An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

We lost our trail a dozen times, but having some abandoned cheese huts just above the woods to direct ourselves to, it did not greatly matter.

Once among the trees, how dark it got all of a sudden! We took the wrong path and found ourselves on the edge of nothing, retraced our steps and started again. We were going just as fast as we could, racing with the darkness, but we soon realized that, so far as Giessbach was concerned, the race would be a losing one. It was so piercingly cold that a night in the open air sounded painful, and we kept on in the hope of finding something.

Just in the last moment of twilight we emerged from the thick woods onto a grassy shoulder upon which was an empty cow-shed. Above it was a loft full of hay. On the ground was a ladder. Nothing was locked. Perhaps fifteen hundred feet below us we could see the roofs of a group of huts, which appeared to be inhabited—about such a place as Nieder Rawyl. It was very doubtful if we could find our way down to them through the woods, so dark had it become, and we decided that a clean hayloft to ourselves would be better than the hospitality they could offer anyhow. So we decided to stay. Fortunately we had ample left from our luncheon to serve us for supper, and by skimping a bit, we could save something for breakfast.

We spent a long time trying to start a bonfire at which to warm ourselves and dry our snow-wet shoes. It could have been done by using loose boards which we saw lying around outside, but we had conscientious scruples against making ourselves quite so much at home (or some of us had) and tried to construct the fire from brush gathered in the woods, all of which appeared to be water-soaked.

At last, however, Frater’s bonfire skill triumphed, and we sat down around a cheerful little blaze and steamed out our very chilly water-logged shoes and dress skirts and watched the moon rise over the mountain top. Then, when sufficiently warm, dry and sleepy, we climbed up the ladder into the loft, buried ourselves deep in the hay, and were soon lost to consciousness.

Anybody who has a lingering idea that there is something poetic in sleeping among the fragrant hay of a loft, had better revise his views. It is distinctly tickly and scratchy and full of dust. And the rats run in and out. However, it is clean and warm, and if you’re tired enough, it will serve.

In the early gloaming we were awakened by voices outside. Two men were circumnavigating our hut engaged in earnest discussion. Probably they belonged in the huts below, had seen our bonfire the night before and had come up to find out what damage had been done. Being satisfied on this point, they departed. The ladder was standing against the side of the barn where the loft door was and Belle Soeur’s alpenstock was lying on the ground below, so they must have known we were still there, but they did nothing to disturb us. Meanwhile we, having nothing to gain by an interview, lay low and held our peace. Each of us thought that the other two were asleep and he or she was the only moral coward, but we found later that we were three of a kind! Really, though, the consciousness of being a trespasser does put one at a disadvantage, and the inability to communicate freely with a patois-speaking peasantry increases the handicap.

After our involuntary hosts had taken themselves away, we emerged from our several nests and picked the wisps of hay from each other. It was very cold and gray at that hour, and the inadequate fragments of stale sandwiches left from the day before were not the most cheering sort of breakfast. When we had consumed the last crumb and performed scanty ablutions in an ice-water brook near by and left everything snug and tight at our late lodgings, we started downward. Our muscles were painfully stiff at first, but gradually limbered up.

About nine o’clock we reached an outlying refreshment house overhanging the Giessbach, whose course we had been following for some time, and here we stopped for a belated, but much appreciated, café-au-lait.

The rest of the day was, from the point of view of a trio of tramps who had spent the night in a hayloft after forgathering with whistling marmots, distinctly civilized and commonplace. We reached the level of Lake Brienz and skirted it to the upper end where the Aar flows in from the Meiringen Valley. We cut across to the Brünig Pass road and followed the gentle grade upward, lunching late (in view of the nine o’clock breakfast) at a roadside restaurant.