The few cows that were here now could be
tethered near by; the milk, when the children had had all they wanted,
was mostly used in soups, pudding or groet (porridge). A net or weir
stretched across the outlet of the lake would fill with fish overnight.
The streams were full of trout. Mother Elle knew how to make fish-hooks
of bone, bows and arrows, ropes, and baskets of bark, how to weave
osiers, how to cure bruises and cuts, how to trap the wild hares,
grouse and plover and cook them over an open fire. The children found
plover's eggs and the eggs of other wild fowl. They raised pulse, leeks,
onions and turnips in a little garden patch. They gathered strawberries,
cranberries, crowberries, wild currants, black and red, the cloudberry
and the delicious arctic raspberry which tastes of pineapple. Some
stores of salt and grain were already at the saeter and the grain-fields
had been sowed, before the pestilence appeared in the valley.
In the long summer days of these northern mountains, one has the feeling
that they will never end, that life must go on in an infinite succession
of still, sunshiny, fragrant hours, filled with the songs of birds, the
chirr of insects and the distant lowing of cattle. There is time for
everything. At night comes dreamless slumber, and the morning is like a
birth into new life.
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