Ole, Kristian, and Sofie are other Norwegian girls who take cows to the high pastures. They live on a farm near a fjord. They take their cattle part way up to the saeter on a boat. The girls, dressed in dark dresses and heavy shoes, carrying big knapsacks on their backs, travel on the same boat with the cows. When they leave the boat, they drive the cows a few miles up the mountain. They live much as Anne, Hulda, Sigrid, and Martha live on their saeter. These girls can go to the village by boat to buy groceries.
Automobile roads have been built in some parts of the high mountains. Tourists climb the high mountains in automobiles. Round and round they climb, sometimes on a road that is like a shelf sticking out from the rocky wall. And here and there they may go right through the wall itself, for holes, or tunnels, have been cut through the rocky banks.
Tourists who travel through those mountains are glad to find a hotel at a saeter on their way where they can get food or stay over night. And hotels have been built at saeters which are near the automobile roads. The hotel is a large wooden building. It stands near the huts which are the homes of the family which cares for the cattle.
Matti, Ingrid, and their brother Ole go each summer to a large saeter called Grotli. Their father has a hotel there. Grotli means “Goat’s Hill,” and Grotli looks like a goat’s hill in the summer when the goats run about on the mountain.
MATTI, INGRID, AND OLE
Early in the spring Matti, Ingrid, and Ole, and their father and their mother move to Grotli. Sometimes the snow is still on the ground when they arrive. Then the children may think that Grotli looks more like reindeer hill. A farmer, who lives near the saeter, has a herd of tame reindeer. They wander about on the mountain. They rub the snow out of the way with their noses and eat the fresh grass and moss which they find underneath.
Sometimes visitors in Norway ask, “Why must the cattle go so far away from the farm to the high pastures?” If they ask a Norwegian milkmaid, she might say, “The grass which grows on the farm must be saved for winter feed. Not enough grass grows on the farm for both summer and winter. Fresh, tender grass grows on the high mountains, so the cattle eat it in the summer. Then no grass is wasted.”
But the milkmaid may not know why the saeter is so far away from the farms. And, of course, it does seem strange to American girls and boys that a farmer sends his cattle to feed in high pastures miles from his farm, while in the mountains just above his own farm graze the cattle of another farmer who lives miles away. Why cannot a farmer graze his cattle on the mountains near his home? The answer to that question is a story of long, long ago in Norway.
Long ago the farmers in Norway found that they must use the grass on the high mountains for summer feed. The king said, “Each farmer may have a part of the grass lands on the high mountains for his pasture. But each farmer must use only a certain amount of land and he must find a place which no other farmer has already claimed.”