§ 14
The next day the farmer Halstein at Rust in Lower Valley saw Bjönn, the dog from Lynx Hut, trotting towards the farm. The dog came into the passage and scratched at the door. Halstein opened, and noticed that the dog was soaking wet. Big wet marks on the floor showed where he placed his paws. He had probably swum across the river.
What was hanging on the dog’s collar?
Halstein loosened the well-worn brass chain, looked at it, and said to his wife:
“This chain belongs to old Gaupa. I’m thinking something must have happened to him.”
Halstein had often followed both Bjönn and his master in the forest, and that was why the dog fetched him for help. The dog behaved exactly as he did with the wood-cutter the day before, running from the door to Halstein and back again.
“Well, well, I’m coming sure,” said Halstein, packing his sack. He took his gun from the beam in the roof, and the two walked quickly across the meadow. When he reached the bank of the river the dog jumped first into the boat, and on the other side they were swallowed up by the forest.
The man and the dog walked for hours, along narrow forest paths, across murmuring brooklets, and through birch bush. Bjönn never wavered, he was going back on his own tracks, and he never walked so far as to be out of Halstein’s sight.
All the time Halstein was wondering what might be the matter with Gaupa. Perhaps he had had an accident, broken a leg.... As far as he knew Gaupa was on the Buvas Slopes a week before, and since then nothing had been heard of him.
The man and the dog walked on, not towards Ré Valley, but farther east. Once they crossed a mountain ridge and stood with their feet on earth and their body in the clear sky. Then again they descended into a narrow valley. Morsæter Lake regarded them like a bright blue eye. They came to a dense copse of healthy young trees, as is usually the case near mountain summer farms, and then they were at their goal. They saw a hut with a brown mossy roof and a cowshed with bright, new-shingled roof.