Happy Times in Norway

by Sigrid Undset

  The men at Björge had been great hunters for generations. But now game was scarce in the mountains. Nevertheless, Magnar was at the saeter with his dogs. He had an elkhound, champion in his class and the winner of a whole shelfful of silver medals and blue ribbons, and a young Irish setter, a red-haired beauty who, though nervous and irritable, had accustomed herself to Mother and Hans and was relatively friendly toward them. Magnar was waiting for the hunting season to begin, but meanwhile he helped his sister with a little of everything. Yes, there were attractions enough at Björge saeter, besides the fact that the buildings there were the oldest and the handsomest of all the saeters in Goppollen.

  Hans quickly accustomed himself to hearing everyone up here call his mother by her first name and use the familiar “du” to her. Soon he himself began calling her Sigrid, not mother.

  “For Sigrid’s a rather pretty name, don’t you think?” he observed one day.

  “Absolutely,” Mother declared. “One of my grandmothers was named Algaard Kristine, and the other one Clara Severine Petrea, so I consider myself lucky. My father wanted me named for all my ancestral mothers at Sollia and Österdalen and all these women were named either Sigrid or Ingeborg, as far as I know.”

  Johanne never went to these coffee parties at the other saeters. In her free time, she sat with a sketchbook and colored crayons, drawing. When she and Mother had become so well acquainted that Johanne could lay aside her shyness, she confided to Mother that she was going to be a painter. A sister of her father’s was married to a doctor in Oslo and this aunt had promised Johanne might live with them when she had finished school. Then she was going to try to get into the Academy. And when she had learned enough so that she could give an exhibition and perhaps get a grant, she would live in Paris in winter and come home every summer and be dairymaid at Goppollen. That was what Miss Jahn did, the daughter of the pastor they used to have in the parish. She was a painter and lived abroad every winter and worked as dairymaid at home every summer. This year she was at Nord-Elstad saeter. That was one of the saeters where a light always burned late in the evenings, there below the mountain on the other side of Big Tromsa. For the most part Johanne copied picture postcards and pictures from magazines—some good, some bad. But when she took her courage in her hands and tried to make sketches of her own from things around her here in the mountains, she was really good, especially in doing cows and horses.

  The doll house took up a great deal of Hans’s and Janna’s time. It superseded even the little girl’s knitting, and Hans disturbed his mother in her work all too often with his demands that she help with this and help with that. Their children, Jöda and Little Mari, went on strike the second day.

  “I only said it the way you say it to me,” Hans related afterward. “ ‘I would rather not punish you, but if you do that again I’ll have to give you a spanking.’ ”

  Little Mari became grossly offended. She refused, straight out, to be Hans’s child any longer. In fact, she began to pout and said she didn’t want to stay there any longer . . . she wanted to go home to her mother. And when her father, Sigurd Hole, arrived on Saturday evening, Little Mari demanded with great force that he take her home with him Sunday. So as Sigurd drove down to the valley, Little Mari sat on his lap, so self-important that she did not even deign to wave to Hans and Janna, though they shouted and called “levvel” good-by, to her. But she merely pouted and pretended she did not know them.

  Nor did Jöda wish to play house any longer. All day long she lay across the long dining table in the saeter house, surrounded with paper bags from the store and all the wrapping paper she could get her hands on, making rough drafts in her large print of the letters she was going to write to her grandmother in Lorn and to her cousins in America. She had won a box of the loveliest writing paper at a bazaar. Some of the sheets were decorated with bouquets of roses, others with swallows carrying letters in their bills, some with two hands clasped in a garland of forget-me-nots. On the envelopes a grownup had written neatly and plainly the names and addresses of those for whom the letters were intended—Miss Loretta Hogan, 2121 East 78 St., Fargo, North Dakota, U.S.A., and Mrs. Jöda Haugen, Hole, Lesjaverk, Gudbrandsdalen.

  Soon every time a wind played over the meadow it whirled around large pieces of gray wrapping paper inscribed with “My der cusin Loreta and Majori and cusin Kenet . . .” or “My good grandmother and name” . . .

  “How well you write, Jöda, even though you are so little,” declared Mother. “You haven’t gone to school more than one year, have you?”

  But Jöda had not even started school. Her grandmother had lived with them the preceding winter and she had taught Jöda to read the headlines in the newspapers and to print the letters.

  Hans was so dejected because Jöda and Little Mari had deserted them.

  “If only we had those dolls of Tulla’s she doesn’t care about anyway,” Hans reflected to Mother. “Mother, can’t you write to Thea and ask her to send them to us?”

  But that Mother could not do. It was true Tulla never played with the two Käthe-Kollwitz dolls Mother had once bought for her, but their place was the shelf above her bed, and Tulla could not abide having anything changed in the rooms at home.

  At last they found a solution. Mother selected from the woodpile two nice sticks of birchwood with smooth white bark. She borrowed Johanne’s colored crayons and drew faces on the bark. Then the sticks were swathed in kerchiefs and Mother sacrificed a shoe box to make a cradle. Now Hans and Janna had two sweet little babies, and they were busy the livelong day changing the didies, and giving them the bottle, and now and then, a wee bit of upbringing.

  5

  IT WAS GETTING ON TOWARD FALL. ONE NOTICES THE coming of fall earlier in the mountains than in the valley. The leaves on the blueberry bushes had a red cast, and the branches were heavy with dark, ripe berries. And everywhere on the marshes shone the cloudberries. These were still hard as stone and lacquer red.

  In Norway people think there is nothing so good as cloudberries. Certainly the cloudberry is one of the most beautiful of plants. The big broad leaves are a deep, deep green with a tinge of bronze and violet in them, the flowers in the spring are white, and the berries before they ripen are like the round old-fashioned coral brooches. When at last the fruit turns soft and yellow gold it is ripe. It has a sharp, invigorating taste unlike any other taste in the world. Foreigners often find it too sharp.

  In Eastern Norway all the great wastes in the highest mountains and in the forests are adorned with cloudberry bogs. But it is not every year that people get enough cloudberries to talk about. A frost during the flowering season or early in the fall before the berries are ripe can ruin all the fruit.

  This year promised to be the biggest cloudberry year anyone could remember. Thea wrote to Mother to buy as many berries as she could get hold of—a hundred quarts, if possible—for when properly put up they last for years.

  The days were longer in the mountains under the high open dome of heaven than down in the village, but it was noticeable here too that the evenings came earlier every day. The nights were darker, and the wind that was always sighing and moaning out on the plain had an even more melancholy sound and felt chill. And the cows were getting to be a nuisance the way they did not come home until late.

  The Krekke cows were still not too bad. They were not nearly so troll-like as the Prestang cows, not to mention Ingrid’s cows at Nyplass saeter. Ingrid was an elderly widow who cared for her own saeter. She had only four cows, some calves, and a small herd of goats. And Ingrid’s cows would never come home by themselves. Every evening the people at Krekke saw the old woman set out for the ford beyond Björge, knitting as she walked. She was going to the other side of the river to look for her cows. She would have to clamber up and down all the bluffs and search every valley. It would often be pitch-dark before they heard her bringing home her cows.

  And now Hanna’s cows had begun to be a bother. There were so many mushrooms in the wo
ods now, and cows are quite mad about mushrooms. They traveled far down in the wood to get them and ate and ate and could never stop. Often the early fall dark had fallen before they came home—and by the time Hanna and Johanne had got them all in their stalls and given them the evening feeding of warm mash made of chopped straw and meal and salt that all saeter cows get, it was almost night.

  Janna had to come and help with the milking, little as she was, for they were milking eighteen cows at Krekke saeter. Mother, too, put on an old blue house dress, tied a kerchief over her hair, and went down to the barn.

  Never had Hans been so impressed by his mother as that day he discovered she could milk a cow.

  “But—but—you say you are afraid of cows, Mother!”

  “I am—of cows I don’t know personally.”

  “But, Mother, where did you learn how to milk?”

  “In the country on summer vacations, when I was a little girl. But, Hans, don’t stand there right in the doorway, like that.”

  He was in the way of the milkmaids as they went to empty their pails in the big milk can outside the door. Besides, cows do not like having strangers around in the barn when they are being milked.

  But Hans could not tear himself away. There is nothing so pleasant as an old saeter barn such as this one on an autumn night, when the weather is raw and windy. Here inside was a good, living warmth from the heavy bodies of cows, and the two little lanterns, hanging from the ridgepole, threw a gentle, golden glow into the dim, velvety-brown interior. For the Krekke barn was very old. The date 1792 was carved in a log in the wall. The ceiling was low and the stalls, with flagstones set on edge for partitions, were small, but it seemed that the cows found it just as pleasant here as in the big, airy barn down on the farm, where Sigurd Hole had installed all kinds of improvements and modern equipment. Their very breathing sounded like sighs of content and well-being as they gulped down their warm evening mash. Then they chewed their cuds, stamping their feet a little, and occasionally switched their tails in the faces of the persons milking them. And above all these peaceful sounds came the rhythmic ring of the milk streaming and foaming into the buckets.

  Then Hanna lighted the little kerosene lamp in the saeter house and hung it up over the long dining table. Mother was so much at home in the house now that she could set out the evening meal for herself and Hans while Hanna and Johanne strained the milk and turned the separator. The separator’s rhythmic hum filled the room as Hans and Mother ate, and out of the night from far and near came the hum of other separators on other saeters. When they had finished, Hanna and Johanne came and sat down at the table too. True enough, they had had their supper while they waited for the cows, but another cup of coffee and slice of bread wouldn’t hurt. . . .

  Mother had hung aside her milking costume and scrubbed thoroughly as soon as she came in from the milking. Nevertheless, Hans sniffed of her as she bathed him and put him to bed.

  “Gee, Mother, you smell so nice.” He sighed ecstatically and pressed against her. “You smell exactly like a peasant woman.”

  But Anders burst into a loud guffaw the evening he suddenly bobbed up beneath the lantern in the doorway of the barn.

  “Why, if it isn’t— God save my soul! If you aren’t playing at the milkmaid up here, Mother!”

  He was carrying a full pack—a knapsack, a fishing rod in a sailcloth case, and a pair of high rubber boots dangling beside the knapsack.

  “I didn’t see any light and I couldn’t imagine what had become of you. Hello, Hans. Are you making yourself useful too? Perhaps my brother cleans the barn . . . ?”

  “Go down to the house and sit down,” Mother said unconcernedly. “We’ll fix you something to eat when we finish here. Where did you come from, by the way?”

  Anders said he had been home several days.

  “I’m to greet you for them all. . . . Yes, everything is fine.”

  He had come by train to Losna station that morning and walked up the old footpath to the saeter.

  “It’s much shorter than the road, but it’s steep, of course. And the lemmings up here! Phew! I’ve seen so many lemmings in these mountains, you can’t imagine!”

  Yes, whenever Mother and Hans went walking they saw lemmings everywhere. Actually, lemmings are dainty little animals with fine, silky, yellow- and brown-flecked fur and white bellies. But their bodies are flat and broad, reminding one inevitably of bedbugs. And in the exact center of the face is that typical rodent’s mouth with sharp, protruding teeth. They have vicious dispositions, these little animals, and stand barking and sputtering and squeaking shrilly at whoever comes upon them.

  Hans used to take a stick and tease them.

  “Mother, they say a lemming gets so angry he bursts if you keep on pricking him long enough.”

  “But don’t do that, Hans. I don’t know if it is true, but leave them in peace. Poor things, they’ll all come to an end, one way or the other, before winter sets in.”

  Mother moved her toilet articles into her study and turned the back room over to the boys. Anders emptied out the contents of his knapsack and by the time the brothers were ready to go to bed the room was as disorderly and bedraggled as their room at home.

  Mother and Anders lay sunning themselves on the grass of the little slope next morning and Anders was telling about his hiking trip with Godfather and Uncle George. It was astonishing how big and mature the boy had become in these few weeks. His body was tough and wiry, and his face was burned a mahogany brown. Actually, his eyes were gray-green, but they were so dark when he became excited or eager about something that they seemed to be coal black.

  They had hiked through the mountains north of Jotunheimen, away from the usual tourist trails. They had slept in stone huts and fished in waters that did not even appear on the map.

  “Kristians Amt, Northern Part,” said Mother, laughing. “I know it very well, thank you. That map was already old when I was a young girl and went hiking in those mountains. But now the General Staff has promised to issue a new relief map of Loms Mountains next year.”

  Anders nodded.

  “But it was fun, just the same, to be in mountains so poorly charted. It was always like being on an exploring expedition in virgin territory.”

  They had hiked over to Drivdalen and then proceeded on down into Sollia.

  “You can’t imagine what nice people live around there, Mother. Especially when they heard I was your son. You must be related to every single soul in the valley, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Mother. “You know Sollia was a saeter mountain until about 1650 when the first colony of people came up and cleared some land for themselves to see if they could live there the year around. There were five families from Österdalen and everyone in Sollia to this day is descended from one of them.”

  “The mayor told me to remember him to you and to tell you that you should sell your house and buy a place in Sollia. Taxes are low there so you could save a lot of money if you moved back there.”

  “What about a school for you? There is certainly nothing but a grammar school in Sollia. I would have to send you away from home to live with strangers the whole school year.”

  “You know I could live with Captain Dahl,” said Anders. “They take school children to room and board. Sheriff Gunstad’s daughters from Ringbu live there.”

  Suddenly he blushed scarlet.

  Mother pretended not to notice.

  “From Sollia,” Anders then went on, “we walked back over the Ringbu Mountains. Some people from Sollia came with us . . . and we went over to Snödöla and took a look at the ruins of that stone hut where people of Sollia surrounded that runaway, Kristen, and killed him. Mother, you are a descendant of Gypsy Kristen too.”

  “So I am,” said Mother shortly.

  “So there is gypsy blood in you—and in us children?” Anders asked excitedly.

  “Not at all. We are descended from one of his daughters by his wife, Sigrid Sollia. No one know
s whether he had any children by the gypsy girl, and if he did, certainly no one asked about them. Heavens, child, don’t get the idea that Gypsy Kristen was anyone romantic or great. A peasant who deserted his farm, and his wife and children, for the sake of a gypsy girl and who joined a bunch of hoodlums and went stealing and plundering on all the farms of his old neighbors. He was nothing but a renegade! He got only what he deserved when the people of Sollia killed him over there in Snödöl Valley.”

  “Perhaps so. I didn’t think of that. But, Mother, I heard another story over there about another ancestor of yours—Anders Grötdalen.”

  “He was my grandfather’s grandfather.”

  Mother knew the story, but she sensed Anders was dying to tell it.

  THEY WERE STAYING AT GRÖTDAL SAETER, ANDERS and his cousin, Halvor Tangen, and one day the cows came tearing home, gone completely wild. This was a sure sign that a bear was around. Halvor took his musket and both fellows started out. They found the bear. He had brought down a heifer and she was still alive and a horrible sight. The bear started for them and before they knew it Anders Grötdalen was behind a large old fir tree and had the bear by both forepaws. The bear was on the other side of the tree, snapping to right and left, but without reaching Anders and hurting him.