Below the hut a fox stopped to smell the smoke which still lingered in the air.
Up in the mountain the brook murmured incessantly. Under the Black Mountain an elk calf was licking the skin of his mother which was hung up on a pole fastened to two trees. The calf kept poking at it with his muzzle, but the skin was dead, lifeless, with no warmth of blood in it, and the young elk raised his head and whimpered plaintively, hoarsely and brokenly.
In Gipsy Lake Hut Gaupa was on the point of going to sleep when he suddenly became wide awake again. The hut was quiet as the tomb, but the silence slowly grew pregnant with that inexplicable murmur which Gaupa knew so well. It was as if spirits were whispering around him. “Beast, beast, beast.”
§ 5
The next day Gaupa went northwards to Lower Valley, where people were living. They struggle through life as best they can, and when they die they are taken to the ancient tarred wooden church that calls them back to earth with dismal deep-toned bells.
Gaupa’s home was a timber hut on a stony birch-clad ridge, jutting out into the river. The building was so near to the water’s edge that if the spring flood was unusually high the water almost lapped against its walls.
There Gaupa and Bjönn lived alone. Gaupa was a confirmed old bachelor, over fifty years of age. He had reached the evening of life, and women and love had never been anything to him. No one had ever heard him sigh on account of a petticoat.
His real name was Sjur and he hailed from a spot far north in the valley, a crofter’s place called Renna. His parents died when he was young. Sjur was not cut out for a crofter, and so he built the little hut for himself down by the river, and it stands there to this very day.
Sjur was believed to be a shoemaker by trade and he was handy both with awl and thread. But what use was it to take your shoes to him when he never finished them? If you left them with him during the potato harvest in the autumn you could not expect to get them back until the cuckoo was heard in the following spring. Therefore work grew more and more scarce, and heaven only knew what he lived upon. But Gaupa would gorge like a dog when there was food, and could starve like a dog when food grew scarce.
People gave him his nickname “The Lynx” because of his strange habits. He slept during the day and was up and about at night, like a wild beast—like a lynx in fact.