“However, Nils had managed to pick himself up, and I saw him and Rig together a good way above us, so I waved my cap and shouted: you can hear a shout in the winter half-a-dozen miles off. Nils changed his course, so as to cut us off. I followed, loading as I went. By-and-bye the old fellow seemed to find out that he had enemies on both sides of him, for he stopped, and growled, and looked back at me, and showed his teeth. Just then Nils made a noise above, by breaking through some understuff; and he turned, and came at me with his mouth open, charging down-hill as hard as he could lick. It was ‘neck or nothing’ with me now, I knew that, for there is no turning or dodging on skier, going up-hill, so I rested my rifle on the fork of a branch, and, waiting till he had come within a dozen yards of me, I shot into his mouth. Lord! it seemed as if somebody had given him a lift behind; his hind-quarters rose up, and his head went down, and he came sliding along the snow on his back, wrong-end foremost. I could not move right or left, hampered as I was, and he took me just across the shins with his huge carcass, breaking one of my skier, and carrying me with him as if I were riding in a sledge; but when we got to the bottom he never tried to hurt me, for he was as dead as Baldur.
“That was something like a chase, and we turned a pretty penny by it, too; we got four specie for sealing his nose, and fourteen for his skin, to a young Englishman who wanted to prove to his friends at home that he had killed a bear, and gave two specie over the market price for the shot-hole; and, for ourselves, we had lots of fat, most of which, by the way, had got melted in the race, and had to be frozen again before we could carry it; and, for solid meat, the scoundrel weighed hard upon four hundred pounds. We had pretty hard work in getting him home, for in those two days we had run on end more than thirty of your English miles, besides the turns. We had to go home and fetch a sledge for him, and my sisters had a pretty job of salting when we got him there; Kari said that our work was not half so hard as hers.”
“It is a curious thing, much as I have been in your country, I never saw a skie,” said the Parson; “I do not even know what sort of things they are.”
“It would be strange if you had,” said Torkel; “we never keep them at the sœters, for the plain reason that we do not use them in summer at all, nor inhabit the sœters in the winter. You have been very little in any of our permanent winter homesteads since you have been here, and if you had happened to put your eye upon half-a-dozen long pieces of wood, with leather straps to them, the chances are, you would never have thought of asking what such very ordinary-looking articles were. I will answer for it, Herr Moodie has plenty of them at Gäddebäck; but they are, most likely, stowed away at the top of the house, in the winter store-room, where you would never think of going. They are long, thin strips of wood, of a triangular form, about three or four inches broad, with their points curved up for a foot or so, to clear the obstacles. In this flat country they make the left-foot skie, which is of fir, ten or twelve feet long; the right one is generally of ash, and not above five or six feet in length, or they would never be able to turn in them. I, myself, like them best both of a size, and not above five or six feet long,—only then you must have them broader, to prevent sinking in the snow. This is a disadvantage, certainly, still they are much handier to dodge about the trees with, than those unwieldy concerns they have here. Mine are a pair of old military skier, and there are none better.”
“What! do the soldiers use them?” said the Parson.
“That they do,” said Torkel. “I was always a good runner on skier, but I learnt a good many clever tricks at drill, when I was serving my time of duty in the militia. Our rifle regiment have all two light companies of skielobere, and are drilled to light infantry movements on skates. I did not like much being called out in the depth of winter for drill, and not a little did I grumble at the hard work they put us to,—scaling mountains, which we are obliged to do in skier, like ships beating to windward; and then charging down them among trees and stumps,—swinging this way and that, to keep one’s rifle out of harm’s way, and then suddenly called upon to halt and fire,—and preciously punished are we if the piece is not ready for action. However, I did not know what was good for me; I have been twice the man ever since after the bears and winter game.”
“I suspect,” said the Parson, “that is pretty nearly the whole use of your skate-drill; it must be a pretty thing to see in a review,—but he must be a gallant enemy who undertakes a winter campaign in Norway, unless he is descended from the Hrimthursar themselves.”
“Well! I cannot stand this any longer,” said Moodie, coming up; “half the party are drunk, and the rest are half-seas over; and there’s the Captain pounding away to his own whistling, for the last fiddler has just dropped off his empty barrel. It is time to go to bed.”
“Bed, yes! but where are we to find it: Jacob, I suppose, is by this time numbered with the dead drunk.”