“Starboard”
Photographed by Mr. C. T. McKechnie soon after its arrival in the Edinburgh Zoological Park.
... What a country this is to breed real men. Every boy in every one of these isolated farms must of necessity learn to row, to ride, to sail, to hunt, ski, handle an axe, do iron and wood work, besides his farming; and for one pound sterling a year he can be in touch with the centres of European news and civilisation. On the telephone—eighteen kroner a year they pay to send messages under the sea and over forests and fjelds to their township, say forty or fifty miles distant, whilst we belated people in these backwoods of Berwickshire have to pay nine pounds a year for the same convenience.
As I write we see two such natives enviably employed—two small boys—the day’s work done on the farm, they don’t go to school in summer—they are now managing a boat and fishing. With the glass I can see the bow is almost full of cod, haddock, and some codling. The elder boy looks about twelve years old. He pulls up two at a time, shimmering, iridescent, pink-tinted haddock. Who could believe the rather plain grey fish we see in the fishmonger’s could ever look like a chunk of mother-of-pearl?
Woods and islands, rugged mountains, grey fjelds, with snow in patches, pass hour after hour, till we come to the fiord of the old capital—Trondhjem Fiord. It reminds us of our Firth of Forth, on a larger scale, with more woods. For me Norway begins at Trondhjem going north, and ends there coming south. Southern Norway seems to have no tradition, no direct appeal to me. In the soft distance I can see height after height fading into the distance; to the north and east with the glass I can see the woods of Sundal in Stordal, where we have hunted elk, and seen the golden birch leaves falling, and the snowflakes drifting down into the green depths of the swaying fir woods. The water of the fiord is tinted with Stordal River. I recall its salmon and hear again its solemn roar when the mist hung low in the glen. What days of exertion these were, climbing and descending under the dripping pines, two men and a hound, stealthily, silently, with hardly a word for hours, watching through the woods for the gaunt form of a bull elk, days of such fatigue and nights of profound repose, alike haunted with the sweet melancholy of the saetar songs.
Why do such merry, cheerful people as bonders’ daughters sing such sad songs? Here is what I remember of one that haunts me now.
Its rhythm just suits your steps if you hum it, not loud enough to disturb an elk as you slowly ascend, step by step, through the wet pines in the morning to the high grounds, and the quick part helps you returning as you swing down the last of the hill-side from one red-leafed rowan to the next, down to the level; and months after, it comes to you when you are in a street and you see the woods and the river winding a silver thread at the foot of the glen and the welcome smoke of the log-built farm. Once I hummed it unconsciously on a dull, wet day at the quayside in Hull, standing amongst emigrants looking at the swirling and muddy river, and a Norse woman standing near with a white handkerchief for headdress began to hum it too—we could not speak to each other, but our thoughts were harking back to saetar and glen and hill—the charm of Norway.