Rauten staggered forwards, Gaupa on his back. Gaupa had a piece of chewing tobacco in his mouth. It was caught between his clenched teeth and a brown juice ran out of the corners of his mouth down into his beard. He caught the knife out of the elk’s back and swung it aloft once more. But it drew no shiny line this time, it was wet. Once more it sank into Rauten’s body while Gaupa spat out the words:
“Take that for Bjönn.”
The same knife met Rauten with the first rays of day on the morning he was born on Black Mountain slopes. The blade was worn and narrow now, but fate decreed that it should sit in Rauten’s body at his death-leap east of Gipsy Lake. Perhaps they knew, the dull-red sunbeams which that morning, so many years ago, stroked their warm hands over the little calf bidding him welcome to life and to the forest.
But now Rauten had lived his life. Trees and grass, air and water had given him of their own, which they now claimed back. Rauten was old; over his melancholy head the sunset was dead. He was entering on the long night which never is awakened by a dawn in the east.
He had created a number of elks, most of them gone before him into the land of shadows. Now his turn had come to follow them. The Ré Valley woods had no more use for him. His legs were stiff and his steps short. No longer was he a roaring storm at mating time. His muscles sang no more wild songs from bottomless depths of forces; his life was on the ebb, and no flood would rise in him again.
§ 29
That morning a marten sat crouching in a spruce tree near Gipsy Lake. The marten might tell what happened.
That morning a broad-winged eagle soared round and round above Ré Valley. The eagle also might tell what happened.
Rauten ran out on a southwards slope where the snow was partly gone. He hardly saw anything; Gaupa’s knife was diving voluptuously into him. But terror paralysed his nerves so that he hardly felt any pain.
When the elk and the man ran the small bushes nodded after them. But the old trees were indifferent to what happened. Everything was as it should be. The old trees had seen the bear pawing the elk’s skull, had seen the adder swallowing live mice. Life takes life. Thus it was when night first dewed the grass, as long as stars have twinkled in the heavens.