Part 2

But Gaupa lay awake in Gipsy Lake Hut, full of memories. The dog was lying silent in sleep. Once Gaupa struck a match to light his pipe, and in one corner his rifle reflected the glow. “The Tempest” had roared once that day, and there was one elk less on the slopes of Ré Mountains.

But what Gaupa saw that morning, when aiming at the elk cow, was the calf’s left ear—it was only half an ear. It was the same calf he had handled the spring before, the elk calf with human eyes. It was he who had just cried out so uncannily like a human being under the Black Mountain, more weirdly than Gaupa had ever heard a beast cry before.

There was also something strange about the calf’s spoors that day. The clefts were not side by side as elk clefts usually are. They spread out obliquely from each other. He knew he would be able to distinguish that spoor from a thousand. Gaupa had seen many elk spoors in his life, but never any like these.

The stove in the hut ceased muttering. The flue cooled down with tiny dry cracking sounds.

Below the hut a fox stopped to smell the smoke which still lingered in the air.

Up in the mountain the brook murmured incessantly. Under the Black Mountain an elk calf was licking the skin of his mother which was hung up on a pole fastened to two trees. The calf kept poking at it with his muzzle, but the skin was dead, lifeless, with no warmth of blood in it, and the young elk raised his head and whimpered plaintively, hoarsely and brokenly.

In Gipsy Lake Hut Gaupa was on the point of going to sleep when he suddenly became wide awake again. The hut was quiet as the tomb, but the silence slowly grew pregnant with that inexplicable murmur which Gaupa knew so well. It was as if spirits were whispering around him. “Beast, beast, beast.”

§ 5

The next day Gaupa went northwards to Lower Valley, where people were living. They struggle through life as best they can, and when they die they are taken to the ancient tarred wooden church that calls them back to earth with dismal deep-toned bells.

Gaupa’s home was a timber hut on a stony birch-clad ridge, jutting out into the river. The building was so near to the water’s edge that if the spring flood was unusually high the water almost lapped against its walls.

There Gaupa and Bjönn lived alone. Gaupa was a confirmed old bachelor, over fifty years of age. He had reached the evening of life, and women and love had never been anything to him. No one had ever heard him sigh on account of a petticoat.

His real name was Sjur and he hailed from a spot far north in the valley, a crofter’s place called Renna. His parents died when he was young. Sjur was not cut out for a crofter, and so he built the little hut for himself down by the river, and it stands there to this very day.

Sjur was believed to be a shoemaker by trade and he was handy both with awl and thread. But what use was it to take your shoes to him when he never finished them? If you left them with him during the potato harvest in the autumn you could not expect to get them back until the cuckoo was heard in the following spring. Therefore work grew more and more scarce, and heaven only knew what he lived upon. But Gaupa would gorge like a dog when there was food, and could starve like a dog when food grew scarce.

People gave him his nickname “The Lynx” because of his strange habits. He slept during the day and was up and about at night, like a wild beast—like a lynx in fact.

When the dalesman locked his door, blew out his candle, and crept into his sheepskins, then the light gleamed as bright as ever from Gaupa’s hut. About midnight he would often steal out into the forest only to return at day-break, when he would creep into his hut, lie down and sleep as a wild animal does in its lair after its hunt for food. Gaupa was indeed a strange man.

There was an old schoolmaster in the valley, who went from one farm to another teaching for a time at each place. He wore spectacles and was exceedingly learned, and he always sang the corpse out of the house at funerals. He was the oracle of the valley. He knew everything, and could tell you why Gaupa slept by day and went out by night.

There were two kinds of people, he used to say. Some were born by day and some by night. Those born by night often had a strange longing for darkness. “Look,” he would add, “at that singular being at the Lynx Hut. He was born by night and avoids the day.”

The schoolmaster was quite right about that. To Gaupa the sunshine was not warm, but cold, while the moon was quite different. In the moonlight the shadows in the forest moved like the shades of dead animals, a steady movement, hardly noticeable and yet unmistakable. Then Gaupa felt as if he himself were stealing about on hairy soles. What a delightful thrilling, silent restlessness there was around him! He seemed to be watched by unseen eyes from the heaps of rocks and wooded copses, where soft paws trotted over the moss, sinewy bodies crouched, the whole copse felt like one mighty enchanting mystery. There was magic music in the air about him, a subdued melody, and he seemed to hear the burning stars sparkle in the firmament.

On such nights Bjönn would often accompany him. The manner of Bjönn’s arrival at Lynx Hut was as follows. One winter a dalesman from Lower Valley was travelling towards the plains with a load of butter and cured fish. When he left the town of Hönefos on his return, he noticed a large deer-hound following him. It was dark in colour with a grey head and grey legs. The man drove on, wrapped in his black sheepskin coat, with his old horse drawing the sledge. The dog followed.

But on the evening of the second day the dog disappeared, and a week later the same animal, all skin and bones, crawled up to Lynx Hut. Gaupa gave him food, and the dog remained there. No one asked questions about him, and Gaupa named him Bjönn.

Towards the spring, in April, Gaupa happened to show the dog a huge spoor in the crusted snow under Ré Mountain. Bjönn went absolutely mad, and the elk ox who was at the other end of that spoor was unprepared for such a terrible pursuit by such a tiny animal as Bjönn appeared to be. The elk sank through the snow crust, but Bjönn kept on top, and three days later Gaupa carried home venison which no one was allowed to see.

From that day Bjönn grew to be the best elk-hound in the valley. Wonderful stories were told in the district of Gaupa and his dog. When those two started to follow a spoor they never gave up. They had their meals on the spoor, they rested, and even slept there. They followed it from one horizon to the other, from one county to another, till at last the elk lay dead.

Gaupa and Bjönn were like the animals they were called after, wild and ferocious. People would say to Gaupa, “You’ll kill yourself yet with such mad chase”—but the prophets fell ill and died, whilst Gaupa ran on as mad as ever.

He was a great teller of stories and a popular musician at dances. Then he played on a fiddle on the head of which the devil himself, horns and all, was carved out. And when he had had a little brandy the stories would come pouring out between his bearded lips. He was inexhaustible like a spring, and in everything he told there was an alluring mystery.

One night he was at a dance, telling of the Ré Valley Swede and the elk calf from Black Mountain—of the elk calf whose mother he had killed two weeks before and of the ugly cry he had heard the night afterwards, while he spoke silence reigned, and the young girls shivered.

A few days afterwards these things were the talk of the Valley. Such a story amongst those people was like leaven in dough. It grew and grew. Old sagas and old superstitions were added, and even the Sacred Word of God. For in those days the people of Lower Valley had nothing else to speak of but what actually took place within the limits of the mountain ridges before their eyes. Kings might die in the great world beyond—that was a matter of minor interest to them as compared with the death of a six-weeks-old piglet belonging to a crofter at Cool Hill.

Therefore it is nothing to wonder at that when Gaupa told the story of the elk calf of Black Mountain, the Ré Valley Swede was in a manner of speaking resurrected from his tomb.

Then suddenly everybody remembered a number of things about him. The Ré Valley Swede was not a true believer, he did not accept the Word humbly with a Christian’s heart. The Bible says that when people die they either go to heaven or hell, and no one in Lower Valley doubted for one moment that as a rule they all went straight to heaven from their Valley—that is, if we may judge from their funeral sermons.

But the old Swede believed that many things might happen after death; he even seemed to believe that the dead might return—as beasts!

The schoolmaster explained that there was another religion which taught such a belief. But people did not care two straws about other religions. The Ré Valley Swede was a mocker, a free-thinker; a cold blast followed him wherever he went. Martin Ormerud recalled how when he entered the barn where the Ré Valley Swede was laid out, a big black bird rose from his head. “Mercy upon us!” people cried.

Thus they gossiped; old wives eighty and ninety years of age, spectacles on nose and Bibles on their knees, read aloud with trembling voices how “the Lord endures not a mocker.” The old Swede was a living testimony to the truth of the Word. As a punishment for his sins and his mocking of God, his restless spirit was now condemned to roam about Ré Mountains imprisoned in an animal’s body. God have mercy upon the poor soul when once the old sinner died, once more up there among the pines along Ré River.

§ 6

Years passed.

In the wilderness between Gipsy Lake to the South and Lower Valley to the north there roamed about a wizard elk that no dog and no marksman could conquer.

The dalesmen called him Rauten; why, no one could say. Such names come floating on the north wind, and have no origin. Perhaps the name stuck because when he was still a calf he would low, for all the world like cattle on an autumn evening.

Rauten wandered about Ré Mountains, not like an ordinary earthly elk, but like a being half body and half spirit. No lead bullets could wound him. He was rarely seen by human eyes.

During the mating season, at dawn and in the gloaming, foresters sometimes heard his mating call. It sounded more human than animal, and it made the foresters realise that they had nerves after all.

Now and then they happened to see his spoor, unlike all other elk spoors. The clefts pointed outwards, like the spoor of a man walking toes outwards. The Ré Valley Swede had also walked toes turned outwards. When he went along the high road northwards one foot pointed east, the other west.

Long-limbed men strode miles and leagues after Rauten, but his spoor never ended. Dogs chased him, and returned limping and moaning.

There was a black-bearded man whom they called Gaupa. He and his dog Bjönn followed elk spoors from one horizon to the other, from one county to the other. But whenever they happened to see an elk spoor with the clefts pointing apart they turned away. Chasing a spirit is like chasing a shadow.

Years passed.

§ 7

On Bog Hill, near the outskirts of Ré Valley, an elk bull was standing immovable.

It was dawn, when light and darkness intermingle, when the wild animal threads softly to his lair, tramples in a circle for a little while, and then crouches down and closes his eyelids. The few hours out of each twenty-four when death and life are locked in each other’s arms have come to an end. Here and there a drop of blood lies on the earth like some moist red flower, or a heap of loose feathers seems to tell where a bird has undressed; only that particular bird no longer needs feathers.

Still the bull elk on Bog Hill did not move a muscle. His head stood out clearly against the dawn which flooded the eastern sky like a lake of yellow light. His antlers resembled young bushes, and between the tines a dying star twinkled in silvery paleness.

It was no mortal animal standing there; it was a ghost from dead generations, an animal spirit from the eternal hunting-grounds.

Daylight grew more and more whilst the elk stood still. A grey film of dawn decked the side of the pine trunks turned to the east. The light filtered through the pine needles as through a sieve. A bird chirped a while and then became silent again, like a life that dies just as it is born.

Then the elk’s head turned, quite slowly from west to north. In his slightly curved muzzle there was the dreaming melancholy of wooded dells. His nostrils worked incessantly, expanding and contracting, the cold morning air running in and out of his nose. His eyes were large and wide awake. For the call of sex burned in his mighty body—the call to mating which rises and falls from time to time in eternal rhythm, from generation to generation.

One ear of that elk was only half an ear. It was Rauten, the largest and wildest of all elks between mountain and valley. Mating time had come, when bull seeks cow, and cow seeks bull, when angry eyes stare into angry eyes in the fight for the female, when antler meets antler, breaking the silence of the forest with mighty crashes.

Rauten sniffed and listened. Into his nostrils entered the smell of rottening leaves and boggy marshes. It was late autumn, and the life which spring had created was on the point of returning to earth. But no scent of the female was borne on the slight breeze from the north that fills his nose. All the same he remained; now and then he cocked an ear, backwards and forwards, but no sound was heard from any living throat.

Then he lifted his head, opened his mouth and gave the mating call, a deep nasal sound which floated over the bog and died away again.

Again Rauten listened. The western slopes took on a lighter shade, but the valleys and gullies still yawned black.

Then he turned and went northwards along the ridge, with long strides, covering the ground at great speed. One cleft hoof splashes into a tiny pool of water, the other crushes a small spruce which has been ages about sprouting in the shallow soil, and might have grown to be a big tree.

Rauten knew of a cow living thereabouts. He had come a full league to find her, and soon a strange scent greeted his nostrils—a kind of burnt acrid smell, recalling a billy-goat at mating time.

Rauten went on till he found a marshy place with yellowing birches. On a hill-top close by, a small hole had been dug out in the earth—and not long before, for a couple of torn roots appeared fresh and white where they had been broken, not brownish as they are when they have been exposed for some time.

The hole had been dug out by mating-mad elk bulls, and the strong scent emanated from it. The hole seemed to breathe out that scent, and Rauten was in the middle of it.

He nosed the earth, but there was no breath of a cow. Then he rubbed himself against a small spruce.

Suddenly a soft-eyed elk cow came out on to the marsh below, and both animals stood still for a moment, heads raised eyeing each other. Rauten felt as light as light; he ran—no, he floated towards her. Passion was boiling inside him. He ran in rings round her, that shy female with lowered ears and patient, expectant eyes.

Then he broke loose upon her: He followed the same almighty law of Nature which compels the unconscious capercailzie and his cackling hen, the valiant wood-cock—yes, and even the little anemone which stealing the blue of the heavens spreads new life out of tiny soft stamens.

For a short time silence reigned over the marsh, except now and then for the crack of a breaking twig under the elks’ hoofs.

Then another elk appeared. It was a three-year-old, with slender horns. He saw the two in front of him and made as if he would jump. In him also the forces of nature were at work. Strength pulsated through his young body, each muscle trembled impatiently with longing for a contest. For that cow with Rauten belonged to him, to him alone. She had gone with him the day before; she was his, his own. The three-year-old grew large-eyed and wild-eyed, his withers bristled like a brush. Rauten must be vanquished, Rauten must die.

The two elk bulls faced each other on Bog Hill like two living springs of force. There were four eyes full of madness, four antlers, and those antlers mean death.

Rauten was like one suddenly waking from a trance. He was quivering, wide awake; for the cow who was peeping at them curiously from behind a crooked spruce was his. He had mastered her, he had floated with her through golden sunlit mists; she was his, his own. That youngster must be conquered. The youngster must die.

The first war-cry was raised, a hoarse cry from a savage soul on fire. “Yah! Yah!”

The younger elk lifted his upper body, a hoof was flung through the air, making a dark line across the pinewoods, stopped and fell.

“Crack!” The sound was at once soft and firm. Rauten felt a fierce burning sensation under one ear, a slight mist shadowed his brain for a moment, then all was clear again.

In that brief second the other hoof from the youngster struck his neck. Hair and skin was flayed off, a fire licked Rauten where the hoof struck, and then....

There he stood, half rampant, a thunder-cloud, a storm. He turned his eyes, turned them slowly, threateningly. They were no longer brown, but white. It was as if all madness raging in that huge body had concentrated in the eyes, turning them white. Rauten towered as tall as the young pine beside him, his jaws opened, breath steamed out and his tongue protruded, long, wet, slavering. Then Rauten struck back. His forelegs were no longer skin and bones and muscles belonging to a body. They were shadows, spirits, ghosts, sinister forebodings of blood and destruction. Lightning gleamed and thunder crashed. The storm had broken loose and the three-year-old was there to meet it. The God of the wilds have mercy on his body!

The sun had not yet risen, but was still resting somewhere behind the hills. But when Rauten struck, the three-year-old saw the sun all the same, not only one, but a number of suns, a swarm of them. They danced in his head like round sparkling disks of wonderful colours. They gleamed green like fireflies, metallic like a bluebottle, copper-red like the harvest moon.

Another blow fell on the heels of the first one. It struck above one eye. And once more the tapestry of the firmament was rolled up before the sight of the youngster. There were no suns that time, but stars—what a host of stars, as numerous as dewdrops on the grass, sparkling like snow in spring! They leapt and danced inside his head, whirling madly together.

They went out suddenly, all of them, disappeared like a mist, and then he saw the old sun peeping red-eyed from behind the eastern mountains.

The three-year-old went backwards and retreated, for this was so sudden. He had attacked a rocky wall and found it hard. But Rauten did not let go; he followed, followed, and up from hot gorges and reeking inner bodies came the war-cry again: “Yah! Yah!”

Their antlers met writhing into each other. Snouts touched the earth, the bulls groaning as if to rid themselves of something. The sinews of their hind-quarters shivered, trembled, rage gave life to every hair in their manes, their stumpy tails were raised angrily. Two sharp backs stood out against the sky like monsters. Every fibre of their bodies was taut, muscles writhed like worms and red-hot blood boiled rhythmically through their veins.

Their antlers were still interlaced in fierce contest; those of the youngster pale grey, Rauten’s brown, watered, lined like iceworn rocks, as if some unknown hand had written strange runes on them. They hammered and crashed, their hoofs cut gaping wounds in the moss, the dew fell like tears from the sedge, and dark spoors appeared on the bog where the mighty ones walked. But the three-year-old went backwards.

Their antlers released each other, their bodies rose, and once more legs turned into fleeting shadows. The blows sounded as if someone were beating sheepskins with a stick; hoarse sounds escaped from their throats, hair flew in the air like driven snow.

The cow looked on, slightly dazed, nodding as it were her approval, for that was what she liked. The tension between the bulls invaded her; she could not remain calm any more, she leapt forwards, stopped, stamped a little, and once she lowed loudly, out of sheer excitement. It was for her they were fighting, for her their sharp hoofs made their bodies bloom red with blood.

The red rose over Rauten’s shoulder grew and lengthened into a long narrow leaf, changing shape continually, but not changing colour. The three-year-old wore a number of such roses, which easily grew out of his young, well-beaten body.

The cow’s sympathies, however, were all for Rauten. He was the stronger, and she wanted the stronger. Even then she felt deliciously faint after their mating.

Rauten’s madness was that time sky-high, his muscles tautened and relaxed and in their rhythmical movement made a wild song.

Both bulls had now begun to feel the strain. The mouths of both were white with bubbling foam, and their heads felt heavy, but their haunches stood up like bushes, and Rauten’s eyes were alight with savage madness. It was as if he wanted to use to the fullest extent that opportunity of working off all the superfluous vitality which had accumulated in him in the course of a long, long year.

A few small bushes seemed to jump forward in the bog to see the fight. Tree-tops stretched their necks one behind the other, staring. Sparks of light flew up from the grass; it was the cool breath of night which remained like dew on the earth.

Once more the cow lowed with excitement. A woodpecker sat on a dry, hollow spruce tree. She was green as the slimy stones in the brook. She turned her head, listening in shiny-eyed astonishment at all the noise. Then her beak hammered on the wood once more. “Knrrr!” said the hollow tree-trunk.

Rauten’s skin was wet with sweat, and under his belly, on his flanks, flakes of foam boiled as if on a fleeing horse. And still his muscles sang their mad song, and again the three-year-old saw suns and stars. He staggered, retreated to the edge of the bog, sank on his knees, but rose at once. He had fought and lost, he had become a smaller beast in the woods. He was giving in, only he did not want to turn round and run away until he was obliged to do so.

At the edge of the bog the unexpected happened. A little hill runs down there, and a high stump of a tree stood close beside a spruce. The stump was about the same height as an elk, and it looked as if a storm had once felled a spruce. The younger bull retreated towards this stump, and without giving warning Rauten ran his antlers under him. Then he made a mighty effort which will not soon be forgotten in the Bog Hill forest. The three-year-old was raised on end, stood for a second on his hind legs, was pushed over and fell down on his back—between the tall stump and its neighbour the spruce tree, and was wedged in securely between them, fast as if in a vice.

Rauten stood with head uplifted looking at his helpless foe whose legs uselessly beat the empty air. Rauten wanted to use his antlers again, to kill, but he could not reach. The younger bull’s legs worked like a windmill, and a blow from them would hurt. Rauten remained there a long time, the youngster on his back, mouth wide open, steaming.