Chapter IV: Part 4

Gaupa was fairly staggering. That last effort near Three Lake seemed to have drained his last forces. All the same he went on and on, always showing that grin of contempt, as if he were mocking at the elk spoor before him.

In the middle of an open space where the pines had once been burnt down and never grown up again to their former state, he stroked his eyes with the back of his hand, as people do when they wake up and yet are not really awake.

He walked on a few steps, stopped again and touched his eyes. What devilry disturbed his sight? He saw as clearly as clearly a shiny yellow moon, not quite round, but slightly elliptical as the moon is when she is on the wane. This moon stood in the air a few gun-lengths before his eyes and it moved when he moved. It was so blazingly, glaringly yellow that it made the air gleam yellow. Gaupa felt as if everything glowed and blazed before him. The very dusk flamed. He was dazzled, and shut his eyes for a long time. When he opened them again the air was as it ought to be, soft and nearly dark. But after a few steps that idiotic moon came back.

He knew well enough what moon this was. He had seen it before. Over-exertion, curse it. And his knees felt as they always did when that glaring yellow moon appeared. All the sinews seemed to have been taken out of his joints, all elasticity had left his legs. They moved about anyhow beneath him, without his volition.

Then Gaupa went under a spruce tree and lay face downwards. His face touched some whortleberry ling and he could smell the soil. A bunch of berries caught his eyes, a large, bright red bunch, and they made so intense an impression on him that he seemed to feel the juice seething inside them. Never in all his life had he seen so red a bunch of whortleberries. His eager hands seized them and pushed them into his mouth. He crushed them with his tongue and their juice ran in his dry mouth, an exquisite joy. He looked for more berries, crawling on all-fours round the spruce tree like a child—an oldish man with a flowing beard.

While doing this he saw Bjönn coming, keeping to the spoor, going backwards. The dog gave up before reaching his master, and lay down a little way off. He was utterly exhausted.

Gaupa went up to him, knelt down, talking to him and stroking him. And it seemed to him that those dog’s eyes spoke. Why had he not come when Rauten stood still on the northern slopes? they asked. Why had he missed when the wizard elk rose up from Three Lake? Bjönn had done what he could, the dog’s eyes declared. All the same Rauten was running about in the valley, free, unwounded.

Gaupa sat still, stroking Bjönn’s head.

“I also could do no more,” he said aloud; “but wait till to-morrow.”

The weather cleared up as evening came on. The sky turned blue as the sea, the stars twinkled like tiny lanterns, some clear white, some dullish red. In a small barn near Three River Gaupa and Bjönn slept.

Farthest out in the valley where the moon was rising like a yellow lantern where earth and sky met an elk stood for a long time snuffing towards the north. He was dripping wet. After a while he lay down, and the snow thawed slowly under him.

Thus Rauten lay all that night, his eyes ever open, ears alive, nostrils working. Towards morning it was so cold that his wet back grew white with hoar-frost.

§ 23

About dawn Gaupa and Bjönn dug themselves out from the hay in the barn.

Gaupa had lost his matches the day before, and could make no fire. The only way was to bury himself in the contents of the barn.

His shoes stood frozen stiff at the door. They were so hard that it was out of the question to put them on. He tried many times, but in vain. To wait for the sun to thaw them would take too long—so he thawed them with the warmth of his own body. They softened, and soon after he and Bjönn were following the spoor of the wizard elk.

They found his night lair where the snow was thawed and some hairs lay about. But Rauten had left several hours before, Gaupa could read that much in the spoor. It had hardened, there was a crust on, and also Bjönn told him they were not near him yet.

They chased the elk from sunrise to sunset.

The spoors were there, and there was something alive about them. Every mark of the hoofs meant a movement forwards—one footmark after the other from one slope to another, an endless chase.

The spoor, so strangely alive, kept Gaupa’s interest warm. It was like turning leaf after leaf of an exciting book where the end cannot be guessed.

Once they found fresh excrements after Rauten, and Bjönn grew doubly eager after smelling them. But Gaupa would not let go until he was fairly sure of being near enough.

He did not think much that day either of the fact that he was hunting no ordinary earthly animal; Rauten was only an elk who had wandered for many years among Ré Mountains, mocking all efforts on the part of those who tried to get at him. He was the elk that Gaupa himself had rather avoided. But now he would measure himself against him. As long as he had a bite of food, as long as Bjönn could move, he would stick to that spoor—and he swore loudly and forcibly.

He went towards the west for several hours. The weather was wonderfully fine. The mountain plains in their majestic calm reflected the sunlight like a mirror. The light dazzled his eyes and made him sun-blind. Little black lakelets looked like spots of ink on a white tablecloth.

Rauten had gone into a long lake, and Gaupa found no spoors up from the water. He went round the lake several times, but no tracks could be seen.

He reflected. Could this lakelet, without even a name, be Rauten’s tomb? Could the elk have been drowned out there? It seemed impossible.

He circled the lakelet once more, and in the little brooklet which fed the lake he saw some strange holes in the mud at the bottom. The brook was shallow, and the sun showed him the bottom quite plainly. Those holes down there had a distance between them about as long as the stride of an elk.

He followed the brook for about a quarter of an hour, and found the place where Rauten had left the water. Gaupa had never seen an elk try to hide his tracks so cunningly.

About noon he went straight towards the sun, ignorant of the names of the mountains around him. Then the earth yawned before him, and he perceived a valley so large and deep that it must be Hallingdal.

He heard also that the air was vibrant with some sound, a dull, heavy roar with some sort of rhythm in it. He could not understand what it was. The wind shifted, and into his ears poured the deep, full boom of church bells. Once more the wind shifted, and he heard nothing but that vibrating roar.

Then he remembered that it was Sunday—for ordinary people, but not for him. The elk spoors led straight towards the valley and the church bells—one might think Rauten was going to church. But on a slope the track turned abruptly, and there Gaupa smelt the homely, acrid smell of smoke, the sign of people and houses.

He walked on after the smoke, sniffing his way like a dog on an open scent. A little later he stood before a low Hallingdal cottage with a tall chimney. He touched the doorhandle; Bjönn stole in in front of him, and in a moment was chasing a cat, as red as a fox. But cats made Bjönn mad. He threw one paw over the animal, pinning her to the floor, and then bit twice across her back. There was the sound of crunching as when Bjönn ate bones, and then a cat died in Hallingdal.

They gave him matches and food, and he walked uphill again. He released Bjönn, who soon returned. Rauten was too far in front of them.

Dusk met Gaupa in a bare valley without summer farms where he could spend the night. His axe resounded in the silence as he cut down dry pines. He slept in the shelter of a rock, Bjönn clasped tightly to his breast.

A few hundred yards from Gaupa’s night lair something dark showed up on a ridge. Was it a rock? No, the rocks were not black then, they were white with snow.

That dark thing did not move.

After a while it did move. Two eyes gleamed wet in the moonlight, a tined antler crossed the harvest moon behind it. Rauten was lying there.

He thought he heard some strange sounds in the evening, but there was little wind and he could not make sure.

He was waiting for daylight.

The snow was glittering, the crystals of snow were like innumerable stars which were for ever being lit and extinguished. The mountains were softly moving clouds, cradling the tired body of Rauten, while a few isolated mountain spruces, from which the sun had thawed the snow, were like darkly dressed dwarfs in the hollows.

It was nearly two days and two nights since Rauten left Owl Glen in Lower Valley.

§ 24

When Gaupa hung up his coffee-kettle over the fire he felt shivery after his cold bed. The kettle boiled, and he swallowed hastily four or five cupfuls of scalding-hot coffee. Then he noticed a strange pattern in the grounds at the bottom of the empty cup. The lines were funny, he thought, they made quite a picture.

He turned the cup round and round, and there was not much imagination needed to make those brown lines mean an elk lying on his back.

Then Gaupa smiled to Bjönn.

“We’ll have him before sundown. He lies here.”

A little later the fire under the rock wall was deserted, and while it was dying slowly the resinous smoke floated like a dark mist over the neighbouring bog.

Gaupa had not walked far when Bjönn rose on his hind legs and caught the open scent. He would not come down on all-fours for fear of losing it, and went on hopping on two legs several steps, and Gaupa swore prodigiously out of the joy in his heart. He loosed the leash, and let Bjönn storm into the mountains towards the pale-yellow sky of the dawn, from which a faint sheen fell on the snow.

The snow was crisp now after the night’s frost, and it crunched a little under each of Bjönn’s steps. A family of grouse flew up like a shower from some osier bushes, a cock grouse called “gak-gak,” and soon after the dog sang out farther east. Rauten had company once more.

Three hours later Gaupa was steaming with sweat. He passed unknown summer farms where the windows in the sun shone like fire. It was warm, for summer was still in the air. Winter lay on the ground prematurely born. The trees were dripping, the snow grew wet and heavy, crunching a little under Gaupa’s shoes. A young hare sniffed the snow which he had never seen till the day before, big brown eyes staring with wonder at the bewitched world.

The chase went on—and it was evening.

§ 25

It was night, the third night since Rauten left Owl Glen.

He was lying in a brook in Ré Valley, on Bog Hill where once he fought the three-year-old. On all-fours he was lying in the brook, the water unceasingly licking his stiff limbs, and Rauten enjoyed the refreshing coolness. Once he bent his head to drink, his flanks hollowing.

Before him on the bank of the brook lay Bjönn. He did not say anything, having barked enough throughout the day. It was quite dark, the moon not yet being up and the snow having been thawed on that sun-exposed slope so that no light was reflected by the snow either. Only the silver bark of a birch gleamed faintly among the dense spruce woods.

A good stone’s throw farther south on the slope Gaupa sat, his back against a tree-trunk. His pack lay at his side and his rifle across his knees. Inside it rested a cartridge containing the Swede’s Bullet.

Gaupa felt exceedingly cold, for he was wet with perspiration when he sat down, and now he felt as if he were wrapped up in icy-cold sheets. He beat his arms across each other, carefully so as not to make a noise, and sat on.

In the dusk he had reached Black Mountain and heard Bjönn baying on Bog Hill, but darkness came before he reached him, and he could not discern the sights of “The Tempest” except against the sky.

When he came to the spruce where he was sitting now he heard Bjönn’s last bark, and understood from it that the elk was not running, for the barking sounded so feeble.

Rauten and Bjönn were presumably somewhere in that brook, and if he knew Bjönn he would not leave the elk that night. But when the sun rose over the eastern ridges and lit up Ré Valley, then Gaupa would steal forth, as soon as he could make sure where Rauten was standing. The brook in the hollow murmured unceasingly.

Gaupa listened. No, he could not hear that inexplicable muttering far away which belonged to the night and the unbroken silence. The brook deadened it. He felt how the forest about him was asleep, standing, eyes closed. All the same there _was_ something, that restlessness which has no origin. He seemed to hear something breathing like a human being somewhere.

He remembered one incident after the other told of the remarkable animal who was standing unseen somewhere near him.

There was Anton Rud. Last autumn he was cutting resinous pine-stumps to distil tar, far up Tolleivsæter way.

One evening he kept on longer than usual, and it was dusk when he walked slowly down to the hut again.

He stopped to light his pipe, when he heard a cough below, a faint, dry cough, first once and then twice running. He heard also the noise of someone walking, and he sat down to wait, for it sounded as if someone were coming uphill.

But nobody came, nor did he hear that cough any more. He thought it strange, and called out aloud asking whether there was any human being.... No answer.

In the morning he went up to the same place to search the soil a little. He could not understand that cough—it sounded exactly like a consumptive coughing and clearing his throat. There were no traces of a human being, but he found elk spoors like Rauten’s, and he stopped stump-cutting that selfsame day.

Gaupa remembered that story and many others.

In the meanwhile Rauten and Bjönn remained in the same spot in the hollow, the dog looking steadily at the huge deer before him, his nozzle rested on his forepaws, and he looked like a long, narrow mound of grass or peat. Off and on something moved on the mound; Bjönn’s ears rose and lay down again.

A big bird, an owl, flew noiselessly over the forest, wings caressing the air.

After a while Gaupa nodded drowsily as he sat by the tree-trunk, but he felt so cold that he was wide awake again in no time, and then he heard somewhere a horse’s bell. He turned his head here and there, and the horse’s bell was to be heard from every direction. But it was impossible that there should be a horse’s bell at that time of the year; nobody put bells on a horse in the summer. He happened to take out his watch, and the horse bell suddenly sounded much louder and nearer. Then he understood that what he had been listening to was the tiny tink-tink of his own watch. It was ten o’clock.

A little later something trod softly in the darkness—very softly. He turned and the tread grew alive, became something tangible which was Bjönn. The dog came close up to him and laid his head on his master’s knee; and Gaupa embraced him, whispering fond words into his ear. Bjönn licked his master’s face and he let him do so. Then he fed him from his sack, gave him much food, whispering and prattling with the beast all the time, telling him that Bjönn must be a clever dog and hold Rauten till either the moon or daylight came, and then “The Tempest” should sing.

But Bjönn did not stay long with Gaupa; he wagged his tail a little, and trotted a few steps away from him. Then he seemed to remember something he had forgotten, went back, sniffed Gaupa’s beard and pressed his cold, wet nose close to his cheek. Then he disappeared in the darkness; there was a sound of rustling among the spruce branches, and then the brook was once more the only living thing Gaupa could hear or see.

He thought of Bjönn’s strange behaviour, how he came back to nose his beard. And he remembered the night before he left Lynx Hut, when he was remelting the Swede’s Bullet, how strangely Bjönn stared at him, whimpering as if in the full knowledge of something evil.... However, such things were not worth noticing.

Rauten had not moved the length of a mouse while Bjönn was away.

Then the dog began to walk stiffly in front of the elk, barking once or twice, and Rauten’s peace was broken. He got on to his forelegs, rose and stood still. Bjönn became eager, for he knew that Gaupa was close by, and he could not understand that it was difficult for his master to shoot in complete darkness.

Gaupa heard the sharp crack of a twig, then another. “There goes Rauten,” he thought.

A little later he heard the antlers striking a tree-trunk, and the dog’s bark came nearer, eager and aggressive. “There is the elk coming,” he thought.

Over him the branches hung like a wide-meshed net, a faint light from the sky penetrating it. But the under-bush was so black that he saw the trees only like vague shadows and in there the wizard elk was coming. Listen! how the antlers rustle among the spruce needles with a dry swishing sound, as when you sweep the floor of the hut with a broom!

Gaupa did not stir, but clasped his hands round his gun in trembling excitement. He sat immovable like an animal in its night lair, his eyes burning as if they would burn a hole in the darkness enveloping him.

Both beasts were close by and below him. Once he thought he saw a large shadow glide past down there, but he was not sure. He heard the dog throw himself aside and Rauten’s heavy steps. But he could not, could not see him.

Slowly Bjönn withdrew a little, following the wizard elk.

Gaupa crawled after them on all-fours, slowly, slowly. He was so close after them that he surely could have thrown his gun at the elk, if there had been light enough, and it seemed to him that he was crawling at the bottom of a black lake with the tree-tops floating on the surface of the water.

Then Rauten stopped and the dog’s barking grew rhythmic. Gaupa dragged himself ward on his stomach, and in a glade he caught sight of Bjönn, a dark bundle which glided here and there over the earth. But the elk, the elk?

He did not dare to move farther, and remained where he was, “The Tempest” ready. Over the western ridges the starry sky was sparkling.

Little by little Bjönn calmed down, till finally he remained on the same spot, and from the direction of his head Gaupa guessed whereabouts Rauten must be. For a long time he had been looking for something showing up like antlers against the sky between two tree-trunks, and he was only waiting to see that something move.... It did move, quite distinctly, and Gaupa lifted the barrel of his gun towards the sky, then lowered it towards the antlers, then far enough down to hit the body—and then the Swede’s bullet left the mouth of “The Tempest.”

The splitting flame from the gun sent a broad beam of light across the glade where Bjönn stood. And in front of the dog Gaupa saw as if in a flash of lightning the head of Rauten above some bushes. The head was lifted high, large eyes staring, and the half ear stood out very clearly.... Then darkness came again. Not a sound, no heavy thud of an elk falling, no eager dog’s bark.

Gaupa was half blinded from the sudden change from glaring light to absolute darkness. He listened for the well-known dry crackle of fleeing elk’s hoofs, but it did not come.

Then his ears caught the sound of something astir close in front of him. It could not be Rauten dying, for he would surely have heard him falling.

He struck a match, and at that moment a cock grouse chattered furiously somewhere up south—a coldly mocking guffaw like the laughter of a lunatic. If the grouse chattered in the middle of the night it must have been roused by the elk, therefore Rauten must be far away already. But what, then, was that which moved before his feet?

The match went out, there was a draught in the air. He scratched another, there was a swish along the box, a tiny explosion, and a little fire was born and burnt uncertainly within the hollow of his hand. Two spruces stood within the circle of the light, staring with wonder as if they had just awakened and wanted to know what kind of tiny sun was dancing on the ground.

Gaupa went forward to some yellow moss, that showed elk spoors. But in the middle of the glade Bjönn lay on one side. His eyes blinked a little at the light from the match, but there was in them something strained which Gaupa did not recognise. He knelt down beside the dog, stroking him and talking to him, but Bjönn took no notice, and his flanks laboured so strangely and quickly.

Gaupa lit another match and saw blood on Bjönn’s hair a little behind the left shoulder. He felt with his hand, which became wet. The dog started to open his mouth as if to yawn—and he gaped, and he gaped, and never finished.

“Bjönn!” Gaupa whispered—“my own dog!”

But Bjönn only gaped.

Gaupa understood what had happened. The Swede’s bullet had struck the elk’s antler and was shattered, one bit of lead ricochetting and hitting the dog.

“Bjönn! Don’t you hear me, Bjönn?” he whispered once more half beseechingly.

Oh no, Bjönn could not hear anything any more now. He began to nod his head in a strange way, something gurgled in his throat. A large tear leapt out of the dog’s eye and rolled down over the grey muzzle. The dog stretched himself. He was tired of the endless chase. He wanted to rest.

The last thing Bjönn from Lynx Hut did in his life was to stretch himself.

* * * * *

A man was sitting with a dead dog on his knees. It happened on Bog Hill in Ré Valley. The murmur of the river sounded steady and calm, like the very breath of night.

Gaupa thought of the Swede’s Bullet. It concealed strange powers; it had travelled through a body before, and it knew its way. Why, oh why, then, did it take away the only friend, the only child he possessed? It would be small comfort walking down to Lower Valley in the morning.

Gaupa waited for the dawn. Bjönn seemed so strangely heavy on his knees. He felt how the warmth of life slowly left the soulless body of the dog, remembered what the two had shared of better things and worse throughout the years, and the tears fell fast down Gaupa’s unkempt face.

Daylight came. In his arms he carried Bjönn to a heap of rocks tenderly as a mother carries her sleeping baby to bed.

He displaced some pieces of rock, and when he laid Bjönn down there he felt that he was burying some of his joy in life. He sat down, his shoulders heaving.

When did Gaupa weep last? He did not remember. It was long ago, long, long ago.

Day broke over Ré Valley.

§ 26

Time floated over the wilderness.

In summer it is warm, in winter cold. Three days before Christmas the sun ceases to descend lower in the sky, rises again, and after a long while he starts work on a fresh spring down on earth.

Through half the year the lakes lie with their eyes closed, for half a year they mirror the sunset. The rivers stiffen when the immigrating birds go south. While the bear dreams in his winter lair, the trees stand bloodless, breaking in the frost. But when the living ploughshares of the wild geese go northwards once more, then the trees spread out all their branches, embracing life.

Such is time, when beasts are born, eat, and die. Such was time when Rauten went towards old age.

His body followed the all-subduing law of nature. At Candlemass time he lost his antlers, which invariably grew out again, every time with more tines. When the leaves fell he roared his hoarse mating call at dusk and at dawn. In the summer nights his huge, dark body would glide through the forest out to Gipsy Lake where the snow-white waterlilies were floating.

On some clear, cruel, frosty winter night he would perhaps stand on guard beside a soft-eyed cow and a calf that was his own flesh and blood. Then Venus, queen of the starry heavens, would glow large and bright above Ré Mountains, lending a pale shimmer to the white snow. The Aurora Borealis would shine bright and strange, then the breath from the elks’ nostrils would smoke in the night.

When once in a while Rauten lay on Black Mountain looking out across the forest, all the happenings of which his life was so rich would stir within him. Probably he did not remember, not live his reminiscences once more in his mind. We do not know about that. But each remarkable incident had set its mark in him in the shadowy life of his soul. They had sharpened his instincts, enriched his experience. There were incidents at all times of the year, in all changing lights of day and night, in sunny heat and in frosty weather—some concerning animals, some human beings.

But he grew solitary and still more solitary as age came on. He sought places where man but rarely made spots on the earth with his shoes of animals’ hide, where the steel tooth of the axe but rarely gnawed a tree, where old times were still dreaming.

For the Ré Valley woods began to be open. Foresters’ huts grew out of the earth, creating unrest. Old trees died, changed their existence, and left Ré Valley. Their stumps stayed, time and weather eating them as ravens eat carrion.

Many a dog had chased Rauten, but their muzzles grew grey and their eyes blue, and one day the barrel of a gun blew out their lives. And still Rauten walked across Black Mountains.

* * * * *

But what of Gaupa?

He also aged; he aged rapidly when Bjönn died. For after that time he lost his love of the woods somehow, and then he seemed to shrink within himself.

Soon he was no longer a wild cat, he became a tame, domestic cat. No more his fire shone at the capercailzie’s play in the blue spring evenings when the song thrush was silent in the tree-tops and flew away for the night. A sleepy petroleum lamp shone dully in Lynx Hut, where the air was not light and pure as drifted snow, but stank of leather and old footwear.

He felt as if something had died within him. His mind was like an everlasting rainy day, monotonous, without a gleam of sun. No more tumults, only silence and death, his mind was luke-warm like marsh water.

Gaupa was not well either. He needed but to drink three or four cups of coffee one after the other to make his heart unmanageable. It would not keep time, but beat eagerly and quickly, and then it lagged, nearly stopped as if lame.... Well, well, that heart had seen hard days, as well he knew.

Gaupa’s calves grew full of small bulbs under his skin from varicose veins. And then rheumatism came. Working in his shop he could feel the rheumatism, like fine red-hot wires being stitched into his body. It was worst in his knees, for there something was gnawing, gnawing like sharp teeth, everlastingly hungry. Well, well, you know those calves and those knees had been through some hard work in his life.

Once somebody asked him to go to a doctor, but then Gaupa guffawed in mocking merriment.

Alas, there was small comfort in Lynx Hut now. No Bjönn came to place his head on his knees while he was stitching shoes, no Bjönn met him with tail waving in the open door when he had been out and came home, no Bjönn shared his bed under the sheepskin covering in the night. When he woke up at night he caught himself listening for the dog’s breath, for Bjönn used to breathe so heavily, so humanly. Gaupa remembered so well.

When he was seventy years old he was converted. After that time the poor old soul would often sit in one of the foremost desks in the schoolhouse, piously listening to what Hans Uppermeadow, the “high priest,” had to announce. He would sit there in his simple blue-striped celluloid collar without a tie. That was the only Sunday best he possessed, and no one knew when last it was washed.

Somehow revivalism did not quite submerge him, for he could not help thinking of other things while the preacher up there threatened his audience with hell and sulphur. It might, for instance, occur to him that the moustache of that fellow was the very spit of the other’s whiskers, and in a bound Gaupa’s thoughts were far from the schoolroom and its close atmosphere. No, he could not get the real hang of the revivalist business, and before he entered upon his seventy-second year he gave it up and became a worldling once more.

Only he ceased to swear, and when religious people were with him he might be heard to talk of how quietly time passed down here. Sometimes he would even sigh audibly.

Poor old Gaupa! He was in earnest right enough. He was no Pharisee. Yet his conscience was never quite easy; he was not regularly “saved,” and when his heart started beating out of time he would feel as timid as a hare!

One day he was at Rust helping with some wood-cutting. He went to feed the horses in the evening, and remained in the stable so long that Halstein began to wonder and went in.

There lay Gaupa senseless after a blow from the young black mare. There was a hole in his skull, and Halstein saw the brain matter pulsating.

It was a strange thing, but Gaupa recovered. He was in bed at Rust for a long time, but as soon as he could walk to his own hut he demanded it, and after six months he was very much as before.

One day about Easter time the sheriff, who lived some two miles to the south, saw Gaupa hatless coming across his yard with a long knife in his hand. He wondered a little, and in a moment the maid came rushing into his office and begged him to go out into the kitchen, for Gaupa must have lost his wits.

The sheriff went. There was Gaupa. His hair had withered at the top of his head so that he was quite bald. He wore a blue blouse, and in his right hand he held his knife, shining, freshly sharpened. Yet Gaupa was an exceptionally good-tempered man.

“Good morning, sheriff. I’ve come to skin him. Where do you keep him?”

The sheriff did not understand, but noticed that the corners of Gaupa’s mouth worked harder than ever. “St. Vitus’s dance,” he thought.

“Skin him, d’you say?”

“Yes, of course; don’t you remember I shot the wizard elk in your woods yesterday? I carted him home, large and whole.”

He pointed the knife straight at the sheriff, till the latter felt the blade like a cold pang through his body.

“This knife,” Gaupa went on, “has tasted Rauten once before, and still it is sharp enough to manage the skinning of the elk. Where do you keep him? Eh?”

The sheriff understood that Gaupa’s mind was queer, and he made believe that everything was as Gaupa said.

“Oh yes,” he replied; “I’ll find him for you soon enough, but you will have a drink first, won’t you?”

Certainly, Gaupa would like a drink; he had one drink, and then another. By that time he forgot his errand and went quietly home to Lynx Hut.

Two days later he went to Lyhus and behaved in exactly the same manner. There was no gainsaying the fact that the day before he had shot Rauten and drove him, in all his bulk, to the farm, so that everyone might see the wizard elk. And now he had come to skin him.

From that time Gaupa was out of his mind. People guessed it was a result from that blow from the horse’s hoof, which seemed probable enough.

Every once in a while he would go to a farm to skin an elk he had shot in their forest, and if only they agreed and said he ought to have the drink due before such a work was undertaken, or they offered him food, he could generally be talked away from his purpose, so that he forgot all about skinning.

The authorities attempted to lodge him at some farm, but Gaupa simply walked home to Lynx Hut, where he would sit busy with his awl and his waxed thread, working quite decently.

But the urchins found great fun in going up to him and showing him a naked knife, for as soon as he saw it he would start telling the story of the elk calf on Black Mountain slopes, always in the same manner, nearly in the same words. He never told anything else than that he cut half an ear from the calf, never anything more detailed about Rauten after the elk had grown up. If they asked him they could see how he strove and strove to remember, but he was never sure. It was always the same story again and again, how he held the calf between his knees, and when he finished they would hear him mumbling something no one understood except one single word: “Beast, beast.”

Later on he imagined he had killed an animal he called Golden Bear. Then he went down the valley to the rich forest owners, to their grand farms with red storehouses and white dwellings with glass balls on the top of their flag-poles, shining like silver in the sunlight. And then Gaupa never stopped till he got speech with the great men themselves, for he could buy their woods and their farms and everything they possessed. They might have their payment in cash and the price was of no consideration, for he had killed the Golden Bear.

Thus fared Gaupa, the elk-killer, in the evening of his life.

§ 27

One spring Lynx Hut remained locked, at first for days, then for weeks, then for ever. Lynx Hut is still locked.

They looked for Gaupa that spring, every one in the Valley who could crawl in forest or mountain. The sheriff donned his uniform cap, used the law and ordered people out. A long chain of men zig-zagged across the Lower Valley slopes, east of the river and west of the river. But no Gaupa was found.

What little he possessed was put to auction. His cobbling tools were scattered over the valley as if by a gust of wind. Martin Lyhus bought “The Tempest.”

I visited Lynx Hut some years ago. It was empty, with naked walls. A hole gaped in the brickwork of the chimney where the stove flue had once gone in, and the window sill was strewn with dead flies. I found a dried-up squirrel on the hearth. The little animal had, I suppose, climbed down the chimney and been unable to climb up, finally lying down mouth open for the food which should have kept it alive.

But also I found something else.

In a corner lay a dog’s collar of coarse leather. It had a shiny buckle and the inside of the leather was worn smooth. In the collar was sewn with white cobbler’s thread the name “Bjönn.”

The man who unlocked Lynx Hut to me was so white of hair that he seemed to carry fresh snow on his head. He wore a waistcoat with silver buttons, and his name was Halstein Rust. It was he who in the autumn after Gaupa’s disappearance went to the relief officer in Lower Valley and told him what he had found above Gipsy Lake out in Ré Valley. It was also Halstein Rust who told me of Gaupa and Bjönn and the wizard elk, Rauten.

To-day a cross stands alternately in sun and shade outside the tar-soaked wall of Lower Valley Church. Under that cross rests the body of Halstein Rust. But I clearly remember the evening when the white-haired man sat before me, crooked, trembling fingers pointing southwards towards Ré Valley, and telling me how Gaupa’s life ended.

§ 28

That spring there were masses of snow in the mountains. First mild weather came in March and afterwards the frost lasted till far into May, then the weather changed suddenly, the air vibrating with sunny heat from morning till night.

The tributary rivers became roaring mad in a few days, Lower River went greenish yellow like ale, lifting timber jams of hundreds of logs, sweeping them along, sucking them on in their mad rush, until the logs would float peacefully into the big lake two leagues to the south.

The birch buds opened in a night. In the morning the trees were thickly covered with what looked like green butterflies. A strong perfume filled the steaming air.

It was late at night, the distant hills were blue. The northern sky was smouldering, a soft tone of sweet sadness rose from the fiery heavens, lulling the senses, like the melody of soft, slowly rolling waves. The people of Lower Valley were asleep.

A belated snipe flew chirping over Lynx Hut.

Gaupa came out, locked his door, and put the key in his pocket. He carried a knapsack, and took out a pair of skis. He remained there as if making sure in his thought that nothing was forgotten. But his ideas were confused, lacking strength to arrange themselves in any definite order, and Gaupa went towards the River with skis on his shoulder and a sack on his back, but his rifle hung peacefully on the wall inside Lynx Hut.

In the darkness of that May night a man walked on the crusted snow on the slopes towards Ré Valley. The skis made a dry grating sound on the snow crust, the man breathed quickly and heavily, and rested sadly often. He grew so very thirsty, and every once in a while he lay down at some brooklet and drank the water from the melting snow.

After midnight the snow crust became stone hard. The man went south along the flat marshes near Ré River, and for such an old man he went remarkably quickly. Gaupa had not in vain been the man who used to show everybody else his back both walking and running.

About two o’clock the door of Gipsy Lake Hut groaned, and on the hard wooden seat where Gaupa and Bjönn used to rest side by side after many a sweat dripping day Gaupa lay alone, after many years.

Strangely enough, that night his brain cleared. He felt as if he had awakened from sleep, and without making a fire he lay, looking backwards in time.

He had lived his life as he himself wanted it, poor in possessions, but rich in happenings. Throughout all the years he could remember there blew a cold breeze from windworn trees and naked mountains. His memories stood out like bright flowers, smelling sweetly of heather and moss. Best of all he remembered the three days’ chase after Rauten, Bjönn’s last chase. Even that time the rumour was true. Bad luck had followed on Rauten’s heels.

Gaupa heard a wood-cock swishing by Gipsy Lake. Then all was silence again.

A little later an owl started hooting in the trees outside the hut, and to Gaupa the hooting seemed to come out from the walls, from the ceiling, from the floor.... The owl is a sinister bird and predicts death, and Gaupa felt quite creepy listening to the sound of the voice. He opened the door and peeped up in the half light between the trees. The bird was silent then, but he could not see it. Yet as soon as he lay down the bird’s voice was heard again, sad, wailing, almost like broken notes of a dirge. The tune never rose, never sank, always keeping the same level.

He went out many times to frighten it away, and although that bird sat just above the roof, he was quite unable to see it; he could almost believe it was a spirit sitting aloft, trying to tell him something.

Day sent a grey square of light through the open door on to the floor of Gipsy Lake Hut. Darkness crept into the corners and hid there.

Then suddenly and unexpectedly the old man jerked his head, steadied his hands against the bench, and half rose. His eyes lost the film of deadness they had had lately and had become keen.

Through the open door he heard the crush, crush, crush of the snow crust shattering under steps heavy enough to break it.

Gaupa knew the snow crust to be hard enough to carry a man, even a heavy one. He rose on his feet and stood in the door, crouching a little, both hands holding on to the lintel above his head.

Crush, crush, crush! he heard from a little mound covered with young trees, just beyond the clearing in front of the hut. Then the sound stopped as if cut off, and the silence afterwards was filled with the boiling rumble from the heath cocks in the marsh by the lake. The owl was silent.

What came over him? Was he afraid? He almost looked like it. His eyes grew keen, staring. His mouth opened, showing his gums with all his teeth still, brown from chewing tobacco.

An elk’s head rose from the bushes on the mound, and Gaupa gave a startled sob.

“Rauten!” he whispered, and his excited face showed everything but fear. It was like the yell from an old, half-blind deer-hound who unexpectedly finds big game, a yell of exultation, a dying fire flaming up.

The elk’s head turned abruptly, a long back floated over the bushes, and once more the snow crust crashed where Rauten ran.

Gaupa turned back to the hut. “The Tempest,” “The Tempest,” his thoughts were wailing. But the rifle was at home in Lynx Hut, rusty with years of disuse.

He was running about on the floor of the hut, his eyes seeking a weapon, anything that could be used for taking life—murmuring all the time: “Sure it is the wizard elk, sure it is the wizard elk!”

Then his hand happened to touch his dagger, hanging at his right-hand side; the touch reminded him of something, and he stopped. He wrenched out the knife, his feet stole quickly across the floor and through the doorway. Shortly afterwards the old man was running on the hard snow, stooping, bareheaded, in his blouse, and with long, homespun trousers flapping round his legs.

Before him were the elk spoors, deep holes straight through the rough snow crust, the bottom of them showing the wide-apart hoofs of Rauten, and the grains of snow in the holes were like pearls.

Gaupa saw how the bits of broken snow crust had flown under the elk’s hoofs, and once more he was the old Gaupa. Body and soul were taken back across the years. He was no longer a rheumatic old cripple running bareheaded towards the rise of the sun, knife in hand. No, he was a man with playing muscles and foaming blood, a shaggy savage who hunted an animal to eat it and to clothe himself in its skin.

The snow crust was so hard that he ran as if on a floor, the sound of his steps was only a slight scratching as from a lynx’s claws in bark. He heard the wizard elk just in front, the beast sinking into the snow till under its belly, and inside him was the song that here was Rauten, Rauten! while audibly he mumbled, “I’ve got him now, I’ve got him now.”

Above the spring-black woods of Ré Valley, the mountains foamed like white waterfalls. In the east the rosy dawn glowed, sending a breath of whitish yellow before her on the sky which in farthest west was still deep-sea blue.

There was Black Mountain with its white head, and the forest down its breast like a shaggy beard. Just such a May morning it was when Black Mountain first saw the little elk calf that was to become Rauten.

Now Black Mountain saw something different. On the marsh east of Gipsy Lake an elk bull was plunging heavily in the crusted snow. He tried to leap, but could not. He sank through as if falling at each step and he looked strangely short-legged.

But on the back of that elk sat a man....

Now both Rauten and Gaupa, “The Lynx,” were animals, one born in and of the forest, the other a human being restored to the animal state by the forest. He sat astride of the elk, feeling its lean, sharp back between his legs. His nostrils were full of the scent of game, and he inhaled it and grew drunk from it, like a beast of prey. His hands held on to the mane and one of them held the knife. He lay forwards along Rauten’s neck as if wanting to bite the elk’s throat. Under his nose his beard bristled like feline whiskers.

The marsh was empty again, the elk spoor marking it like a deep scar, and the trees about it seemed to wonder at what they had just seen.

But in the copses to the south the crash of the elk’s hoofs could be heard, and there was Rauten forcing his way, half mad with terror. Every step was an effort, the man on his back and the difficult snow both increased his fear. He wanted to throw the man off. He strained his body till muscles and sinews groaned inside him, but the snow crust was ever faithless; as soon as his hoofs were on the ground, the weight of his body following, the snow crust broke like brittle ice. No matter however much he willed, willed to go forwards, faster, faster—he could not, it was useless.

The bushes waved around him, hitting Gaupa’s face till it smarted and he closed his eyes for fear of being blinded. Just before him he saw the ear that was only half an ear. He saw fur had grown where the knife once cut. He noticed also that the antlers were growing out again after the winter’s moulting. They were covered with fur.

Rauten’s breathing was laboured, long and hissing like bellows in a smithy.

Then Gaupa let go one hand from the elk’s mane, the hand rose, slowly at first, then darting like a flame, and a newly ground knife’s edge drew a shiny line across the dark forest. The knife stopped above Gaupa’s head, then sank like lightning. It sank into the elk’s back, deep up to the haft.

Rauten opened his mouth a little, also his eyes, but did not even groan, only took a few leaps out of the undergrowth to a more open place where the sun had been more powerful so that there was less snow. Two weather-grey stumps ran out of it like long tusks.

“Akk,” said a capercailzie hen, wide awake and warning—“Akk, akk!” A capercailzie cock had finished his play, a neck stretched out from the brown-flecked pine branches, and his wings beat the air noisily when he rose.

Rauten staggered forwards, Gaupa on his back. Gaupa had a piece of chewing tobacco in his mouth. It was caught between his clenched teeth and a brown juice ran out of the corners of his mouth down into his beard. He caught the knife out of the elk’s back and swung it aloft once more. But it drew no shiny line this time, it was wet. Once more it sank into Rauten’s body while Gaupa spat out the words:

“Take that for Bjönn.”

The same knife met Rauten with the first rays of day on the morning he was born on Black Mountain slopes. The blade was worn and narrow now, but fate decreed that it should sit in Rauten’s body at his death-leap east of Gipsy Lake. Perhaps they knew, the dull-red sunbeams which that morning, so many years ago, stroked their warm hands over the little calf bidding him welcome to life and to the forest.

But now Rauten had lived his life. Trees and grass, air and water had given him of their own, which they now claimed back. Rauten was old; over his melancholy head the sunset was dead. He was entering on the long night which never is awakened by a dawn in the east.

He had created a number of elks, most of them gone before him into the land of shadows. Now his turn had come to follow them. The Ré Valley woods had no more use for him. His legs were stiff and his steps short. No longer was he a roaring storm at mating time. His muscles sang no more wild songs from bottomless depths of forces; his life was on the ebb, and no flood would rise in him again.

§ 29

That morning a marten sat crouching in a spruce tree near Gipsy Lake. The marten might tell what happened.

That morning a broad-winged eagle soared round and round above Ré Valley. The eagle also might tell what happened.

Rauten ran out on a southwards slope where the snow was partly gone. He hardly saw anything; Gaupa’s knife was diving voluptuously into him. But terror paralysed his nerves so that he hardly felt any pain.

When the elk and the man ran the small bushes nodded after them. But the old trees were indifferent to what happened. Everything was as it should be. The old trees had seen the bear pawing the elk’s skull, had seen the adder swallowing live mice. Life takes life. Thus it was when night first dewed the grass, as long as stars have twinkled in the heavens.

While Rauten leapt down that slope the wind slipped in under Gaupa’s blue-striped blouse, making it bulge out at the back. He rode on intoxicated, far away from everything and everybody. He gave vent to a long yell, old man that he was, and the yell sank into the spring-time roar from Ré River and was swallowed up by it.

Almost blind, the wizard elk rushed down a precipice, about three or four times the height of a man, sliding with legs stretched out and back straight. Gaupa pressed his knees against the elk’s flanks with all his might, but could not keep his seat. He slid forwards along the neck, found the antlers and hung on. The elk’s hoofs tore away patches of moss, disturbing a small stone which became a living thing and jumped down; a jay perched on a tree on that rock started a thin piping as if bewailing the scene it saw. High up under a small cloud red with sunlight the eagle soared easily in the air. Then he screamed, long and hungrily.

Rauten found firm earth below the rocky wall; he nearly fell forwards with the shock, but managed to keep his balance. Gaupa did not let go of the antlers, but his legs slipped off from the elk’s body and turned a somersault, his soles high up towards the sky, as if he wished to kick the tree-tops in play. Then he lost his hold on the antlers, turned over the elk’s muzzle and lay on the snow, his knife still in his hand.