Part 5

Yes, he shot an elk bull on a prohibited ground. If the thing had been made known it would have resulted in a thumping big fine; and as Gaupa had nothing with which to pay a fine, it would have meant prison instead. Therefore he did a very sensible thing. He cut off one of the elk’s legs at the knee, then went outside the preserve and made a beautifully clear elk spoor all up to where his elk lay. Then he fetched people and said:

“Here ye are, folks. There is the spoor. I was raising him outside the preserve, and then he ran away in there where he lies.”

Well, the men saw what there was to see. The elk had been raised outside, though lying in the preserve. That was clear enough. The spoor was sufficient evidence as good as a sworn witness. The men bit off a screw of twist and would have sworn ever afterwards on their souls that Gaupa raised the elk on lawful ground. The man who owned the forest had half the meat, as is the custom. The sheriff had some of it for his Christmas dinner, and proposed the health of Sjur Renna whom people called Gaupa, the sprightliest man in the forest who fetched such dainty food from the wilderness.

Well, it was no unusual thing. Elk hunters have a special catechism, with the ninth commandment left out, the one about bearing false witness. But when Gaupa skipped that commandment he made an extra special churchy face, as candidly innocent as if his good conscience was covering it externally.

That winter an elk fell through the ice in Lower River, a league or so to the south. Four men helped him out again with great difficulty. That deer had half an ear, and ran off to the western slopes, having come from the east.

The following autumn Gaupa received a letter. It was brought to him specially by a little boy from Rust who had no other errand.

“I was sent with a letter for you,” he said.

“A letter?” Gaupa could scarcely have been more surprised if one morning the sun had risen in the west and had crossed the sky backwards. A letter? A letter for Gaupa?

He put down the fat pork he was eating, wiped his hand on his trousers, and took the letter as gingerly as if afraid it would burn his fingers.

The envelope bore some printed letters as distinct and black as those in the Prayer Book: “H. Braaten & Co., Drammen.” Below he read “Mr. Sjur Renden, Lower Valley.” But that was in pen-and-ink writing.

Gaupa opened the letter with his sheath knife much as he would cut open the skin of an elk’s belly. The rustling white paper in his hands for once brought home to his mind the fact that his hands were extremely dirty. The paper seemed too nice for them to touch. Even that bore the printed inscription “H. Braaten & Co., Drammen,” and below: “_Wholesale Hardware_,” which two words he did not understand in the least. The handwriting did not look like what he had learnt at school, round and readable. That before him was nothing but straight lines and broken ones crowded close together. And what a man he must be at handling a pen, he who wrote it! The words raced across the paper like gusts of wind, and below a whirling curl stood by itself; Gaupa guessed it was meant for “Braathe.” He went off at once to find the schoolmaster and have the letter read aloud. By himself he could only puzzle out a few words here and there, like “elk,” “Ré Valley,” “superstition,” and “Yours truly.”

H. Braaten & Co. was a man from Lower Valley who had turned genteel. He hailed from a croft called Vermin Camp, and left home as soon as he was out of school. He sat on a loaded trading cart when he left, and the whole outfit reeked of well-matured old cheese.

But when he returned!...

He arrived in a hired carriage with a hood on it, and he brought a wife whom they called Mrs. Braathe, and who talked town language. And there was so much gold in his teeth that when he laughed his mouth was like an entire sunrise.... That grand gentleman was Hans from Vermin Camp who left the district on a sledgeful of old cheese.

The schoolmaster first took two or three readings of the letter, his lips forming the words but not his tongue. Then he read aloud:

“MR. SJUR RENDEN,

“From my good friend up there I learn that there runs in the woods a remarkable elk, which no forest-men can manage to kill. Of course a great deal of superstition is connected with the animal, the dalesmen of Lower Valley being presumably as superstitious now as when I was a child. Lower Valley is on the outskirts of civilisation. But if you, who are, as I have heard, the greatest hunter in those parts, would consent to guide me on a trip after the mysterious elk, you would give great pleasure to an old acquaintance. I long for Ré Valley.

“Please send me an answer.

“With kind regards,

“Yours truly,

“H. BRAATHE.”

The schoolmaster folded up the letter looking as if he had accomplished a great deed, something that no one else in all the valley could manage.

“You’ll answer for me, won’t you?” said Gaupa. “You’ll say he can come?”

And going home to Lynx Hut he felt himself greater than before. A gentleman from Branæs had sent him a letter, saying it would be a pleasure to have his company. The last “Yours truly” sounded so full of respect and so courteous that one might think it had been written in mockery.

§ 16

One day Mr. Braathe knocked at the door of Lynx Hut. Gaupa was at home, but did not answer. What did that knocking mean? After another knock he went to open the door.

Mr. Braathe was a long lath of a man, who seemed to have been pulled too hard length-ways and grown too narrow. Everything about him hung loosely—his cheeks, shoulders, even his clothes. He was as shrivelled up as a bat.

“Please sit down on the bed,” said Gaupa; “there are no more lice there than the fleas have managed to eat.”

That was a joke he usually quoted to strangers, but this time he swore to himself the moment he had said it. The man before him hailed from Vermin Camp, and might think the words an allusion to his past.

But Mr. Braathe kept smiling, and asked Gaupa to call him plain Hans just as in the old days.

That same evening they stood on the slope above Tolleiv Mountain Farm in Ré Valley. Bjönn was not with them, because Hans did not want him, and in Gaupa’s opinion even a dog could not avail when he was hunting Rauten.

If Gaupa had nursed any ideas about the townsman being worth but little, he was mistaken. Gaupa walked quickly all day, but Hans kept up with him, and there was not a sign of perspiration about him. Once he took out from his bag a strange instrument, a short trumpet of birch-bark with a kind of mouthpiece at one end.

Hans was a much-travelled man. He once saw nothing for nights and days but sea and sky. He had smelt the smoke from Red Men’s camp fires. While he spoke, Gaupa grew silent and his eyes sought the far distance. He was not there in a boggy hollow on the Ré Valley slopes. He followed this tall man through endless woods on the other side of the earth, in a country which to Gaupa’s mind had always been more dream than reality. They seemed to be under a tree, and beside them crouched a copper-coloured Indian with burning eyes. He had a similar birch-bark trumpet in his hand. The wilds of Canada spread out under the clouds. It was early morning. Somewhere a beaver splashed into a calm pool. Farther away a duck was heard.

Then the Red Indian, their guide, moved his moccasins with infinite care, turned towards the rosy dawn over the earth in the east and lifted the birch-bark trumpet to his mouth. At first he only breathed into it as if to warm it. It was a cold autumn morning, as silent as death, except for the occasional splash of the beaver....

The Red Indian lowered his instrument, raised it again, and out of it floated the mating call of an elk, loud and living, luring and treacherous.

Hans arose, saying that that night they would lure the wizard elk. The birch-bark instrument had accompanied him in the wilds of Canada, and more than one crowned head had been turned by it. It would be a strange thing indeed if Rauten were not fooled also.... All that talk about the Ré Valley Swede was the most arrant nonsense, he declared.

Gaupa did not care to show himself superstitious to his companion, for superstition was old-fashioned amongst the genteel. Therefore he guessed that Rauten was an elk like other elks. He ate grass, mated with the cows in the autumn, and when he died he would die like a he goat. No restless spirit would fly out of his nostrils.

§ 17

It was the following night.

On the slopes of Black Mountain Rauten stood on a rock, listening, his ears waving alternately backwards and forwards. His beard hung stiff and awe-inspiring. He was listening for a cow. They usually can be heard at dusk during mating time.

The weather was not quite calm. A darkish cloud sailed slowly above Black Mountain. Just below him in the river there were mild rapids and the water bubbled incessantly against the rocks like a boiling kettle.

Farther up the slope Hans and Gaupa sat under a spruce tree, the lower branches of which touched the earth. They sat as if in a tent, on soft reindeer moss, hardly daring to move. Hans produced a flask, and Gaupa poured the golden brandy down his throat without a word. Little by little the forest grew veiled. Over the east mountains daylight faded away, the roar of Ré River seemed incessant and more wide awake than ever. The sound was uneven, which meant that there was movement in the air. That was bad luck.

Hans bent towards Gaupa. “I wonder if we shall have an answer to-night,” he whispered.

“This is the best elk ground in all Ré Valley,” Gaupa whispered back.

Then once more they sat as still as stones, and Gaupa felt the brandy on his tongue for a long time.

The night before they had tried the trumpet trick, but no bull answered them.

That afternoon they found Rauten’s spoor just below where they were then sitting. A young pine showed white spots on its bark and several branches were broken.

There the wizard elk had rubbed his antlers; the marks were so fresh, perhaps only made that day.

As darkness came on, Gaupa’s excitement grew. Hearing seemed to fill every part of his body. He was nothing but ears....

Hans regarded this strange being beside him. Gaupa’s face was so very short, with next to no chin, and that is rare, for surely energetic people generally have strong chins. Now and then he jerked his head sharply and suddenly, as if he heard something that made him jump every once in a while. Then Hans saw Gaupa smile, and a smile had not been seen on Gaupa’s face all that trip. He was smiling, a strange, stiff-lipped smile, and turning to Hans he asked:

“D’you hear him?”

Hans had not heard a sound. But Gaupa’s keen ear had caught a sound so faint as scarcely to be one at all—the mating cry of a bull elk. The sound seemed to come from below and from the north. Silence reigned around them once more. Gipsy Lake had a silvery streak along its eastern banks. It was the reflection of the northern sky.

Hans carefully pressed the birch-bark mouthpiece against his lips, stuck the other end out through the pine branches, and blew. The call of a cow elk rang out: “Come, come.”

Then all was silence.

A quarter of an hour later Hans once more lifted his instrument.... He stopped, startled.

Immediately to the north, silhouetted against the bright sky in the opening of the valley, an elk bull stood on a mountain ridge. Hans could see the sky between its legs and also two ears and enormous, shovel-shaped antlers.

The elk did not move, and stood out like a statue against the sky above the valley.

Gaupa cocked his gun. “Rauten,” he whispered, and it sounded like a sob. He had seen the mutilated ear. At that moment the bull stepped down from the ridge, straight towards them, and darkness hid him from their view.

Then they heard “Örrke—örrk,” a kind of nasal grunt, approaching nearer and nearer. A dry twig cracked, and in the clearing a pine stump shimmered with a greyish gleam. The roar from Ré River seemed far distant, as if withdrawn, but suddenly it sounded close again, the forest gave a sigh, and Gaupa saw a lichen tuft move slightly just above Hans’s head.

Then the noise of the elk ceased as if suddenly cut off. There was not a sound. The minutes crawled past. There was still silence.

Gaupa turned.

“Weathered!” he whispered.

But Rauten trotted northwards along the edge of the long Ré marshes hour after hour. He had heard the luring call of a cow, went to meet her, and found man. What a strange thing to happen!... And Rauten ran on. It is bad to be where man is.

§ 18

It was the same autumn, later on in September, one night at Lynx Hut.

Bjönn was asleep on the bed. “The Tempest” hung on the wall. A wooden box, converted, formed Gaupa’s cobbler’s workshop. A tiny paraffin lamp gave him a sleepy light for the work he had in hand, mending a shoe. On the box awls, plugs, tacks, waxed thread, and heel irons were heaped together, for Gaupa was very far from being a tidy man.

The patch finished, he pulled out from under the bed a violin case, took out his instrument and turned it round in his hands as softly as if caressing it. Then he lifted it to his chin and made a stroke to test the tuning, but when he touched the tenor and bass strings the violin sang so sadly, sweetly, and wildly at the same time, just the tune that will sometimes rise up out of black, hidden river-filled gullies. The violin was tuned for magic.

A lively country dance leaped from the strings. Bjönn woke up and opened his eyes, but shut them again. A few dying embers glowed red through the draught-hole in the stove, and when Gaupa had finished and sat in deep reflection the sound of a watch ticking filled the silence. It was getting on for one o’clock in the morning, but that was Gaupa’s most wide-awake hour.

Steps were heard outside, and Bjönn barked. “Whisht,” said Gaupa. There was a knock, Gaupa unlocked his door, which as it happened he had locked that night.

“Evening,” said somebody in the dark.

“Evening,” Gaupa replied; “are you out walking so late?”

Hans Holmen stood outside, exactly in the line between darkness and the yellow lamplight from within. His coat was unbuttoned and a nickel watchchain gleamed across his waistcoat. He carried a fishing-rod over one shoulder, and Gaupa saw the white top move softly in the dark.

“Oh,” said Hans Holmen again, “it’s early rather than late. It is just about one o’clock.”

Gaupa waited. Full well he knew that Hans must have a very special reason for coming in the night like that.

Then Hans began to relate how he was fishing along the river. There was a dense thicket of bushes growing along the bank and he was well hidden. While he was baiting his hook an enormous animal came out of the undergrowth just to the south of him. At first he thought it was a horse, and wondered why it had no bell, and besides it was not quite the shape of a horse either. When the animal waded out into the river he saw it against the sky-line and recognised it as an elk of unusual size.

Hans Holmen went close up to Gaupa. He lowered his voice as if telling a secret.

“‘Twas the wizard elk I saw,” he said; “I saw the mark of your knife.”

He waited.

“Well,” he summed up the situation, “I thought I’d better tell you, when I saw the light in your window. That elk waded across the river and went up the other side, so now you know where to find his spoor.”

Hans Holmen left, and Gaupa closed the door. He remained for some seconds staring down on the floor, standing in his shirt and trousers.

But out on the high road Hans Holmen went straight homewards and not towards the river.

In Lynx Hut the petroleum lamp was still burning. Gaupa went to and fro slowly, busy as usual. He baked potato flap-jacks on his stove, filled the wooden butter cup, and made ready for a tramp with his knapsack, Bjönn, and “The Tempest.”

About three o’clock he went to the corner cupboard, and after some fumbling produced an old-fashioned leather purse. Out of it he took a slightly flattened lead bullet, as big as a small potato, dirty, knobby, and rough.

That bullet had a name, for it was called the Swede’s Bullet. Gaupa’s father was a soldier at Matrand in 1814, and he shot a Swede who was standing against a tree-trunk. The bullet went straight through him and into the bole of the tree. Afterwards his father picked out that bullet, and ever since the family had regarded it as a priceless possession.

It could heal wounds and cure illness as well as any doctor. Gaupa never forgot the old crofter who had an ulcer in his leg. Gaupa went to him with the Swede’s Bullet and stroked the leg with it in a circle round the ulcer. From that day the ulcer stopped spreading; it could not pass outside the circle where the Swede’s bullet had touched the skin.

But then Gaupa reflected whether he should sacrifice the priceless lump of lead and melt it into a bullet for Rauten.

Rauten, being no ordinary elk, could probably not be killed by ordinary bullets. All the old people believed that there are many animals which demand a special ammunition if you want to shoot them.

But should he really give up the Swede’s bullet?

If it could assist him to kill the wizard elk, the whole district would look upon him as a great man. He would be famous in the valley, and the fact would not easily be forgotten that he was the man who killed Rauten.

For many years he had avoided the beast. For to be quite honest he had to admit that bad luck followed the one who hunted it. Why was he so ill when he shot at the wizard elk at Morsæter? They saw the spoor and knew what animal it was which he saw like a vision in the moonlight.

But while he was conscious of his childish fear of Rauten, he always felt a tantalising desire to see the end of him, to kill him, and cart that enormous body down into the Lower Valley, to exhibit it to the dalesmen and listen to their comments.

Oh what a day that would be! The small boys would gaze at him and Bjönn in deep admiration not unmingled with fear, and the old women would shake their heads knowingly and predict disaster to him....

The Swede’s bullet weighed heavily in his hand, heavier than ordinary lead. Unknown forces were imprisoned in the metal, and it must not go out of the family’s possession. But Gaupa had no relatives in the Valley. He was an only child, his parents were dead, all his other kinsmen had gone away across the Blue Atlantic. When he died the Swede’s bullet would be homeless, so to speak, and that ought not to happen.

Gaupa decided to melt down the Swede’s Bullet.

He made a big fire in the stove under a kind of small pan in which he usually melted his lead. He gazed very earnestly at the Swede’s bullet as it lost form and flattened down until at last it was one big drop of lead in the pan, glittering like a flame, as mysterious as a mountain lake under the moon.

Suddenly Bjönn, who lay upon the bed, grew restless. He looked up at his master, whimpering softly. What on earth was the matter with the dog? “Quiet!” said Gaupa.

Bjönn rolled himself up again, head under tail. But when Gaupa poured the molten lead into the bullet mould, the dog once more raised his head and whined.

How strange! Was the dog ill? Perhaps it was rheumatism. For Bjönn was growing old. He had the pale-blue eyes and the dimmed pupils which indicate age. But he was fairly brisk as yet. What was it he carried on like that for?

Gaupa went up to the dog and stroked his head. Bjönn flattened his ears as a sign of content and calmed down.

The lead had cooled, and Gaupa took out the bullet, fresh and shiny. But it was not like other bullets. It had killed once; it knew its way, and wherever this bullet hit the elk’s body, death would radiate from it as if from a poisoned arrow. Heaven have mercy upon Rauten!

Bjönn again raised his head, whimpering, when Gaupa placed the bullet in the cartridge.

It was four o’clock in the morning. He extinguished the lamp and crept to bed beside Bjönn. Now and then he opened his eyes to look for dawn through the window.

§ 19

That morning an elk bull lay quietly at the upper end of Owl Glen. It was Rauten. He had come from the other side of the valley from the eastern mountains. A dog with a terrible voice in his throat had chased him for half a day, and at last Rauten had swum across Lower Valley River.

But he wanted to go back to Ré Valley, for that was his home. There for months peace reigned in the woods until it entered his own shaggy body and made him at one with the deep silence of the mountains.

Peace was the depth of his nature. He wanted to see, unseen. He liked to stand at the edge of the bogs, looking at the capercailzie hen with all her brood. He liked to see the ever-frightened hare nibbling the grass undisturbed. That was peace, and each day offered fresh joys, however old—a feed of juicy grass not yet withered in some marshy place, a few waterlilies in a mountain lakelet. For him life was food, sleep, and rest, and then feeding again. Life was light and darkness, sun and rain, heat and cold.

He slept at all times of day and night, but as lightly as if even in his sleep all the tiny sounds of the wilderness reached his consciousness. They floated about his ears, and the least unusual crackling let them all into his brain at once, and he was wide awake.

Rauten lived on his instinct—that is, on the experiences accumulated by countless generations through all ages and in all countries. Experiences had glided into him as murmuring brooklets run into the sea.

When he ran towards the wind, and not before it, it was because he had to do so. When he ran away from the scent of man, elks long since dead whispered soundless warnings in his ears. The fear of man was a seed which had been growing since the first arrow flew twirling and singing into the shoulder of an elk and caused life to ebb out of it.

Rauten was lying in Owl Glen this grey morning, with the sleepy murmur from Lower River before him, and a tiny trickle of water over the rocks beside him. That little trickle was a tiny life. A drop fell, and there was an attentive silence, then another drop splashed. Higher up in the glen an owl sat immovable, big sprouts of feather sprouting from the head, yellow eyes staring blindly at the daylight, her beak still bloody after the night’s hunting.

Far below Gaupa was following an elk’s spoor, breathing heavily. He held Bjönn on the leash, and the dog nosed the earth as if seeking something. Once in a while he would snort and tug hard, straight into the mountain, into Owl Glen.

The glen was narrow, with walls of rock on either side, the mountain ash glowing in autumnal glory, and the bracken turning gold. A hawk flew out with a cry, and the sound echoed backwards and forwards from rock to rock, growing into a strong volume of sound, like a loud call in empty space.

The man and the dog crawled upwards. Suddenly Bjönn threw up his head. He had caught the open scent, and Gaupa unfastened the dog’s collar, quietly and carefully.

When the foresters lie in their huts on long winter evenings they often tell of Gaupa and Bjönn and the wizard elk.

The old men amongst them still remember from their boyhood the wild chase which began that morning in Owl Glen, and lasted one day, two days, three days. The end came on the night of the third day.

Rauten lay peacefully in Owl Glen, his ears on the alert, one cocked forwards and the other backwards.

Then he started up from his lair, and ran. The wakeful conscience of the woods had been disturbed. A small pebble loosened and fell clattering downwards, a black deer-hound with a grey nose and grey legs ran out from amongst the scrub, the elk bull turned tail, and strode westwards on his long legs. That was the beginning. Down in Lower Valley the parlour clocks struck seven, and the chimneys gave forth light smoke into the grey morning.