Part 4

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?