Her name was Hanna. She was the dairy woman at Krekke saeter.
“That will be a lot of work for you, Hanna,” said Mother, “to have both the cows and us to look after. But we’ll try to be as little bother to you as we can.”
The roof of the winter cabin rested almost on the lintel of the door and under the eaves hung a whole row of swallows’ nests. Enormous, clamoring, yellow-rimmed mouths filled the little opening of each nest, and swallow parents flew in and out with some last servings of midges and flies for their greedy children.
“Oh, mother, lift me up so I can see the baby swallows.”
“Not now. We must not frighten our swallows. And you know people say the parent birds do not want a baby bird that human hands have touched; they throw it out of the nest.”
“Mother, I shan’t touch. Can’t I even see?”
“Later, perhaps, when the swallows have become used to our living here.”
There was a commodious hall and two rooms in the cabin. The furniture was of the simplest, but in the front room a rocking chair had been added and a table that Mother could use as a desk. And there was a wide bed with lovely homespun woolen blankets in black and red check. But until Anders came up, Mother observed, it would be best if she and Hans both slept in the inner room. There were two beds there with the same pretty checked woolen blankets and pillow slips and sheets with wide crocheted insertions.
“Mother, isn’t it pretty here? Don’t you think it’ll be lovely to live here?”
Hanna had started a fire in the cookstove that stood in the bedroom. When Mother had unpacked the essential things from their suitcases, she borrowed two empty margarine pails from Hanna and went down to the spring for water. The four little girls still stood in a row along the saeter house wall, and a short distance beyond stood Hans, his hands thrust to the very bottom of his pants pockets. The children eyed one another silently and with great reserve. They were the daughters of Sigurd Hole, the farmer whose saeter it was, explained Hanna, and their names were Johanne and Janna and Jöda and Little Mari. They came forward, one by one, gave Mother a hand and curtsied nicely, but still without uttering a sound.
“My name is Hans,” announced the boy, and then they came forward and shook hands with him too. Then the five children went on with their wordless game.
“Well, værsogod, please, come in and have something to eat,” invited Hanna.
“Oh, how good it smells here, mother!”
Yes, it was the real old-fashioned saeter smell of milk and whey and butter and cheese.
“Why, I do believe you make your own cheese here at this saeter!”
“Yes, so we do.”
The saeter owners at Goppoll had not yet reached an agreement with the creamery down in the valley on delivery rates and such things, Hanna explained, and the roads had to be much better before one could begin bringing the milk down. But it would probably be the last year they made cheese here.
“It’s less work for the girls, but I don’t know,” said Hanna. “You see, they come for the milk before five in the morning, so if the cows have got it into their heads to stay out until late at night, and you have to milk and strain and cool the milk, it means fussing around all night. Yes, you can sleep all day then, but it’s not the same. Besides, it isn’t very nice to have to write and ask them to send back with the truck every last drop of cream a body might need for the coffee, or for a little baking a body might decide to do, and then to have to ask for butter and cheese and everything! We old-timers, we’ve always been used to living a little well the time we’re up at the saeter. No, I must say I like the old way better.”
This was evident from what was spread out before them. Hanna had laid places for her summer guests at one end of the long, unpainted dining table under the windows. There was fresh-baked bread and fine flatbrod, a large butter dish of newly churned butter molded in an old carved wooden form so that it looked like a piece of sculpture with roses and lilies in bas-relief. There was goat cheese and the white cheese made from the goat’s milk curds and two kinds of dried, homemade sausage, and coffee and milk and cream in enormous pots and jugs.
It was a pleasant saeter house, with copper and stoneware on open shelves along the walls; in one corner a kettle for cheese making that certainly held its fifty quarts of milk and in the other a bed with embroidered sheets and homespun blankets. Hanna even had flowers in the window—a row of green-painted cans with rose balsamine growing in them. The floor was strewn with freshly chopped juniper, and branches of dwarf birch were stuck everywhere along the shelves, around the mirror, and over the fireplace.
Hans ate and ate, while Mother and Hanna talked. The four little girls had sat down on the seat under the south window. Johanne did nothing, for she was supposed to be a sort of second milkmaid here, explained Hanna. She was a big girl, nearly twelve years old, so she had a right to take it easy when they were through with the evening chores in the barn. But Janna was knitting a sky-blue sweater. She was nine, so it was almost like being on a vacation for her to be here, but her mother had supplied her with yarn and said she should knit some school sweaters for herself and Jöda this summer. Jöda was six, and she too sat struggling with a little piece of knitting—a scarf, it was going to be, if it turned out to be anything, Hanna explained and laughed. Little Mari only scratched the mosquito bites on her arms and legs and peeped at the strangers. She was no more than four.
The clear summer evening’s dusk lay over the little lea as Mother and Hans went out to stand awhile by the gate before the boy had to go to bed. It seemed like daylight out, for the sky was blue-white still and water blinked in every direction out on the plain. But bushes and hillsides and irregularities in the land flowed together in strange darkness, and below the mountain ridge on the other side of Big Tromsa, a row of light-points pierced the dusk.
“They’re late with their work at the Amot saeters,” said Hanna, who had come up and stood beside them.
“Oh, Mother, smell how good it smells.”
The saeter smell—the smell of wet bog earth where the cows had tracked through the grass, the smell of wood smoke from the saeter chimneys, the good warm smell of cow and the rank odor of goat, the bitter-sweet fragrance of young birch and willow, wet with dew, and the fine and fleeting smell of shy little flowers hidden in the grass.
“Mother, what is it that’s making that noise?”
“It’s the golden plover,” replied Hanna. “Back of that little hill you see, there straight to the south, there’s a little lake, and a pair of plovers have built their nests there.”
Something white—a large grayish bird—suddenly came rushing directly toward them—then swung aside, and up, circled over the housetops, and then came at them again, as if it wanted to strike them.
“The snow owl,” said Mother.
“Yes. There are such a lot of them this year. They hatch out there in the rocks below Hogtind. They have probably hatched the second brood already. They strike at everything light. It’s my kerchief it sees. They say it’ll be a lemming year when the snow owl hatches two broods. And it’s true we’ve seen more lemmings around this year.”
“Oh, Mother, do you remember the last time it was a lemming year? It was the year I was five years old, and Ulla and Ingvald were with us, because Aunt Ragnhild was ill. You remember, Ulla and I were so terribly sick with the lemming sickness that we had to throw up in your lap before we felt better. Mother, if this is a lemming year, we’ll probably be sick in the fall?”
“The last time we had a lemming year we had not yet piped water into the house from the waterworks, so we had a well. This year it should not be so bad.”
In lemming years, when those small rodents multiply beyond all bounds, they eat the grass down to the very roots, and everything else that is edible up in the mountains. Then they move down to the valleys. They move in hordes and travel straight ahead, stopping at nothing, and going around nothing they may encounter on their way. Automobiles run them do
wn by the hundreds, and dogs and cats kill them right and left, but the horde forges ahead and never swerves. When they come to a body of water they swim and masses of them drown. The dead bodies putrefy and contaminate all the brooks and rivers and wells. Mother remembered the last lemming year very well. She herself was ill for six weeks while she cared for three children who had jaundice and diarrhea and fever and vomited all day long. Thea boiled all the water, but it did not help much. Only Tulla remained well. Thea could, of course, keep her from drinking any water at all. She got only pop and ginger ale for two months, and Tulla had nothing against that.
“Hans, it is almost midnight. Come, let’s go to bed.”
The water in the margarine pails was pleasantly warm. Mother helped Hans undress and had him stand in a little galvanized tub while she washed him all over his body.
“Oh, mother, do this every night. Undress me and bathe me. And when I’ve gone to bed you can sit beside me and tell me stories until I fall asleep.”
“Why, Hans, you who always want to be such a big boy? And you are too, by the way. Eight, next month.”
“Phewy. That’s only when I’m home. I don’t want Thea and Anders to make fun of me. But when there’s only you and me I don’t have to be so big.”
He staggered into the pajama pants that Mother held out for him, and tumbled sleepily and sweetly into his mother’s arms.
“Now put me to bed and tuck me in the way you used to when I was little.”
4
HANS CAME STORMING IN TO MOTHER WAVING JANNA’S sky-blue knitting.
“Oh, mother, pick up these stitches that have been dropped. I pulled out one of Janna’s needles . . . and, mother, may we borrow some thumbtacks?”
“Thumbtacks? Are you mad?” asked Mother, casting her eye over the damage to Janna’s sweater. “I have no thumbtacks up here.”
“Oh, yes, mother, just look and see. Maybe you have some among your writing things?”
And sure enough, miraculous as it seemed, in a tin box where Mother kept such things as tape and rubber bands, she found a package of thumbtacks.
“Oh, mother, you just ought to see the playhouse Janna and I are making. Come and see.”
Mother sensed that she would not have any peace for working this morning. She might just as well go and see what the children were doing.
They were out by the woodpile and the playhouse was, to put it plainly, the little old house from behind the barn. Sigurd Hole had built a new one, more comfortable and roomy, while he was building on his saeter the year before. The old one stood amid piles of kitchen stovewood and chunks for the fire under the cheese kettle. Pine roots and gnarled trunks of white-barked dwarf birch lay waiting to be chopped into firewood and this fate also certainly awaited the old outhouse. The door had already disappeared. But now Janna and Hans were elevating it to the rank of a fine house. Boards were laid on the seat with the unambiguous holes in it, and Janna had spread some paper napkins over them. She had a whole cigar box full of napkins which she had saved from Christmas-tree parties at school and activities at the mission house. She had a thick pack of pretty Christmas cards too and these were to be put up on the wall by means of thumbtacks. Hans ran bringing in “dishes” he had found—parts of a lovely blue glass sugar bowl and fragments of flowered cups and plates.
“I have washed them in the creek, mother. We found them on the rubbish heap, but they are absolutely clean now.”
The youngsters had rolled two chunks of tree stump into the “room” and there was no space left for anything else.
“Værsogod, mother. Do sit down. There, isn’t that ni-i-ce? You shall be invited to our party when Hanna is through with the cheese. She has promised to give us some whey and cookies and coffee and sugar lumps. And Little Mari and Jöda are kind of like our children, you see.”
Johanne had more than enough to do. It was she who washed the floors and dusted up at the winter house and down in the saeter house. And afterward she stood and stirred the cheese in the big cheese kettle with a large wooden ladle that was longer than herself, her narrow back swaying from the hips and her shoulders circling and circling. She worked steadily, like an experienced dairymaid.
Goat’s-milk cheese is actually not cheese at all—or so the experts say. For when the milk has been warmed so that the rennet can be added, and the milk begins to separate, the casein, or the stuff from which cheese is made, is fished out of the kettle and set aside. This mass, which people here in the valley call kjuke, is made into several different kinds of white cheese, but it also tastes good eaten fresh with rich milk and sugar and cinnamon on it for dessert. The whey left in the cheese kettle is allowed to stand and cook by the hour until it thickens and turns a reddish brown. All the time someone has to stir it, scraping the bottom of the kettle. It pays to be especially careful toward the end, when the cream is added, so that the mixture does not burn. By afternoon there is nothing left in the big kettle that was brimful of milk that morning but a clump of reddish-brown dough in the bottom. It is chiefly lactose, or milk sugar, and it is called myse or myssu.
Hanna would lift this dough up into a wooden bowl and when it had cooled sufficiently, she would work it with a large paddle, and knead it with her hands until the dough was smooth and pliant. She would stand outside the saeter door to do this work—when it did not rain—and the children swarmed around the bowl, filching bits of the sweet, lukewarm dough. They did not get much, perhaps, but always more than their stomachs could handle. Finally Hanna would press the mass into wooden molds. Three or four pounds of goat’s-milk cheese would be what she got out of two milkings—the morning and the evening—less what she had set aside to get cream for butter and other household use. By that time nine hours of hard work had gone into the cheese, not to mention all the wood that had been burned under the kettle.
Not so many decades ago, this entire tableland that held the Goppoll saeters, and thousands of other such saeter mountains in Norway, were clad with great, dense spruce forests. Everywhere stumps remain, rotted and overgrown now with white moss and blueberry bushes, and in all the clumps sheltered by knolls and hillocks, and along the creek beds, little shoots of spruce appear and now and then a little fir. But the winter storms on the naked mountain dwarf them and keep them down. Many of these are old trees already, but they have had to resign themselves to growing only in girth and to looking like bushes with thick trunks and close-set branches. And over all the plain, down in the heather, grow flowers which really belong in the forest shade. Exposed to the strong sun up here, the flowers have deeper colors than those in the valleys. The linnaea has become a carmine red, the silvery star-flower and the ivory-colored wintergreen have a rose cast. The flowers have become smaller too, but they are more fragrant than down in the forest. How many million acres of Norway’s forests have come to an end under the cheese kettles at thousands of saeters it is impossible to say, but they have been costly to the country, these old-fashioned saeter practices. The old dairymaids can protest as much as they like that the old ways were more pleasant; from an economic point of view, the modern arrangement with creameries in the valley is a step ahead.
Hanna still set aside römmekoller—shallow wooden bowls in which milk is allowed to sour and a thick layer of cream to form—for Sigurd had said that she must cook römmegraut for Sigrid and her boys once a week or so. The thick cream porridge is a favorite dish of all Norwegian children and Thursday was a red-letter day at Krekke saeter, for that evening Hanna treated everyone to römmegraut. Otherwise, the fare was rather dull. Hanna had three dishes to offer—dried ham and scrambled eggs, meat balls the farmer’s wife had put up at the last slaughtering, and trout. But to Hans these were the very best things in the world.
The afternoon hours, from the time the dairymaids finished with the cheese making and until the cows came home, the womenfolk at the saeter could take things quietly. They went visiting from saeter to saeter, having coffee together and talking, always with a piece of needlework in
their hands. Mother also laid aside her writing and accompanied Hanna to Björge saeter, or down to the Prestang saeters, or over to Ledumssla, where Hanna’s married sister took care of her own saeter and had all her children with her. Hans very much liked these afternoon coffee parties, for everyone served seven different sorts of cookies and cakes with the coffee, as well as freshly made waffles. And everywhere there was something new and interesting to see. At Ledumssla there were three sows, and two of them had each just had a litter of little pigs—and newborn pigs are the sweetest things in the world. Mrs. Ledum told a story about her neighbor, Per Brekkum, who had had two young actresses from Oslo staying at his saeter last summer, and these two from the city had become so enthralled with the sight of newborn pigs that they had shouted and shrieked and declared they had never seen anything so bewitching.
“Per, you surely won’t drown them all, will you? You’ll let the mother pig keep one or two, won’t you?”
But it was not wholly unlikely, said Mrs. Ledum, chuckling, that Per had made up the story. He was fond of ridiculing city people. Several years ago he had taken in an unemployed person from Oslo who had come wandering up the road asking for work. Per had hired him as a dairyman. When evening came he handed the boy from Oslo a milk pail and a stool and sent him to the barn to milk the cows. After a long time, he came in, this city fellow, all dirty and perspiring and with black and blue marks on his face and arms.
“No, my good man,” he had said to the farmer, “this job is not for me, after all. I’ve been working with your blasted old cows out there for three hours now and I still haven’t got one of them to sit down on the stool.”
At least that was the story Per told.
On Björge saeter there was a wonderfully fine pair of binoculars. The owner’s daughter, Magda, who was at the saeter as a dairymaid, stood in a gable window nearly all afternoon, watching a herd of elk that came down toward evening to graze on a grassy plot on the other side of Tromsa. There was a great bull with wide-spreading branched antlers, and three cows, each with a calf. Kongsparten this plain was called, and the strange thing about it was that every once in a while an air picture, or mirage, appeared above it: a picture of a harbor with fishing schooners and boats in it, with yellow and white boat sheds beside a pier and a white lighthouse against the blue water of the bay. Mother and Hans dropped in at Björge saeter rather often in order to look at the herd of elk through Magda’s binoculars, in hopes of seeing the mirage. Mother fancied she would be able to recognize the harbor and say where on the coast it could be found. But she never had a chance, for the mirage never appeared while Mother and Hans were at Goppollen.