CHAPTER XXV.

THE GJENDE FLY.

_August 28._--This was the hottest, most windless and cloudless day that has yet been made. The Russian and F---- went out with Esau and the Skipper to shoot ryper, accompanied by a pointer, which the Norwegians call a bird-hound. A brood was soon found and rose in front of Esau, who with his usual promptitude got a right and left; whereupon the Russian took off his hat, and bowing profoundly, advanced and solemnly shook hands with him, protesting that he had frequently seen marvellous shooting, but never, never aught like this; at least, that is what we imagined to be the translation of the neat little speech which he made in Russian.

A ryper is easier to kill, if possible, than the tamest young grouse which gets up under a dog's nose on the calmest 12th of August; and Esau thinks fame is like an eel on a night-line, easily caught, but very difficult to hold afterwards.

Satisfied by having witnessed this extraordinary specimen of our skill, the Russian gave up the chase, and returned to Gjendesheim completely exhausted by the heat; but the others went on till the afternoon, now finding a selfish old cock, whose fate no one regretted; now a young brood only just old enough to be shot: anon lying down to rest and eat berries, or bathing in the Leirungs Lake, but all the time extremely happy.

F---- was so exceedingly polite that he would _not_ shoot unless birds enough for all of us happened to get up at once, and one brood escaped without a shot being fired, in consequence of our unwonted emulation of his courtesy.

Near Leirungs we were fortunate enough to drive three large broods into the same bit of willow scrub, and had some very pretty shooting as the dog set them one by one; but there was hardly any scent, and the heat soon proved too much for our bird-hound, so we returned to Gjendesheim with a very considerable addition to the larder.

Then followed hours of inability to do anything except lie on our backs with lighted pipes in our mouths, far too exhausted to smoke them; and at last--dinner; and soon the cooler air brought relief and engendered a return of bloodthirstiness, which impelled the gang of sportsmen to sally forth and rake the river till it was quite rough with artificial flies.

This was a trying time, for by some means we have established a most dangerously flattering reputation as fishermen, and were bound to do all we knew to retain it. However, all turned out right; the Skipper went into the lake and got several beauties, and Esau did the same in the river, so that we came in with the best bags by a considerable margin, and could now afford to catch nothing for a whole day without being dethroned from our pedestal.

The river, Gjendinoset as it is called, just in front of the rest-house, is a wonderful piece of water; there are about 150 yards of rapid in which the fish lie, then comes a fall, and below that there are nothing at present but small fish, though the big ones will soon begin to drop down lower for spawning. Consequently we all fish in the first 150 yards, and to-day between 50 and 60 lbs. weight has been taken out; the same quantity yesterday, and probably for some days before; and the fishing will be even better a few days later, for the Gjende fly is beginning to hatch, and as long as he lasts the fish will rise well.

We have heard so much of this fly that we had been expecting something rather gorgeous, a monster dragon-fly, or at least a second-rate butterfly, or a decent imitation of a stag-beetle; and we have been looking up gaudy Scotch and Canadian salmon flies, which we hoped might be passable substitutes; but, alas for the vain hopes of foolish man! the Gjende fly has come, and he is only a wretched little black beast like a very small, unenterprising, common or garden house-fly of Great Britain. He cannot fly decently; he is apparently devoid of sense; he has no moral, physical, or intellectual attributes for which a human being can learn to respect or love him; but--he _can_ CRAWL. If he alights on the water it never occurs to him to rise again, and he allows the trout, mad with the excitement of a fortnight's prospective gluttony, to scoop him down their capacious throats by companies. If he enters your mouth, which he does with a numerous retinue every time you open it, retreat from that untenable position is the very last thing he would think of; and with what may be a gleam of momentary intelligence he seems desirous of still further increasing his knowledge of the rest of your interior arrangements.

With characteristic obstinacy, unmindful of the teachings of logic, he invariably acts on the fallacious maxim that 'an ink-bottle cannot be so full that there is not room for just one more Gjende fly.' The whole of the river here at the end of the lake, and for thirty yards on each side, is now pervaded by this noisome creature; the water looks as if it were covered with a mixture of soot and tar, the rocks are black and slippery with him, and the atmosphere is charged with him, so that the landscape dimly seen through the cloud looks as if it were dancing.

Gjendesheim itself is unfortunately not quite beyond the zone which he infests, so that the windows look loathsome with crawling blackness; the tablecloth is strewn with the corpses of those who have imbibed the honeyed poison of the paraffin lamp and come to an untimely end, and the remains of the 'boss pie' would warrant a stranger in the belief that it had been composed of currants.

We think Pharaoh must have been a man of extraordinary resolution, or else inane mildness of character, otherwise he would have sacrificed Moses long before the fourth Plague was concluded.

Fortunately the Gjende fly has no insatiable craving for human flesh; the Skipper, indeed, asserted that one fastened on his hand and inflicted a wound that swelled enormously and remained swollen for several days, but the better opinion is that the creature that perpetrated this outrage must have been a viper, though we did not hint this to the Skipper, because he is firmly convinced that whisky is the only remedy for snake-bites, and that it must be taken in large quantities.

If any one stuck up a rod near the river, in two minutes it looked like a black fir pole with a bunch on the top; and John, who is a man of great entomological knowledge, spent some time in studying this phenomenon. He reported that the flies crawled up for fun, intending to jump off the top ring, but when they got up it was so much higher than they expected that they were all afraid to try, and those at the bottom and halfway up kept jeering at the top ones and calling them names, and jostling them so much that they could not crawl down again. He also said that the swarm in the air was so dense that he wrote his name in it with his finger, and it remained visible for nearly a minute.

Probably it is difficult for a man to speak the exact truth with his mouth full of (_f_)lies.

When it was too dark to fish we sat round the fire and heard a good deal about the various winter sports of Norway, capercailzie stalking, bear hunting, elk and reindeer shooting, and running on skier, the snow-shoes of the country, which are very different from the well-known Canadian shoes, being made of wood, from six to twelve feet long, four inches wide in front, three behind, about an inch and a half thick where the foot rests, thinner at each end, and turned up and pointed in front. Every district has its own peculiar shape; about here the right shoe is made six feet long, the left one ten or eleven feet, it being more easy to turn if one is shorter than the other: some are made of pine, some of birch, and occasionally oak. The men of the Thellemarken are the most skilful runners, but it is now quite a fashionable amusement in Christiania during the winter, just as skating is in England.

_Sunday, August 29._--Our Norwegian friends departed for the happy hunting-grounds of Rus Vand this morning, but before doing so they most kindly offered us the hut there any time after this week, at the end of which they are going south. We can hardly expect the present glorious weather, which has now lasted for three weeks, to go on for ever; and when the change comes, a tent will no longer be the abode of comfort and luxury that we at present find it, so that the offer of the hut is most opportune for us.

We parted with great regret from people who have been so kind and hospitable, and many were the expressions of good-will and protestations of eternal friendship, as we shall not see them again till we pass through Christiania on our return home.

That return home has caused the Skipper hours of anxious thought already: there is to be a wedding in England about the end of next month, at which, although it is not his own, his presence is urgently needed. He knows he ought to go, but hates to leave this blissful life just when the best stalking is beginning; consequently he devotes much time every day to the consideration of the subject, torn by doubts, tortured by terrible misgivings, and harassed by indecision.

To-day, after being more than usually disagreeable under the malign influence of his conscience, and seeking for inspiration, first in the room at Gjendesheim, walking up and down like Weston; then on the lake paddling like a penny boat; and finally roosting on a rock at the top of the fjeld with his arms folded like Napoleon, and a gruesome scowl on his face, or at least on those portions of it which were visible through the mask of Gjende flies, he at last concluded to commit his fate to the decision of an unbiassed coin, if such could be obtained from any confiding friend.

With great difficulty he persuaded Esau to lend him one öre, value 1/100 of a shilling, which seems on reckoning to be about half a farthing; Esau observing as he gave it, 'It isn't that I'm stingy, old fellow, though of course I don't expect to see it again, but it _will_ throw my accounts out so.' N.B.--Esau's notion of keeping accounts is to put his receipts into one pocket, _and his disbursements into another_; if he has a vague idea to within 20_l._ or so of how the money has gone, it will be more than any one expects; that everything he possesses will be spent is a foregone conclusion.

But to resume. The öre coin has no distinct head or tail, so the Skipper named one side heads, and tossed. The thing fell on its edge, and rolled round the table and about the room till it struck the wall, whereupon it fell over 'heads,' and decided that the Skipper must go to the wedding.

So he sat down and wrote a letter saying that they must not expect him, and that he should stay out here the whole time that was originally intended; for as soon as he had dated the letter it occurred to him that it would be childish to allow such a weighty matter to be decided by the whim of a half-farthing coin, which might very likely be interested in the affair in some way, and which, as he truly said, would possibly have turned up 'tails' if it had not happened to fall on its edge and been interfered with by an unauthorized wall.

Having thus acted according to his inclinations, and given his missive to Andreas to post when he leaves Gjendesheim next week, the Skipper became quite pleasant again, and went forth to his fishing 'ever and all so gaily O.'

The ponies of Norway are wonderfully docile and clever; these qualities were well shown to-day in a black one belonging to Jens which came to take F----'s baggage over the mountain to Rus Vand. This pony was brought down near the door of the rest-house, and left standing there without any fastening or any one to look after him. The things were not ready, so he waited about two hours, occasionally wiping off the Gjende flies with his tail when their weight became insupportable, but otherwise never moving. The busy world (consisting of Andreas and Ragnild) pursued their usual avocations around him, goats ran against him, and insects climbed over him, but there he stood placid and motionless as a wooden rocking-horse. At last the baggage was ready, and they brought it out and piled it on his back until we feared he would break, and then Jens turned his head in the direction of Rus Vand, and gave him a gentle push to start him; and he went slowly off up the mountain, choosing the best way for himself, for no one went with him; in fact, Jens did not follow him for about half an hour, but no doubt he was found at the right place in the end. The whole performance reminded one of a clockwork toy, and John remarked as we stood and watched him out of sight over the pass, 'Now, that's what I call a well-trained pony.'

During our stay here we had the pleasure of forming the acquaintance of an elk-dog. This animal is taken out in a kind of harness to which a rope is fastened, the other end of the rope being attached to the hunter's belt; and his legitimate occupation is finding elk in a forest by scent, and denoting their presence by his behaviour before the hunter gets within range of the elk's eyes, ears, or nose. Mr. Thomas brought him up here hoping to find reindeer with him in the same manner, as he had been unable to get a Finmarker[*] broken to reindeer; but the experiment has not been successful, for the dog has been so carefully trained to elk, that he exhibits a large and lofty contempt for so pusillanimous a creature as a reindeer, and will not confess that he has discovered the existence of such a thing at all.

[Footnote: Finmarker is the kind of dog usually employed for finding reindeer: the name being derived from the district of which it is a native.]

But in addition to the fact that he finds no deer, he is a good deal of trouble from the fastidiousness of his appetite. It appears that he is accustomed to feed on dogs, and when he cannot get dogs he can rough it very well for a short time on boys or any other plain fare; but up here, where dogs are few and boys are extinct, he is having a very poor time of it. The last place where he had a really square meal was at Skjæggestad, on the journey up, where he was lucky enough to get a whole dog and some portions of boy; since then he has only had limbs snatched off adventurous observers, and altogether seems to be pining for want of proper nourishment. He is about the height of a colley, but with an enormous chest and limbs, a head something like an Esquimaux, a wiry reddish yellow coat, and a most unkindly expression of countenance. In the absence of sufficient flesh food he appears to be developing a liking for man-diet, so we did not remain long in his society, for which indeed we only craved after we had perceived through a chink in the door of his dwelling that he was moored to a beam by a kind of anchor chain. We have often heard that there is a certain amount of danger in the pursuit of the elk; if the hunter is always accompanied by a dog of this kind we can easily understand it. However, he was a very interesting animal, and if we had a National School at Memurudalen we should certainly have tried to buy him, as there is any amount of room for _débris_ there. What a boon he would be in some of the thickly populated districts of England!

In the afternoon we paddled leisurely back to our camp and found it looking prettier than ever, but, alas! our little stream had ceased to run. However, there is another one not more than forty yards away, so we shall not be much troubled by its loss.

_August 30._--The sun still shines upon us from a cloudless sky, and early in the morning, before any breeze springs up, the lake makes a most beautiful picture, with its steep mountain sides and foaming torrents so perfectly reflected in the green unruffled water. But, lovely as it is, its beauty is rather wasted on us now, for it has been just the same for the last three weeks, with the outlines all hard and clearly defined, and none of the graduated effects of distance which we get from the hazy climate at home: in this clear atmosphere the peaks twenty miles away are as bright as those a mile or so beyond the lake. Probably this is the reason why we so seldom see pictures of Norwegian mountain scenery, and that the few which do appear are often condemned as hard, cold, and unsatisfactory.

The most prominent object in looking towards the lake from our camp is a curious pyramidal mound, about thirty feet high, close to the water's edge. It is so regular in shape that we have devoted many hours of cogitation and argument to the discovery of its history.

John (who is a man of considerable archæological fame) maintains that it is a funeral barrow in which some ancient Viking was buried, and he wants us to give up our cartridges for the purpose of constructing a mine and blasting him out: we have vainly represented to him that it cannot be a Viking's tomb, because there is absolutely nothing to Vike up here.

The Skipper says it is a glacial moraine, 'any donkey can see that at a glance;' and Esau holds to the opinion that it is an artificial mound put up for ancient regiments of Gjendin yeomen and Memurudalen militia to practise archery at. Possibly none of these theories give the correct solution; but, whatever its origin, it makes a capital rifle butt for our occasional shooting. Esau was heard to irreverently remark, as he aimed at it with the Skipper's rifle, 'he guessed an express bullet would rouse old Jarl Hakon out of that,' but nothing particular followed.

To-day the Skipper composed an Irish stew as a _pièce de résistance_, which, when it came to table, was unanimously voted the best of all the excellent dishes on which we have feasted here. After dinner we made an enormous fire for the sole purpose of warmth, as the nights are now very cold, and during this fine weather after sunset a strong draught sets down our valley towards the lake. We have ascertained that a like draught blows down each of the other valleys running into Gjendin, making the lake a centre. That in ours begins gently directly the sun has set, and increases in strength until it amounts to a stiff breeze; and as it comes direct from the vast snow fjelds, it is a disagreeably chilly blast, which freezes that side of our bodies remote from the fire, and leads us to envy the happy condition of a leg of mutton attached to a roasting-jack. That, 'o nimium fortunatum!' enjoys equally in every part the genial warmth, while man has no mechanical arrangement by which his immortal soul can be rendered blissful through the medium of a temperate body.

In the morning a breeze begins to blow out of the lake into all the valleys; illustrating on a small scale the cause of land and sea breezes all over the world. The Skipper and John (who is a man of profound science) have elaborated a theory explaining the exact reason of this interesting phenomenon; but as their explanation is entirely opposed to the teachings of Dr. Brewer and the opinions of Professor Tyndall, and involves a rearrangement of existing notions concerning radiation and the movements of the heavenly bodies, we think it best to exclude it from these pages, as this is not a simply scientific work, and we have no desire to hurt the feelings of even the above-named misguided philosophers.