We ‘whisky’ every one who turns up at camp, and as a rule they like it. We are not much of drunkards ourselves, so we can afford to give it to other people.
[CHAPTER X.]
BESSE SÆTER.
July 28.—
Our two men arrived while we were at breakfast this morning, and brought two sleighs in the boat with them; these they deposited on the shore, and then one of them departed into some secret haunt of his own in search of a horse. The last we saw of him was a wee dot struggling up over the mountain crest; and we began to feel what a hopeless sort of task was before us.
When we had finished our breakfast there were certain remnants of food, and these we offered to the other man, because he seemed to want something to do. We left him in the tent with a frying-pan containing two trout fried in butter, and a tin pot nearly full of soup. Some time afterwards we looked in, and saw him eating greedily off his knife-blade, and after a further interval we noticed that he had finished; then we examined the culinary utensils out of which he had been feeding, and found he had left the trout untouched, but the butter they were fried in he had utterly consumed off the blade of his knife, and also all the soup through the same medium. But there was not more than a gallon and a half of the latter, so we did not grudge it.
Apparently he was like a giant refreshed after his meal, and seizing one canoe he carried it up to the top of the mountain, and then came back for the other and did the same with it; after this he returned again and borrowed our axe, saying he wanted to make the path better for the sleigh. He disappeared among the stunted birches, and we heard him chopping and slowly getting further up the track for about an hour. We naturally supposed that he was clearing away trees that obstructed the path, but when we came to traverse that path ourselves, soon afterwards, we discovered that he had only been filling up holes in the road by felling trees across it. Now a road that can be improved by this process is in a very bad state and this one was decidedly improved.
Just before we started an English tourist came down the mountain and arranged with Siva (one of our men) to go down the lake in his boat. He was the first of our fellow-countrymen whom we have seen since Lillehammer, and proved to be the only one we met all through our trip in the mountains.
After some time we perceived three dots wending their way down the path again, and presently they arrived, proving to be our other man and two extremely shaggy ponies; and after the complicated Norwegian harness had been put on we began the ascent. The path was as bad as bad could be for a short distance, but when the level was reached it became much better than we had had hitherto; it was only the first climb up from the lake that presented any difficulty. The canoes could only have been transported as they were, on a man’s back.