The women had all of them red kerchiefs on their heads, the ends of which hung down their backs, and red or yellow bodices with great silver brooches on them, and blue petticoats trimmed with red or yellow. Both sexes adorn themselves with all the silver they can collect; the men’s shirt buttons are sometimes as big as a walnut, and on gala days they will wear three or four of them strung one under another.
All the party were loaded with the utensils necessary for following their occupations in the fjeld; the women were carrying the pails, while the men’s loads, which consisted of all sorts of heterogeneous articles, were topped with the great iron kettles in which they simmer their milk, after the Devonshire fashion, in order to collect the whole of the cream.
There were little carts, too, that is to say, baskets placed upon two wheels and an axle, and drawn by little cream-coloured ponies; stout, stubby little beasts, very high crested, and with black manes and tails—the former hogged, the latter peculiarly full and flowing. A Swede generally values his horse according to the quantity of hair on his tail. These were loaded—it did not take much to load them—with meal for the summer’s gröd, and strings of flad bröd, a few sheep skins, particularly dirty, though in very close proximity to the provisions,—and now and then the black kettle, which its owner was too lazy to carry. Then came the goats and sheep, and the little cows following like dogs, now and then stopping to take a bite, when the turf looked particularly sweet and tempting—little fairy cows were they, much smaller than our Alderneys, finer in the bone, and more active on their legs; they looked as if they had a cross of the deer in them. They were all of one colour—probably that of the original wild cattle—a sort of dirty cream colour, approaching to dun, and almost black on the legs and muzzle.
The party was a combined one, and was bound eventually to several other sœters besides this, but they had agreed to make their first night’s halt in Torgenson’s pasture, and beside the regular herdsmen and dairymaids, as many supernumeraries as can possibly find excuse for going, accompany the first setting out of the expedition, which is always looked upon in the light of a holiday and a merry-making.
And a holiday and a merry-making it seemed to be, judging by the shouts, and screams, and laughter, and rude love-making that was going on among the gentle shepherds and shepherdesses of the north; but, for all that, there was a good deal of real work too. Sœter-life may be a life of pleasure, but it certainly is anything but a life of ease.
The Soberud division, bestial as well as human, evidently seemed to consider themselves quite at home; and the cows belonging to it, which looked as if they recognised the old localities, roamed at liberty; but the parties bound to the more distant mountains were occupied in hobbling, and tethering, and knee-haltering their respective charges, mindful of their morrow’s march and of the difficulty of collecting cattle and even sheep, which, except that they keep together, are just as bad, from among the intricacies of a strange forest. Some were forming temporary pounds, by effecting rude repairs in the dilapidated fences, chopping and hewing, for that purpose, great limbs of trees and trees themselves, with as little concern as, in England, men might cut thistles.
Streams of blue smoke began now to steal up through the trees, and fires began to glimmer in the evening twilight, while the girls brought in pail after pail of fresh milk, and swung their kettles, gipsy fashion, and, opening their packages, measured out, with careful and parsimonious foresight, the rye-meal that was to thicken it into gröd. Meal is precious in the mountains, though milk is not.
Whether the Haabet had sailed, or what had become of poor Svensen, did not transpire; but certain it was that the damsels from Soberud, after looking in vain for their mistress, were obliged, that evening, to act on their own discretion—and equally certain it was that the Parson, whose knife had been inconsiderately lent to Torkel on the preceding day, was obliged to eat his broiled gjep with two sticks, the knife and the fortunate individual in whose pocket it was, being, for the time, invisible.