The first thing Lavrans wanted to attend to was the beacon at Heimhaugen. During those difficult times of unrest a hundred years earlier or more, the landowners along the valleys had erected beacons in certain places on the mountainsides, much like the wood stacked in warning bonfires at the ports for warships along the coast. But these beacons in the valleys were not under military authority; the farmer guilds kept them in good repair, and the members took turns taking care of them.
When they came to the first mountain pasture, Lavrans released all the horses except the pack horse into the fenced meadow, and then they set off on a steep pathway upward. Before long there was a great distance between trees. Huge pines stood dead and white, like bones, next to marshy patches of land—and now Kristin saw bare gray mountain domes appearing in the sky all around. They climbed over long stretches of scree, and in places a creek ran across the path so that her father had to carry her. The wind was brisk and fresh up there, and the heath was black with berries, but Lavrans said that they had no time to stop and pick them. Arne leaped here and there, plucking off berries for her, and telling her which pastures they could see below in the forest—for there was forest over all of Hovringsvang at that time.
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.”