Weird Tales from Northern Seas | Page 2

a
_Sexæring_,[2] and henceforward go fishing in his own boat.
One day, as he was walking along with a _Kvejtepig_[3] in his hand,
and thinking the matter over, he unexpectedly came upon a monstrous
seal, which lay sunning itself right behind a rock on the strand, and was
as much surprised to see the man as the man was to see the seal. But
Elias was not slack; from the top of the rock on which he stood, he
hurled the long heavy Kvejtepig right into the monster's back, just
below the neck.
The seal immediately rose up on its tail right into the air as high as a
boat's mast, and looked so evilly and viciously at him with its
bloodshot eyes, at the same time showing its grinning teeth, that Elias
thought he should have died on the spot for sheer fright. Then it
plunged into the sea, and lashed the water into bloody foam behind it.
Elias didn't stop to see more, but that same evening there drifted into
the boat place on Kvalcreek, on which his house stood, a Kvejtepole,
with the hooked iron head snapped off.
Elias thought no more about it, but in the course of the autumn he
bought his _Sexæring_, for which he had been building a little
boat-shed the whole summer.
One night as he lay awake, thinking of his new _Sexæring_, it occurred
to him that his boat would balance better, perhaps, if he stuck an extra
log of wood on each side of it. He was so absurdly fond of the boat that
it was a mere pastime for him to light a lantern and go down to have a

look at it.
Now as he stood looking at it there by the light of the lantern, he
suddenly caught a glimpse in the corner opposite, on a coil of nets, of a
face which exactly resembled the seal's. For an instant it grinned
savagely at him and the light, its mouth all the time growing larger and
larger; and then a big man whisked out of the door, not so quickly,
however, but that Elias could catch a glimpse, by the light of the
lantern, of a long iron hooked spike sticking out of his back. And now
he began to put one and two together. Still he was less anxious about
his life than about his boat; so he there and then sat him down in it with
the lantern, and kept watch. When his wife came in the morning, she
found him sleeping there, with the burnt-out lantern by his side.
One morning in January, while he was out fishing in his boat with two
other men, he heard, in the dark, a voice from a skerry at the very
entrance of the creek. It laughed scornfully, and said, "When it _comes
to a Femböring_,[4] Elias, look to thyself!"
But there was many a long year yet before it did come to that; but one
autumn, when his son Bernt was sixteen, Elias knew he could manage
it, so he took his whole family with him in his boat to Ranen,[5] to
exchange his _Sexæring_ for a _Femböring_. The only person left at
home was a little Finn girl, whom they had taken into service some few
years before, and who had only lately been confirmed.
Now there was a boat, a little _Femböring_, for four men and a boy,
that Elias just then had his eye upon--a boat which the best boat-builder
in the place had finished and tarred over that very autumn. Elias had a
very good notion of what a boat should be, and it seemed to him that he
had never seen a _Femböring_ so well built below the water-line.
Above the water-line, indeed, it looked only middling, so that, to one of
less experience than himself, the boat would have seemed rather a
heavy goer than otherwise, and anything but a smart craft.
Now the boat-master knew all this just as well as Elias. He said he
thought it would be the swiftest sailer in Ranen, but that Elias should
have it cheap, all the same, if only he would promise one thing, and
that was, to make no alteration whatever in the boat, nay, not so much
as adding a fresh coat of tar. Only when Elias had expressly given his
word upon it did he get the boat.
But "yon laddie"[6] who had taught the boat-master how to build his

boats so cunningly below the water-line--above the water-line he had
had to use his native wits, and they were scant enough--must surely
have been there beforehand, and bidden him both sell it cheaply, so that
Elias might get it, and stipulate besides that the boat should not be
looked at too