“Ah! well!” that did not strike Torkel very forcibly; he had, it must be confessed, led hitherto a rather miscellaneous sort of life; he knew a great deal more about hunting than he did about farming, and regarded the depredations of the bear—though some of them had been made on his father’s own farm—much in the light in which an English fox-hunter listens to tales of murdered geese and turkeys.
The matter which weighed upon his conscience just then was, that poor Nalle[61] had not received altogether fair play. This had not struck him during the heat of the chase so very much, but, now that the murder had been committed, and that he was regarding the result of it in cold blood, he evidently did not feel quite easy in his mind about it.
“Ah!” he said, “poor fellow,” turning over the skin of Bjornstjerna’s own bear, which was yet wet with the water of the river in which he had been killed; “well! we do not do such things in our country.”
“No!” said Bjornstjerna, “you could not get a couple of thousand people together in your country without knives drawn.”
“But how do you manage it in your country?” said the Parson, who was not a little afraid that his follower’s nationality would get the better of his politeness.
“Ah!” said Torkel, “you should see one of our Norwegian bear-hunts in the winter; it is not an easy thing to get Master Nalle on foot, and he takes a good deal of looking after; but, when you do get a chance, it is worth having.
“I remember my brother Nils one day, as he was coming home from church, took a short cut across the fjeld, and put his eye on a queer-looking heap in the snow, that he did not rightly know what to make of. While he was looking at it out came a great fellow—one of the biggest I ever followed,—as if he would eat him. Down tumbled Nils on his face, and the Wise One came ploutering through the snow right over him, but went on, minding his own business, as all wise ones do, and never stopped to look at Nils.
“It so happened that my brother Nils had nothing but a pair of skarbogar on his feet (a rough sort of snow-shoe, made of wood and rope), and, knowing he could not get over the ground very well, never tried to follow him, but came home quietly and told me what he had seen. The weather looked fine, and there was neither snow likely to fall, nor wind likely to drift what was fallen already, so that we knew the tracks would lie; and the next morning, before it was well light, we had each of us our pair of skier on our feet, our rifles at our backs, a good iron-shod pole in our hands to shove along by, and a week’s provision in our havresacs. I took old Rig[62] with me, in case we should lose the tracks.
“We soon came up with them, and off we went, taking it leisurely—for we had a long run before us. It requires some little exertion to get up hill with these skier; they do better for such a country as this than they do for the rocky and tangled fjeld in Norway; but, on flat ground, you get along five or six miles an hour without feeling it, and as for down-hill, you may go just as fast as you like, only for standing still and keeping your feet.
“For four or five hours the track lay as straight and even in the snow as if we had been travelling the post road to Christiania. Old Nalle thought his winter quarters were not over safe, and meant evidently to make a passage of it, and had just been trotting along in the snow, not looking right or left of him.