Roald watched them for some time. From one of the boys he learned that grain in that part of Norway is usually dried on poles. By the time the oats, barley, and rye are ripe enough to cut summer is nearly over. The wet fall weather begins. The grain must be dried as quickly as possible. Stacking it in shocks on the ground would not do, for the rainy weather would rot it. The farmers in Norway fasten their grain on short poles to hold it up off the wet ground.
The grain on one side of the poles which Roald saw had received more sunshine than the grain on the other side of the poles. That is why the boys were in the field turning the poles. They wanted all the grain on the poles to dry quickly.
Roald was surprised to see other boys cutting small shrubs and branches of trees and hanging them on fence posts to dry. What would they ever do with those dry leaves? But his father told him that if he stayed on the farm during the winter he would see the goats eating the dried leaves and liking them too. And most farmers in Norway keep goats as well as cows, horses, and pigs.
Roald and his father and his mother and sister then rode on a bus to the next town. They did not travel very fast, for the bus driver is also the mailman. He stopped at each farmhouse along the road for which he had mail. Sometimes he dropped the mail in a mail box by the side of the road, but often girls or boys were waiting at the farm gate to take the mail. Often the driver gave a sack full of mail to a farmer or a man who runs a small store in a village. That man delivers mail to the families who live farther back off the main road.
At one place the man who was to take a sack of mail was not outside his house to meet the bus. The driver and all the passengers on the bus were impatient. The driver honked the horn of his car, but still the farmer did not come. Then the bus driver went over to a post by the gate and pushed a button. He told Roald that by pushing that button he rang an electric bell at the farmhouse. So Roald was not surprised to see the postman come running after the bell had been rung.
Roald was ready to take the train back to Oslo after a week in the country, but he talked about the farms all the rest of the summer.
In the High Pastures
“Come, children dear,
For night draws near,