He was a great teller of stories and a popular musician at dances. Then he played on a fiddle on the head of which the devil himself, horns and all, was carved out. And when he had had a little brandy the stories would come pouring out between his bearded lips. He was inexhaustible like a spring, and in everything he told there was an alluring mystery.
One night he was at a dance, telling of the Ré Valley Swede and the elk calf from Black Mountain—of the elk calf whose mother he had killed two weeks before and of the ugly cry he had heard the night afterwards, while he spoke silence reigned, and the young girls shivered.
A few days afterwards these things were the talk of the Valley. Such a story amongst those people was like leaven in dough. It grew and grew. Old sagas and old superstitions were added, and even the Sacred Word of God. For in those days the people of Lower Valley had nothing else to speak of but what actually took place within the limits of the mountain ridges before their eyes. Kings might die in the great world beyond—that was a matter of minor interest to them as compared with the death of a six-weeks-old piglet belonging to a crofter at Cool Hill.
Therefore it is nothing to wonder at that when Gaupa told the story of the elk calf of Black Mountain, the Ré Valley Swede was in a manner of speaking resurrected from his tomb.
Then suddenly everybody remembered a number of things about him. The Ré Valley Swede was not a true believer, he did not accept the Word humbly with a Christian’s heart. The Bible says that when people die they either go to heaven or hell, and no one in Lower Valley doubted for one moment that as a rule they all went straight to heaven from their Valley—that is, if we may judge from their funeral sermons.
But the old Swede believed that many things might happen after death; he even seemed to believe that the dead might return—as beasts!
The schoolmaster explained that there was another religion which taught such a belief. But people did not care two straws about other religions. The Ré Valley Swede was a mocker, a free-thinker; a cold blast followed him wherever he went. Martin Ormerud recalled how when he entered the barn where the Ré Valley Swede was laid out, a big black bird rose from his head. “Mercy upon us!” people cried.
Thus they gossiped; old wives eighty and ninety years of age, spectacles on nose and Bibles on their knees, read aloud with trembling voices how “the Lord endures not a mocker.” The old Swede was a living testimony to the truth of the Word. As a punishment for his sins and his mocking of God, his restless spirit was now condemned to roam about Ré Mountains imprisoned in an animal’s body. God have mercy upon the poor soul when once the old sinner died, once more up there among the pines along Ré River.
