Happy Times in Norway by Undset Sigrid

Author:Undset, Sigrid [Undset, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2013-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

PART III

SUMMER VACATION

1

“MOTHER, WHEN SHALL WE MOVE TO THE SAETER?”

“Right after St. John’s, Hans.”

“Mother,” then asked Anders, “Godfather wrote he and Uncle George are coming to meet me at Ringbu as soon as the Boy Scout jamboree is over. We’re planning a three weeks’ camping trip. Could I join you at the saeter afterwards?”

“Of course. How nice of Godfather and the professor to want you along on their camping trip again this year, Anders.”

“Yes, very nice. But then, of course, you know I make myself useful too. I am a kind of orderly for them, you see.”

Norway is a large, far-reaching country, but people can live and build homes on but a small part of it. Along the coast, with its thousand isles and projecting rocks, lies a garland of little towns, fishing hamlets, outports, and little farms where women and children cultivate what poor arable land there is, while the men and boys are at sea or out fishing. But Norway’s interior is one single, enormous mass of mountains. From the backbone ridge, the divide between Norway and Sweden from north to south, run mighty ribs of mountain range with many peaks and pinnacles of which the highest are everlastingly capped with ice and snow. But between lie wide upland moors, gray with lichen—the “Iceland moss”—and green with dwarf birch, and dotted everywhere with the bright glance of water—little lakes, pools and tarns, and little brooks that unite to form rivers that seek their way to the valleys.

As early as September come rain and storms that tear the red and yellow leaves from the dwarf birch and snow falls—to lie until midsummer. Snowstorm follows snowstorm the whole winter through, and when day is but a quick blink and the greater part of the twenty-four hours pitch-dark, then the mountains are such that few persons can bear to live there. Still every settlement in Norway has stories to tell from olden days about someone who had been outlawed by the community and fled into the wilderness and built himself a stone hut deep within a crevasse between mountain walls. There he lived for years by hunting and fishing. . . . Then there are stories about strange and erratic characters—recluses who, in the olden days, lived on the saeters the year round. The mountains teemed with reindeer and ptarmigan and blue fox and bear and wolverine and provided the fearless hunter with all the food he needed, and all he desired of excitement and adventure.

Not much wild life remains in our mountains and where the outlawed ones once had their secluded refuges now lies one large tourist hotel after another and buses transport the guests up and down the mountain. But still anyone who wants to get away from other people can find room and view enough in the great wilds and moors that still exist.

And nearly every farm in Norway has its saeter in the mountains—a cottage where one or two or three milkmaids live in the summer, a

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