Then Gaupa was quite alone in the mountain hut.
Only he was not there at all. Suddenly he had entered strange underground passages where breathing was difficult and which were so narrow that he could scarcely move. He lay flat, he tried to bend his knees and sit up on his haunches, but the place was too narrow. Then he attempted to pull himself forward on his stomach, tried with all his might, for soon there would be no more air in there. It was half dark and he could not find his way out. The passage was crooked like a fox’s lair, with no beginning and no end. He crawled forward in mad terror, lest he should never find a way out.
Then suddenly a shot rang out there, and all was blank.
After a while he crawled again, crawled—crawled to find a way out which he could not see.
§ 12
Bjönn trotted down the path to Spænde Lake. Here and there yellow and brownish leaves were in his path, and when he trampled them they rustled like a fire of twigs.
Where the slopes began to fall steeply towards Lower Valley, a wood-cutter stood beside a marked spruce. At the height of a man’s head a strip of bark had been flayed off so that bare flesh of the tree could be seen. The strip of bark hung down like a long tongue; one might imagine the tree putting its tongue out at the forester.
But the wielder of an axe is not one to defy! “Bang!” said the tree trunk, when the lightning steel cut a chip from its body.
The strokes of the axe sounded even and regular from the forest; they might almost be the pulse of the woods.