Day after day, and week after week, the snow continued to descend. Big Hans and his friend sat at the window watching the large feathery flakes, as they whirled slowly and silently through the air and covered the earth far and near with a white pall. Soon there was a scarcity of wood at the Myrbraaten cottage, and Halvor was obliged to get into his skees and go to the forest. Humming the multiplication table (so far as he knew it) to the tune of a hymn, he pulled on his warmest jacket, took his axe from its hiding-place under the eaves, and went in a slanting line up the mountain-side; but before he had gone many rods it struck him that it was useless to go so far for wood, when the whole mountain-slope was covered with pines. Fresh pine would be a little hard to burn, to be sure, but then pine was full of pitch and would burn anyhow. He therefore took off his skees, dug a hole in the snow, and felled three or four trees only a few hundred rods above the cottage. When his wife heard the sound of his axe so near the house, she rushed out and cried to him:
“Halvor, Halvor, don’t cut down the trees on the slope! They are all that keep the snow from coming down upon us in an avalanche, and sweeping us into the ocean!”
“Oh, the Lord will look out for his own,” sang Halvor, cheerily.
“The Lord put the pine-trees there to protect us,” replied his wife.
But the end was that, in spite of his wife’s protests, Halvor continued to fell the trees.
The heavy fall of snow was followed in the course of a week by a sudden thaw.
Strange creaking and groaning sounds stole through the forest. Sometimes when a large load of snow fell, it rolled and grew as it rolled, until it dashed against a huge trunk and nearly broke it with its weight.
Then, one night, there came down a great load which fell with a dull thud and rolled down and down, pushing a growing wall of snow before it, until it reached the clearing where Halvor had cut his wood; there, meeting with no obstructions, it gained a tremendous headway, sweeping all the snow and the felled trunks with it, and rushed down in a great mass, carrying along stones, shrubs, huge trees, and the very soil itself, leaving nothing but the bare rock behind it. How terrible was the sight! A smoke-like cloud rose in the darkness, and a sound as of a thousand thundering cataracts filled the night. On it swept, onward, with a wild, resistless speed! At the jutting rock, where the juniper stood, the avalanche divided, tearing up the old spruces and the birches by the roots and hurling them down, but leaving the juniper standing alone on its barren peak. It was but a moment’s work. The avalanche shot downward with increased speed—hark!—a sharp shriek, a smothered groan, then a fierce hissing sound of waves that rose toward the sky and returned with a long thundering cannonade to the strand! The night was darker and the silence deeper than before.
III.
Where the Myrbraaten cottage had stood, the bare rock now stares black and dismal against the sun. The rumor of the calamity spread like wild-fire through the valley, and the folk of the whole parish came to gaze upon the ruin which the avalanche had wrought. All that was left of Myrbraaten was the cow-stable, where the cow and Little Hans and Big Hans had slept. Little Hans had been very ill-behaved the night before, so Turid had sent him to sleep with the cow; and Big Hans, who thought it would be cruel to ask his companion to spend the night in that dark stable, with only a cow for company, had gone with him and slept with him in the hay. Thus it happened that Little Hans and Big Hans both were saved. It was pitiful to see them shivering in the wet snow. Big Hans was crying as if his heart would break; and the women who crowded about him were unable to comfort him. What should he, a small boy of ten, do alone in this wide world? His father and his mother and his little brothers and sisters were all gone, and there was no one left who cared for him. Just then Little Hans, who was anxious to express his sympathy, put his nose close to Big Hans’ face and rubbed it against his cheek.