“Very true; and when the boy is capable of the latter he will leave off his prison-base and bird’s-nesting without any trouble on your part.”
“There are good superstitions as well as bad,” said Birger. “To be afraid of thinning down a noxious bird, like the magpie, as our people are, because the devil has them under his protection, is a bad superstition. It is a distrust in the power and providence of God; but, though it is equally a superstition to imagine that one bird is more a favourite with God than another, yet the boy who, in your country, in the ardour of his first shooting expedition, turns aside his gun because
Cock-robins and kitty-wrens
Are God Almighty’s cocks and hens;
or, in our country, from the Gertrude-bird, because she is working out the penance which Christ has imposed upon her, has, in so doing, exercised self-denial, has acknowledged the existence of a God, and has admitted the sanctity of His protection. Many a superstition has as good a moral as a parable, and this is one of them.”
The approach of dinner at once scared away the Gertrude-bird, and put an end to Birger’s moralising; and as they discussed the pink curdy salmon, the produce of the morning’s sport, and revelled in the anticipation of strawberry and raspberry jam, the fumes of which every now and then were wafted to them from the kitchen, and in the certainty of roast game and smoked fish for future consumption, they laid their plans for the afternoon’s sport.
The sun was still shining in its strength and cloudlessness, and bade fair so to shine for the rest of the day; and the breeze, which had been for some time failing, had now sunk into a perfect calm. No salmon or trout were to be caught by the usual means—that was clear enough. Jacob, however, who had procured what might be called with great propriety a kettle of fish, for he had borrowed from a neighbouring farm-house one of the kettles in which they simmer their milk, and had got it full of minnows and other small fry—proposed setting his långref. This was unanimously assented to, for occupation is pleasing, and so is variety; and eels, pike, and flounders, which were likely to be its produce, were no bad additions to a larder less remarkable for the variety of its provisions than for their abundance.
But the grand scheme was one proposed by the Captain, who had been reconnoitring the higher parts of the river, and had discovered a very likely place for a bright day, but one which could not be reached from the shore, or by any of the ordinary means of propelling a boat. It was a fall terminating, not as falls generally do, in a huge basin, but in a shoot or rapid of considerable length, like a gigantic mill race, which, after a straight but turbulent course of a couple of hundred yards, shot all at once into the middle of a round and eddying pool. It was called the Hell Fall, probably from its fury, for the word is Norske; but possibly also, from Hela’s Fall, Hela being the Goddess of Darkness; and well did the yawning chasm, through which the waters rushed, deserve that name, overshadowed as it was by its black walls of rock. It was upon this that the Captain had reckoned; whatever were the case with the rest of the world, sunshine or storm must be alike to it, and to the tenants of its gloomy recesses.
The Captain was confident the thing could be done, and the Parson was as confident that if it could be done, and the fly introduced into the numerous turn-holes round which the water boiled and bubbled, the rapid would require neither cloud nor wind to make it practicable. And Birger, who was a great man at contrivances, asseverated strongly that it should be done.
The first job, however, was to set the långref, and that was a mode of poaching with which they were all familiar. The långref, a line of two or three hundred fathoms in length, with a snood and a hook at each fathom, was baited from the minnow kettle, and coiled, so that the baited hooks lay together on a board; and one end having been made fast to a stump on the landing place, the boat was pulled diagonally down and across the stream, and the line gradually paid out in such a manner that the hooks were carried by the current, so as to hang free of the back line; the other end, which came within a few yards of the farther bank, was anchored by a heavy stone, backed by a smaller one, and the whole affair left to fish for itself.