The following summer the people of the farm were astonished to see a mountain grouse amongst the poultry. At first she was shy and disappeared every night, but she was always there in the morning. At last the bird grew so tame that the lad who had lost his girl-bride could hold it in his hands.
When winter came the grouse changed her feathers and became snowy white, and one day she flew to the mountains straight towards the sun. The shimmering sunshine absorbed her, and to the lad she seemed to be a white angel flying into heaven.
When Gaupa first heard the story he felt himself start. The girl had kept her word. Would the half-witted Swede keep his?
Then in the Spring, something happened. Gaupa was stealing through the wooded slopes of Ré Valley one morning about four o’clock. The surface of the snow, thawed once and frozen to hard ice afterwards, bore his weight. Big socks outside his boots allowed him to walk without a sound, for the capercailzie is easily alarmed.
A tiny fluffy cloud flamed red in the eastern sky. Water from melting masses of snow rushed down the mountain-sides, making a sound like gusts of wind in the forest-clad mountains.
Then he heard a raven croaking above him, and he raised his face to the sky in search for it. What might the black bird be crying out for? Gaupa saw warnings in many things, and he knew that a raven’s croak generally means something sinister. He remembered an autumn night when he was spearing trout somewhere west in Three Valley Mountain, how in the moonlight he saw such a bird fly up from the ground. Gaupa went up to the group of young spruce out of which the raven came and there he found the skeleton of a man, with a half-rotten leather pack lying beside him. It was the wandering pedlar who many years before had insisted on crossing the mountains to the next cultivated valley, and had never been seen again.
Gaupa felt quite convinced that the raven is a sinister bird. What might that black eater of carrion be croaking about now? wondered Gaupa as he stole along lightly on the Black Mountain slopes. The raven was sure to have seen something down there in the forest, quite sure. “Arrp!” he cried—“arrp!”
Gaupa continued his way southwards, stopping once in a while to use his ears when the snow did not crunch under his feet. He had not known sleep since the evening before, when day fled from the horizon and he threw a lump of snow on to his fire farthest up the valley and walked into the darkness, for Gaupa preferred the darkness to broad daylight. He loved night.
Dawn was approaching and he was growing sleepy, a heaviness in his head took away his interest in everything about him. But when he reached a ridge overlooking Gipsy Lake, all drowsiness left him instantly, for before him in the pearly dawn he saw an enormous grey elk cow bending over and licking a newborn calf. He stopped short, but the elk cow seemed to think that Gaupa himself was nothing more than an animal, black as soil, with hairless skin round eyes and nose. Terror engulfed her, and when Gaupa drew near the cow fled. He went up to the calf. The little animal was wet and warm, steaming in the cool air of the dawn, its breathing laboured, uneven—it was newly born.