hot and good
hauls of trout to be made in the mountain lakes and connecting streams.

But what is the country like up here on the very summit of
everything? It is called a plateau; but that does not mean that it
is absolutely level, for, as a matter of fact, there is no part of
it level enough to be made into a football ground. It is all up and
down, and every here and there are low hills, with occasionally great
prominent, rounded mountain-tops, rising to a height of 500 or 600
feet above the plateau. Then there are chains of lakes, often several
miles in length, acres of swampy ground in every direction, shallow
ravines filled with a jumble of rocks and boulders, and constant sand
mounds, partly overgrown with grass and dwarf juniper. And up here
are the snowfields, about which we shall have more to say presently.

It is all weird and wild and wonderful, and if there be no wind the
silence is intense, and only broken by the bark of an Arctic fox from
some rocky hillside or by the plaintive call of a golden plover.

Why, it may be asked, should anyone wish to go to such a desolate
place? Only to shoot or to fish, to gather in a store of the purest
air in the world, or perhaps to enjoy a period of calm and quiet
solitude--world-forgetting, by the world forgot.

CHAPTER X

WILD NATURE--BEASTS

In a country like Norway, with its vast forests and waste moorlands,
it is only natural to find a considerable variety of animals and
birds. Some of these are peculiar to Scandinavia. Some, though only
occasionally met with in the British Isles, are not rare in Norway;
whilst others (more especially among the birds) are equally common
in both countries.

There was a time when the people of England lived in a state of fear
and dread of the ravages of wolves and bears, and the Norwegians of
the country districts even now have to guard their flocks and herds
from these destroyers. Except in the forest tracts of the Far North,
however, bears are not numerous, but in some parts, even in the South,
they are sufficiently so to be a nuisance, and are ruthlessly hunted
down by the farmers. As far as wolves are concerned civilization is,
fortunately, driving them farther afield each year, and only in the
most out-of-the-way parts are they ever encountered nowadays. Stories
of packs of hungry wolves following in the wake of a sleigh are still
told to the children in Norway, but they relate to bygone times--half
a century or