We dined near the summit at a neat log inn called Haukeli-Saeter upon a soup, boiled salmon, reindeer steak and vegetables,—all good. Here our Germans clamored for sauerkraut and bier, and were much perturbed at receiving instead schooners of sweet milk and caraway-seeded tea-cakes. The inn is built in typical Norse style, with sharp and elaborately carved gables, and is kept open chiefly for the benefit of tourist travel.
Our driver is a quaint and lackadaisical old Norsk, who speaks a drawling, ancient Roldal patois. The first day we could not do much with him, although H tried her best Danish. But to-day he is beginning to thaw out and has at last become really garrulous. He is full of peasant superstition and folk lore which he implicitly believes. These Haukeli Fjelde will never be inhabited by man, he says, for they are already the home of the giant and dangerous Trolls, mysterious and mighty spirits who are inimical to man. They dwell on the barest and bleakest and most desolate mountain tops, where they devour young kids and reindeer fawns and, occasionally, even dare to kidnap a child, and are always on the watch to steal a buxom lass. It is useless to chase or follow them, they are never to be caught, and while they may show themselves at times if they shall choose, yet they are invisible to most human eyes. He has never seen a Troll, he says, but once he knew an old man who had been scared by one which tried to catch him when a boy.
There are also witches upon the Haukeli mountain tops, the old man says. He is sure he has heard them hurtling through the air, sometimes, when driving alone in the dusk of midsummer nights, crossing the desolate heights of the Haukeli Fjeld. I asked him if they still rode on broomsticks as they used to do in Germany, but he declared that they were more bloodthirsty than that, for they always carried ancient Viking broadswords, which they had picked up after some of the big fights which take place before breakfast in Valhalla every morning among the Vikings. Every summer some few witches are sure to be seen or at any rate heard, by some lonely peasant caught by fatigue on a twilight mountain top. There is one more beautiful than all the rest, he says. He calls her “Hulda,” and says she is a great hand to seduce and beguile young men. She can fix herself up to appear very beautiful, and to look upon her is to fall fast in love with her. Then she taps a rock with a long staff she carries and lo! it opens and there within are splendid chambers, a fairy palace, with all the allurements of golden furnishings and sumptuous hangings and a table groaning under the weight of delicious things to eat. If, dazzled by this glimpse of paradise, the youth once enters and is taken in her arms and kissed by her, then it is all up with him. He never escapes, but after she has toyed with him to her heart’s content in idle dalliance, and grown tired of him, then are his blackened bones cast forth upon some barren mountain top, perhaps to be found long years afterward by wandering goatherd or venturesome hunter. Between these Trolls and the witches, H has acquired a most wholesome fear of the Haukeli Fjeld, and she vows she would never drive over it alone.
THE DESOLATE HAUKELI FJELD.
Also, the old man has at first hinted at and then confided to us that the Trolls and witches are not indeed the so serious menace they might seem, for they are really afraid of man and keep generally well out of his way; but that the real vexation of life comes from the little pixies and sprites, who love to live handily about your house, and who are always making trouble, either out of a spirit of pure mischief, or else by reason of jealousy or pique. They are “very touchy,” he says, and you never know when or how you may offend them. But if you do, then woe betide you. They will steal the feed out of your horse’s trough, or from his very nosebag right before your eyes, and so deft are they at their tricks that you can never catch them. You only discover that your horse gets thinner and thinner until he finally dies, while if they shall be pleased with what you have done or said you will find the horses always sleek and fat and able to do two days’ work in one. I asked him how he stood in with the pixies just now, for I thought his team looked rather poor, but he said that was by reason of the hard summer’s work, the pixies having done him no ill for several years. They also delight to milk the goats and cows upon the sly, he said, and will steal the cheese set out to dry, and often play such havoc with household supplies as to drive the peasants to despair. For this reason it is, that many good farmers set out little bowls of milk and bits of cheese in some silent meadow or mountain dell, where the pixies may eat quite undisturbed.
As if to emphasize the old man’s words, we just then passed the hut of a woman goatherd almost upon the summit of the vast lonely Haukeli Fjeld and there, set upon a little shelf, high up near the moss-grown roof, were a small milk-bowl and a bit of brown cheese, an offering to the elves and pixies of that place.
The information I here give you may be wrong in minor detail, for we could not always perfectly interpret the quaint and ancient dialect in which the facts were told, but H says she could make out the most of what the old man said; for after all Danish and Norse speech are very nearly the same.