During our stay here we had the pleasure of forming the acquaintance of an elk-dog. This animal is taken out in a kind of harness to which a rope is fastened, the other end of the rope being attached to the hunter’s belt; and his legitimate occupation is finding elk in a forest by scent, and denoting their presence by his behaviour before the hunter gets within range of the elk’s eyes, ears, or nose. Mr. Thomas brought him up here hoping to find reindeer with him in the same manner, as he had been unable to get a Finmarker[*] broken to reindeer; but the experiment has not been successful, for the dog has been so carefully trained to elk, that he exhibits a large and lofty contempt for so pusillanimous a creature as a reindeer, and will not confess that he has discovered the existence of such a thing at all.

[*] Finmarker is the kind of dog usually employed for finding reindeer: the name being derived from the district of which it is a native.

But in addition to the fact that he finds no deer, he is a good deal of trouble from the fastidiousness of his appetite. It appears that he is accustomed to feed on dogs, and when he cannot get dogs he can rough it very well for a short time on boys or any other plain fare; but up here, where dogs are few and boys are extinct, he is having a very poor time of it. The last place where he had a really square meal was at Skjæggestad, on the journey up, where he was lucky enough to get a whole dog and some portions of boy; since then he has only had limbs snatched off adventurous observers, and altogether seems to be pining for want of proper nourishment. He is about the height of a colley, but with an enormous chest and limbs, a head something like an Esquimaux, a wiry reddish yellow coat, and a most unkindly expression of countenance. In the absence of sufficient flesh food he appears to be developing a liking for man-diet, so we did not remain long in his society, for which indeed we only craved after we had perceived through a chink in the door of his dwelling that he was moored to a beam by a kind of anchor chain. We have often heard that there is a certain amount of danger in the pursuit of the elk; if the hunter is always accompanied by a dog of this kind we can easily understand it. However, he was a very interesting animal, and if we had a National School at Memurudalen we should certainly have tried to buy him, as there is any amount of room for débris there. What a boon he would be in some of the thickly populated districts of England!

In the afternoon we paddled leisurely back to our camp and found it looking prettier than ever, but, alas! our little stream had ceased to run. However, there is another one not more than forty yards away, so we shall not be much troubled by its loss.

August 30.—

The sun still shines upon us from a cloudless sky, and early in the morning, before any breeze springs up, the lake makes a most beautiful picture, with its steep mountain sides and foaming torrents so perfectly reflected in the green unruffled water. But, lovely as it is, its beauty is rather wasted on us now, for it has been just the same for the last three weeks, with the outlines all hard and clearly defined, and none of the graduated effects of distance which we get from the hazy climate at home: in this clear atmosphere the peaks twenty miles away are as bright as those a mile or so beyond the lake. Probably this is the reason why we so seldom see pictures of Norwegian mountain scenery, and that the few which do appear are often condemned as hard, cold, and unsatisfactory.

The most prominent object in looking towards the lake from our camp is a curious pyramidal mound, about thirty feet high, close to the water’s edge. It is so regular in shape that we have devoted many hours of cogitation and argument to the discovery of its history.

John (who is a man of considerable archæological fame) maintains that it is a funeral barrow in which some ancient Viking was buried, and he wants us to give up our cartridges for the purpose of constructing a mine and blasting him out: we have vainly represented to him that it cannot be a Viking’s tomb, because there is absolutely nothing to Vike up here.

The Skipper says it is a glacial moraine, ‘any donkey can see that at a glance;’ and Esau holds to the opinion that it is an artificial mound put up for ancient regiments of Gjendin yeomen and Memurudalen militia to practise archery at. Possibly none of these theories give the correct solution; but, whatever its origin, it makes a capital rifle butt for our occasional shooting. Esau was heard to irreverently remark, as he aimed at it with the Skipper’s rifle, ‘he guessed an express bullet would rouse old Jarl Hakon out of that,’ but nothing particular followed.

To-day the Skipper composed an Irish stew as a pièce de résistance, which, when it came to table, was unanimously voted the best of all the excellent dishes on which we have feasted here. After dinner we made an enormous fire for the sole purpose of warmth, as the nights are now very cold, and during this fine weather after sunset a strong draught sets down our valley towards the lake. We have ascertained that a like draught blows down each of the other valleys running into Gjendin, making the lake a centre. That in ours begins gently directly the sun has set, and increases in strength until it amounts to a stiff breeze; and as it comes direct from the vast snow fjelds, it is a disagreeably chilly blast, which freezes that side of our bodies remote from the fire, and leads us to envy the happy condition of a leg of mutton attached to a roasting-jack. That, ‘o nimium fortunatum!’ enjoys equally in every part the genial warmth, while man has no mechanical arrangement by which his immortal soul can be rendered blissful through the medium of a temperate body.