The Great Hunger | Page 3

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THE GREAT HUNGER

by JOHAN BOJER

Translated from the Norwegian by
W. J. ALEXANDER WORSTER and C. ARCHER

THE GREAT HUNGER
Book I
Chapter I
For sheer havoc, there is no gale like a good northwester, when it roars
in, through the long winter evenings, driving the spindrift before it
between the rocky walls of the fjord. It churns the water to a froth of
rushing wave crests, while the boats along the beach are flung in
somersaults up to the doors of the grey fisher huts, and solid old barn
gangways are lifted and sent flying like unwieldy birds over the fields.
"Mercy on us!" cry the maids, for it is milking-time, and they have to
fight their way on hands and knees across the yard to the cowshed,
dragging a lantern that WILL go out and a milk-pail that WON'T be
held. And "Lord preserve us!" mutter the old wives seated round the
stove within doors--and their thoughts are far away in the north with
the Lofoten fishermen, out at sea, maybe, this very night.
But on a calm spring day, the fjord just steals in smooth and shining by
ness and bay. And at low water there is a whole wonderland of strange
little islands, sand-banks, and weed-fringed rocks left high and dry,
with clear pools between, where bare- legged urchins splash about, and
tiny flat-fish as big as a halfpenny dart away to every side. The air is
filled with a smell of salt sea-water and warm, wet beach-waste, and
the sea-pie, see- sawing about on a big stone in the water, lifts his red
beak cheerily sunwards and pipes: "Kluip, kluip! the spring has come!"
On just such a day, two boys of fourteen or thereabouts came hurrying

out from one of the fishermen's huts down towards the beach. Boys are
never so busy as when they are up to some piece of mischief, and
evidently the pair had business of this sort in hand. Peer Troen,
fair-haired and sallow-faced, was pushing a wheelbarrow; his
companion, Martin Bruvold, a dark youth with freckles, carried a tub.
And both talked mysteriously in whispers, casting anxious glances out