“So be it, then,” said Birger; “be early at the Captain’s post, that is all, for you may depend upon it, if I know anything of the lie of the country, there will be sport there long before the dref comes up. You will probably find me there before you.”
“Au revoir, then,” said the Parson, as he swung himself off the cliff on which he had been sitting, into the boughs of an ash, and thus dropped into the watercourse; down this he disappeared, with Torkel after him, floundering, crashing, and rolling the stones before him.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE SATTERVAL.
“’Tis merry, ’tis merry, in good greenwood,
Though the birds have stilled their singing;
The evening blaze doth Alice raise,
And Richard is faggots bringing.”
Alice Brand.
Avoiding the advanced column of the dref, which had halted just short of the watercourse, the Parson and his follower took a line nearly parallel to that of the hills. It is no easy thing to beat a Swedish forest, for there are every now and then thick-tangled brakes, and grass-grown svedgefalls, and occasionally, it may be, a little lake to break the line, causing perpetual halts, since one part must necessarily wait for another. But simply making a passage through a Swedish forest is almost as easy as walking on plain turf:—here there will be a wide patch of high pines, under which nothing will grow,—then there will be actual green glades of considerable length, with short mountain turf, broken only by tufts of lilies of the valley, or, perhaps, whortleberry or cranberry plants; and everywhere, when the trees are young, or have been cut, and the understuff has been permitted to come up thick, the whole space is intersected by cattle paths,—for all the fjeld is divided into sœters belonging to the lowland farms, forming the summer runs for their cattle.