Days of the Discoverers | Page 5

them begins like this:
"'Piche Klooskap pechian Machieswi menikok.'"
"What does it mean?"
"'Long ago Klooskap came to the island of the partridges.' Klooskap was like Odin, or Thor. The priests in Greenland told her he was a devil and wouldn't let her talk about him, but the Skroelings had runes for everything just like the people in the sagas,--runes for war, and healing, and the sea."
"How did she ever get away?"
"Some men came from Westbyrg to cut wood in the forest, and when they saw that she was not really a Skroeling they bought her for an iron pot and one of them married her. But he was drowned a long time ago."
"I wish I knew the Skroelings' language. Some day I mean to go to Greenland."
"Perhaps Mother Elle will teach you. I'll ask her."
The Wind-wife was rather chary of information about the country of the Skroelings until Nikolina's coaxing and Thorolf's silent but intense interest had taken effect. The country, she said, was rather like Norway, with mountains and great forests, lakes and streams, but far colder. There were no fiords, and no cities. The people lived in tents made of poles covered with bark, or hides. They dressed in the hides of wild animals and lived by hunting and fishing. They had no reindeer, horses, cattle, sheep or goats, no fowls, no pigs. They could not work iron, nor did they spin or weave. The man and woman who had adopted her treated her just like their own child.
The stories she had learned from these people were intensely interesting to her listeners. There was one about a battle between the wasps and the squirrels, and another about the beaver who wanted wings. One was about a girl who was married to the Spirit of the Mountain and had a son beautiful and straight and like any other boy except that he had stone eyebrows. Then there was the tale about Klooskap tying up the White Eagle of the Wind so that he could not flap his wings. After a short time everything was so dirty and ill-smelling and unhealthy that Klooskap had to go back and untie one wing, and let the wind blow to clear the air and make the earth once more wholesome.
Wild apples fell, grain ripened, nights lengthened. Long ago the twin-flower, violet, wild pansy, forget-me-not and yellow anemone had left their fairy haunts, and there remained only the curving fantastic fronds of the fern,--the dragon-grass. Then had come brilliant spots and splashes of color on the summer slopes--purple butterwort, golden ragweed, aconite, buttercup, deep crimson mossy patches of saxifrage, rosy heather, catchfly, wild geranium, cinnamon rose. These also finished their triumphal procession and went to their Valhalla. Then one September morning the children woke to hear the wind screaming as if the White Eagle had escaped his prison, and the rain pelting the world.
All summer they had been out, rain or shine, like water-ouzels, but now they were glad to sit about the fire with the shutters all closed, and the smoke now and then driven down into the room by the storm. Before evening the little ones were begging for stories.
"I wish I could remember a saga I heard last Yule," Nikolina said at last. "It was about a voyage the Vikings made to a country where the people had never seen cattle. When they heard the cattle bellowing they all ran away and left the furs they had come to sell."
"Tell all you remember and make up the rest," suggested Karen, but Nikolina shook her head.
"One should never do that with a saga."
"I know that tale," spoke up Thorolf suddenly, although he had never in his life repeated a saga. "Grandmother used to tell it. In the beginning Bjarni Heriulfson the sea-rover, after many years came home to Iceland to drink wassail in his father's house. But strangers dwelt there and told him that his father was gone to Greenland, and he set sail for that land. Soon was the ship swallowed up in a gray mist in which were neither sun nor stars. They sailed many days they knew not where, but suddenly the fog lifted and the sun revealed to them a coast of low hills covered with forest. By this Bjarni thought that it was not Greenland but some southerly coast. Therefore turned he northward and sailed many days before he sighted the mountains of Greenland and his father's house.
"Years afterward returned Bjarni to Iceland, and in his telling of that voyage it came to the ears of Leif Ericsson, who asked him many questions about the land he had seen. There grew no trees in Iceland or Greenland, fit for house-timber, and Leif was minded to find out this place of great forests. Thus it came that Leif sailed from