In the afternoon we went farther up the Fiord, about five miles to the north-east of the village of Fædde. The Fædde Fiord is of great depth, and in a circular bay to which we had now sailed, no anchorage for a vessel of the yacht's tonnage could be found. Running her, therefore, into a bight, ropes from the bow and stern were made fast to a couple of firs, and by belaying them taut, the cutter was kept clear from the base of a mountain that rose, straight as the mast, out of the water to an altitude of several thousand feet. This was the most beautiful and romantic spot of which the imagination of a poet might dream. The bay was about half a league in circumference, and a perfect circle in form. To the east, south, and west, were mountains covered nearly to their peaks with thick forests of fir; and when the dispersion of the clouds revealed their gray summits, many cascades, like thin pillars of light, darted down the rocks; and the eye, following their track, could trace their increasing bulk as they rolled along from crag to glen, bounding, gliding, foaming, till they fell, roaring, with collected volume, into the waters of the bay. The sound of these cascades during the heat of the day was not only pleasant to the ear, but still more delightful was the feeling of freshness it conveyed to the mind.
To the north a piece of level land, made into an island by the severed branches of a river, bore, by its position, all the beauty and aptitude for human habitation that nature could bestow; and the clean, white cottages with their red roofs and spires of ascending smoke, its gardens with their symmetrical flower-beds, and its cultivated fields, teemed with every sign of ease and plenty, and revealed the ingenuity of man. Beyond the northern limit of this island, far away in the interior, the blue outlines of the mountains were drawn with a darker tint upon the kindred colour of the sky, and their snowy scalps thrust to Heaven, seemed to claim priority of creation and rule with patriarchal dominion over the lesser hills. The main river ran along the eastern quarter of the island, leaping and flowing over and under the rocky ledges of a mountain, and its stream, sometimes expansive, then contracted, hurried down a bed of scanty depth.
As the sole pursuit of my two companions was the circumvention and death of numberless salmon, the same evening on which we arrived a start was made for the salmon pools on the other side of the island. In the course of an hour the pools were reached, and having gone through the usual forms, such as solicitation for permission to fish, and the hire of two prams, R—— and P—— began their accustomed labour. Taking, as customary, my position on some elevated spot, whence a good range of all my two friends' operations might be had, I strove to pass away the time by staking bets with myself whether one fish could be caught in thirty casts, or whether, on an average, twice as many minutes would elapse without such a result. My left hand generally took the odds, and I calculated that it won four times out of five.
The sun had set for many hours, but it was light as noon. Wearied with fruitless watching, I lay down on the grass. Stretched at full length on my back, and having read in astronomical works that, looking upwards from a dark hole dug in the earth, the stars might be seen shining at mid-day, I covered my face with my cap, and peered upwards at the sky through a small hole in the crown. But my philosophy was suddenly interrupted by the solution of another remarkable fact, and of more personal moment than the scintillation of the stars, by finding I had put my head in an ant's nest. I started to my feet, affirming that I had never been so unwary before. But I am a believer in predestination, and know that this accident could no more fail of occurrence, than that from my cradle, in harmony of order, it should fail being traced, link by link, to the instant at which it came upon me. See, now, its consequences. No sooner had a score of angry ants been brushed from my hair, in which their irritability had entangled them, than I was gratified with the sight of a herculean salmon that rose completely out of the water, and sprung, like a ravenous cat, at P——'s fly, which he had just withdrawn from the water, intending to change it for another of a brighter colour. The fish leapt about a foot and a half above the surface of the stream, and was the largest salmon I ever saw, weighing, I should think, between fifty and sixty pounds. If sharks inhabit the Fædde river, I would not pledge my word it was not one. I yield, however, my opinion to that of my gallant friend, who is a better sportsman than myself and asserts, without any mental reservation, that
"It was a salmon, sir,—a salmon."
Be it as it may, the difference of classification has nothing to do with my story.
The Norwegians, I know, are a bold people, but may sometimes be taken unawares, as well as other men, and though they live and think in the simple and primitive manner of the Mosaic era, they express the signs and feelings of apathy and surprise, with similarity of silence and spasmodic gestures to Indians and Englishmen. This world, too, is certainly a world of incongruities, and the more I see of it, the more I am biased in that way of reflection; and if any one will take the trouble to look at things as they are, abstractedly, and observe how good, bad and indifferent, black, white and blue, are jumbled together, he will not deny me his assent. It so happened, throughout our travels in Norway, and, indeed, whenever we went on these fishing excursions, that R——, who gave little expression to success in his pastime, nor felt annoyed at failure, invariably obtained the services of the most expert boatmen, while P——, who threw heart and soul into everything he undertook, and always swerved under discomfiture, secured with the same invariableness the aid of the most consummate clowns; and the rewardless termination of his toil, or tact, has been mainly attributable to the thick-headedness of those who should have assisted him with their sagacity. Scarcely, then, had this bulky salmon shown his mouth, literally an ugly one, above the water, than P——'s boatman, instead of keeping silence, and subduing his fears, as any reasonable being would do, raised an immediate shout of horror, and during the paroxysms of dismay, dipped his two sculls negligently into the stream, and in his anxiety to make a few rapid strokes towards the shore, caught, what is nautically called, a couple of crabs, that caused him to lose his balance, and fall, legs uppermost, with a loud crash backwards to the bottom of the pram. His aspiring feet, taking P—— in the flank with the purchase of a crow-bar, raised him from the diminutive poop-deck of the pram on which he was standing; but some part of P——'s apparel giving way to the weight of his body, told its mute love of gravitation, and desire to prevent any further mischief. As it was, P—— narrowly escaped submersion; and his presence of mind alone saved the fly-rod from any more serious damage than a slight fracture of the top joint. The untimely vociferation of the Norwegian interrupted of necessity any plan P—— might have adopted to secure the salmon; for the assault made so unexpectedly on his person seemed, like an electric shock, to pursue its course throughout his whole frame, and rushing to the tips of his fingers sent the rod, at a tangent, bolt into the air.
About sixty yards from the inlet where the yacht was anchored, stood a cottage, tenanted by a woman and her daughters, two girls about fourteen and fifteen years of age, elegant as Indians, in form, and possessing the flowing fair hair, the large, round, loving, languid, blue eye, and the unaffected simplicity of bearing, and native loveliness of their clime. Every morning they brought us milk, eggs, and strawberries, and seemed to find great delight in listening to our language, and, observing the routine of a vessel carried on with all the regularity of a ship of war; for, with their little bare feet that escaped from their blue gowns, and shone on the black rocks, like the white moss of the rein-deer, they would sit for hours on the crags above us, clinging to each other and explaining the reason why the bell struck at certain intervals of time, and why the firing of the evening gun made the flag to fall, as if by magic, from the mast-head to the deck.
On Sunday morning, the 11th of July, we took leave of Fædde, and started, with a foul wind, for the Bukke Fiord. Being in want of bread, we were obliged to anchor off the village, in order to supply our stores; and having accomplished our object with less difficulty than we had anticipated, we set off fairly, at one o'clock, for our destination.
The wind had been increasing the whole morning, and veering two points from the south toward the south-west, now blew with the fury of a gale. The shifting gusts, as they careered down the valleys, taking the head sheets, first, on the weather, then, on the lee, bow, made us more tardy than usual in getting up the anchor. Being the Sabbath, greater crowds of people were abroad than on other days; and we could see, with our telescopes, ladies and gentlemen standing or sitting, in large numbers, in the churchyard, watching our manœuvres with much interest. On the brows of the headlands, the peasants, both men and women, viewed with surprise our determination to put to sea on such an inauspicious day, and in such stormy time; but when the cutter swung, so that the anchor could be heaved, they could not refrain from loud expressions of praise to see her gallant trim, and the pride of buoyancy with which she swam the baffling waves.