Growth of the Soil (Sverre Lyngstad 2007 Translation) by Knut Hamsun

Author:Knut Hamsun [Hamsun, Knut]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781440619601
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 1917-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

XIX

Isak returned from the village with a horse.

Yes, the upshot was that he bought the horse from the bailiff; it was, as Geissler had said, for sale, but it cost two hundred and forty kroner, which amounted to sixty dollars. The horse prices didn’t make much sense anymore, in Isak’s childhood you could get the best horse for fifty dollars.

But why hadn’t he bred a horse himself? He had considered it, had imagined a one-year-old colt—for which he would have had to wait a whole year, if not two. That was feasible for a farmer who had time to spare, someone who could leave a strip of bog intact till he got a horse some day and was able to cart home the crop from it. As the bailiff said, “I don’t care to feed a horse; the womenfolk can carry in the hay I have while I’m away making money.”

The new horse was an old idea of Isak’s, an idea several years old; it wasn’t Geissler who had suggested it to him. Accordingly, he had prepared himself as best he could: one more stall, a tether for the summer; he had some carts and would make more in the fall. Naturally, he hadn’t forgotten the most important thing of all, the fodder: why had it been so necessary to turn up that last bog already last year if it wasn’t to avoid reducing the number of cows and still have winter feed for the new horse? Now the bog was seeded with green forage. That was for the calving kine.

Oh yes, everything had been thought out. Inger had again good reason to be amazed and to clap her hands as in the old days.

Isak brought news from the village: Breidablik was to be sold, it had been announced on the church green. The modest crop, such as it was, the tufts of hay and the potatoes, would be thrown in, maybe even the livestock, a few animals, sheep and goats.

“Is he going to sell his home altogether and clean himself out?” Inger cried. “Where is he going to move?”—“To the village.”

True enough, Brede was moving to the village. But first he had tried to get Aksel Strøm to let them stay with him, where Barbro was already. Aksel didn’t let him. Brede didn’t want for anything in the world to upset the relationship between Aksel and his daughter, so he took care not to insist, but it certainly upset his apple cart. After all, come fall Aksel was to build his new house, and when he and Barbro moved in there, why couldn’t Brede and his family have the hut? No! The thing was that Brede didn’t think like a settler, he failed to understand that Aksel had to vacate the hut because it was needed for his increasing herd; the hut would become a cowshed. This way of thinking remained alien to him even after it had all been explained; after all, people had to come before animals, he said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.