Now they were just below the last bare, rounded crest, and they could see the enormous heap of wood towering against the sky and the caretaker’s hut in the shelter of a sheer cliff.
As they came over the ridge, the wind rushed toward them and whipped through their clothes—it seemed to Kristin that something alive which dwelled up there had come forward to greet them. The wind gusted and blew as she and Arne walked across the expanse of moss. The children sat down on the very end of a ledge, and Kristin stared with big eyes—never had she imagined that the world was so huge or so vast.
There were forest-clad mountain slopes below her in all directions; her valley was no more than a hollow between the enormous mountains, and the neighboring valleys were even smaller hollows; there were many of them, and yet there were fewer valleys than there were mountains. On all sides gray domes, golden-flamed with lichen, loomed above the carpet of forest; and far off in the distance, toward the horizon, stood blue peaks with white glints of snow, seeming to merge with the grayish-blue and dazzling white summer clouds. But to the northeast, close by—just beyond the pasture woods—stood a cluster of magnificent stone-blue mountains with streaks of new snow on their slopes. Kristin guessed that they belonged to the Raanekamp, the Boar Range, which she had heard about, for they truly did look like a group of mighty boars walking away with their backs turned to the village. And yet Arne said that it was half a day’s ride to reach them.
Kristin had thought that if she came up over the crest of her home mountains, she would be able to look down on another village like their own, with farms and houses, and she had such a strange feeling when she saw what a great distance there was between places where people lived. She saw the little yellow and green flecks on the floor of the valley and the tiny glades with dots of houses in the mountain forests; she started to count them, but by the time she had reached three dozen, she could no longer keep track. And yet the marks of settlement were like nothing in that wilderness.
She knew that wolves and bears reigned in the forest, and under every rock lived trolls and goblins and elves, and she was suddenly afraid, for no one knew how many there were, but there were certainly many more of them than of Christian people. Then she called loudly for her father, but he didn’t hear her because of the wind—he and his men were rolling great boulders down the rock face to use as supports for the timbers of the beacon.
But Isrid came over to the children and showed Kristin where the mountain Vaage Vestfjeld lay. And Arne pointed out Graafjeld, where the people of the villages captured reindeer in trenches and where the king’s hawk hunters8 lived in stone huts. That was the sort of work that Arne wanted to do himself someday—but he also wanted to learn to train birds for the hunt—and he lifted his arms overhead, as if he were flinging a hawk into the air.
Isrid shook her head.
“It’s a loathsome life, Arne Gyrds?n. It would be a great sorrow for your mother if you became a hawk hunter, my boy. No man can make a living doing that unless he keeps company with the worst kind of people, and with those who are even worse.”
Lavrans had come over to them and caught the last remark.
“Yes,” he said, “there’s probably more than one household out there that pays neither taxes nor tithes.”
“I imagine you’ve seen one thing and another, haven’t you, Lavrans?” Isrid hinted. “You who have journeyed so deep into the mountains.”
“Ah, well,” Lavrans said reluctantly, “that could be—but I don’t think I should speak of such things. We must not begrudge those who have exhausted their peace in the village whatever peace they may find on the mountain, that’s what I think. And yet I’ve seen yellow pastures and beautiful hay meadows in places where few people know that any valleys exist. And I’ve seen herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, but I don’t know whether they belonged to people or to the others.”
“That’s right,” said Isrid. “Bears and wolves are blamed for the loss of cattle up here in the mountain pastures, but there are much worse robbers on the slopes.”
“You call them worse?” said Lavrans thoughtfully, stroking his daughter’s cap. “In the mountains south of the Raanekamp I once saw three little boys, the oldest about Kristin’s age, and they had blond hair and tunics made of hides. They bared their teeth at me like young wolves before they ran away and hid. It’s not so surprising that the poor man they belonged to should be tempted to take a cow or two for himself.”