had antlers as big as never was,” says the boy.

The outcome was that Martin went with him. They found “Drople” not far 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.

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?