It took them until the next day to obtain just what they wanted. The sleigh was a commodious one, and in it they placed such things as the driver advised them to take along. Then, wrapped in fur overcoats and wearing fur caps, they set off, on a tour that was destined to be filled with not a few perils and strange adventures.
CHAPTER XX
AN ENCOUNTER WITH WOLVES
"Well, this is certainly a strange Christmas day!"
It was Dave who spoke. He stood in the doorway of a small log hut, gazing anxiously out at the landscape before him.
He was in the very heart of Norway, and on every side loomed the mountains with their covering of ice and snow. Just behind the hut was a patch of firs, the only trees growing in that vicinity. In front was what in summer was a mountain torrent, now a mass of irregular ice, the hollows filled with snow.
The party had arrived at this place the night before, after four days of almost constant traveling. But here a blinding snowstorm had brought them to a halt, the driver of the sleigh refusing to trust himself and his turnout on the mountain trail beyond.
"It is a bad road," said he to Granbury Lapham, in Norwegian. "A slip and a slide and we should all be killed. We must wait until the storm is over." And so they put up at this hut by the roadside, and the horses were stabled in a cow-shed in the rear.