“Perhaps I might, if he had stopped long enough. But if he stopped for a moment to wipe his brows, he began again before I could well speak. He asked me whether I had ever heard that drowned men could show their heads above water, and stare with their eyes, and throw their arms about, a whole day,—two days, after they were drowned.”
“Ay! indeed! Did he ask that?”
“Yes, and several other things: he asked whether I had ever heard that the islets in the fiord were so many prison-houses.”
“And what did you say?”
“I wanted him to explain; so I said they were prison-houses to the eider-ducks when they were sitting, for they never stir a yard from their nests. But he did not heed a word I spoke; he went on about drowned men being kept prisoners in the islets, moaning because they can’t get out. And he says they will knock, knock, as if they could cleave the thick hard rock.”
“What do you think of all this, my boy?”
“Why, when I said I had not heard a word of any such thing, even from my grandmother or Erica, he declared he had heard the moans himself,—moaning and crying; but then he mixed up something about the barking of wolves that made confusion in the story. Though he had been hot just before, there he stood shivering, as if it was winter, as he stood in the broiling sun. Then I asked him if he had seen dead men swim and stare, as he said he had heard them moan and cry.”
“And what did he say then?”
“He started bolt upright, as if I had been picking his pocket. He was in a passion for a minute, I know, if ever he was in his life. Then he tried to laugh as he said what a lot of new stories—stories of spirits, such stories as people love—he should have to carry home to the north, whenever he went back to his own place.”
“In the north,—his own place in the north! He wanted to mislead you there, boy. Hund was born some way to the south.”