Days of the Discoverers | Page 2

DAYS OF THE DISCOVERERS

I
ASGARD THE BEAUTIFUL
A red fox ran into the empty church. In the middle of the floor he sat up

and looked around. Nothing stirred--not the painted figures on the
wooden walls, nor the boy who now stood in the doorway. This boy
was gray-eyed and flaxen-haired, and might have been eleven or twelve
years old. He was looking for the good old priest, Father Ansgar, and
the wild shy animal eyeing him from the foot of the altar made it only
too clear that the church, like the village, was deserted.
Father Ansgar was dead of the strange swift pestilence that was called
in 1348 the Black Death. So also were the sexton, the cooper, the
shoemaker, and almost all the people of the valley. A ship had come
into Bergen with the plague on board, and it spread through Norway
like a grass-fire. Only last week Thorolf Erlandsson[1] had had a father
and mother, a grandmother, two younger sisters and a brother. Now he
was alone. In the night the dairy woman and the plowmen at Ormgard
farm had run away. Other farms and houses were already closed and
silent, or plundered and burned. Ormgard being remote had at first
escaped the sickness.
Thorolf turned away from the church door and began to climb the
mountain. At the lane leading to his home he did not stop, but kept on
into the woods. It was not so lonely there.
Up and up he climbed, the thrilling scent of fir-balsam in his nostrils,
the small friendly noises of the forest all about him. Only a few months
ago he had come down this very road with his father, driving the cattle
and goats home from the summer pasture. All the other farmers were
doing the same, and the clear notes of the lure, the long curving horn,
used for calling the cattle and signaling across valleys, soared from
slope to slope. There was laughter and shouting and joking all the way
down. Now the only persons abroad seemed to be thieving ruffians
whose greed for plunder was more than their fear of the plague.
A thought came to the boy. How could he leave his father's cattle unfed
and uncared for? What if he were to drive the cows himself to the
saeter and tend them through the summer? He faced about, resolutely,
and began to descend the hill.
Within sight of the familiar roofs he heard some one coming from the

village, on horseback. It proved to be Nils the son of Magnus the son of
Nils who was called the Bear-Slayer, with a sack of grain and a pair of
saddlebags on a sedate brown pony. Nils was lame of one foot and no
taller than a boy of nine, although he was thirteen this month and his
head was nearly as large as a man's. He had been an orphan from
baby-hood, and for the last three years had lived in the priest's house
learning to be a clerk.
"Hoh!" called Nils, "where are you going?"
"To the farm to get our cattle and take them to the saeter. There is no
one left to do it but me."
"Cattle?" queried the other interestedly, "She will be glad of that."
"She!" said Thorolf, "who?"
"The Wind-wife[2]--Mother Elle, who used to sell wind to the
sailors--the Finnish woman from Stavanger. She has gathered up a lot
of children who have no one to look after them and is leading them into
the mountains. She has Nikolina Sven's daughter Larsson, and Olof and
Anders Amundson, and half a score of younger ones from different
villages. She says that if it is God's will for the plague to come to the
saeter it will come, but it is not there now, and it is in the valleys and
the towns. She has gone on with the small ones who cannot walk fast,
and left Olof and Anders and me to bring along the ponies with the
loads. I'll help you drive your beasts."
Without trouble the lads got the animals out of the byres and headed
them up the road. Norway is so sharply divided by precipitous
mountain ranges and deeply-penetrating fiords, that it may be but a few
miles from a farm near sea level to the high grassy pastures three or
four thousand feet above it where the cattle are pastured in summer.
The saeter maidens live there in their cottages from June to September,
making butter and cheese, tending the herds and doing such other work
as they can. The saeter belonging to Ormgard and its neighbors was the
one chosen by Mother Elle as a refuge for her flock.

The forest of magnificent firs through which the road passed presently
grew