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.

There was a great deal of singing and story-telling at odd times. A
group of children making mats or baskets, gathering pease or going after
berries would beg Nils or Nikolina to tell a story, or Karen would lead
them in some old song with a familiar refrain. But some of the songs the
Wind-wife crooned to the baby were not like any the children had heard.
They were not even in Norwegian.

Thorolf was a silent lad, who would rather listen than talk, and hated
asking questions. But one day, when he and Nikolina were hunting wild
raspberries, he asked her if she thought Mother Elle meant to stay in
the mountains through the winter. Nikolina did not know.

"'Tis well to be wise but not too wise,
'Tis well that to-morrow is hid from our eyes,
For in forward-looking forebodings rise,"

she added quaintly. "I have heard her say that it is colder in Greenland
than it is here."

"Has she been in Greenland?"

"Her father and mother were on the way there when she was little, and
the ship was wrecked somewhere on the coast. The Skroelings found her
and took her to live in their country. That is how she learned so much
about trees and herb