The Modern Vikings

“Father!” he cried, with a hoarse voice of despair; “why don’t you pull me up?”

His cry was lost in the roar of the wind, and there came no answer. Taking hold once more of the rope with one hand, he considered the possibility of climbing; but the miserable gull, seeming every moment to redouble its efforts at escape, deprived him of the use of his hands unless he chose to dash out his brains by collision with the rock. Something like a husky, choked scream seemed to float down from above, and staring again upward, he saw his father’s head projecting over the brink of the precipice.

“The rope will break,” screamed Sigurd. “I have tied it to the rock.”

Thoralf instantly took in the situation. By the swinging motion, occasioned both by the wind and his fight with the gull, the rope had become frayed against the sharp edge of the cliff, and his chances of life, he coolly concluded, were now not worth a sixpence. Curiously enough, his agitation suddenly left him, and a great calm came over him. He seemed to stand face to face with eternity; and as nothing else that he could do was of any avail, he could at least steel his heart to meet death like a man and an Icelander.

“I am trying to get hold of the rope below the place where it is frayed,” he heard his father shout during a momentary lull in the storm.

“Don’t try,” answered the boy; “you can’t do it alone. Rather, let me down on the lower ledge, and let me sit there until you can go and get someone to help you.”

His father, accustomed to take his son’s advice, reluctantly lowered him ten or twenty feet until he was on a level with the shelving ledge below, which was broader than the one upon which he had first gained foothold. But – oh, the misery of it! – the ledge did not project far enough! He could not reach it with his feet! The rope, of which only a few strands remained, might break at any moment and – he dared not think what would be the result! He had scarcely had time to consider, when a brilliant device shot through his brain. With a sudden thrust he flung away the pole, and the impetus of his weight sent him inward with such force that he landed securely upon the broad shelf of rock.

The gull, surprised by the sudden weight of the pole, made a somersault, strove to rise again, and tumbled, with the pole still depending from its leg, down upon the ice-field.

It was well that Thoralf was warmly clad, or he could never have endured the terrible hours while he sat through the long afternoon, hearing the moaning and shrieking of the wind and seeing the darkness close about him. The storm was chilling him with its fierce breath. One of the birds he tied about his throat as a sort of scarf, using the feet and neck for making the knot, and the dense, downy feathers sent a glow of comfort through him, in spite of his consciousness that every hour might be his last. If he could only keep awake through the night, the chances were that he would survive to greet the morning. He hit upon an ingenious plan for accomplishing this purpose. He opened the bill of the auk which warmed his neck, cut off the lower mandible, and placed the upper one (which was as sharp as a knife) so that it would inevitably cut his chin in case he should nod. He leaned against the rock and thought of his mother and the warm, comfortable chimney-corner at home. The wind probably resented this thought, for it suddenly sent a biting gust right into his face, and he buried his nose in the downy breast of the auk until the pain had subsided. The darkness had now settled upon sea and land; only here and there white steeples loomed out of the gloom. Thoralf, simply to occupy his thought, began to count them. But all of a sudden one of the steeples seemed to move, then another – and another.

The boy feared that the long strain of excitement was depriving him of his reason. The wind, too, after a few wild arctic howls, acquired a warmer breath and a gentler sound. It could not be possible that he was dreaming, for in that case he would soon be dead. Perhaps he was dead already, and was drifting through this strange icy vista to a better world. All these imaginings flitted through his mind, and were again dismissed as improbable. He scratched his face with the foot of an auk in order to convince himself that he was really awake. Yes, there could be no doubt of it; he was wide awake. Accordingly he once more fixed his eyes upon the ghostly steeples and towers, and – it sent cold shudders down his back – they were still moving. Then there came a fusillade as of heavy artillery, followed by a salvo of lighter musketry; then came a fierce grinding, and cracking, and creaking sound, as if the whole ocean were of glass and were breaking to pieces. “What,” thought Thoralf, “is the ice breaking up!” In an instant the explanation of the whole spectral panorama was clear as the day. The wind had veered round to the southeast, and the whole enormous ice-floe was being driven out to sea. For several hours – he could not tell how many – he sat watching this superb spectacle by the pale light of the aurora borealis, which toward midnight began to flicker across the sky and illuminated the northern horizon. He found the sight so interesting that for a while he forgot to be sleepy. But toward morning, when the aurora began to fade and the clouds to cover the east, a terrible weariness was irresistibly stealing over him. He could see glimpses of the black water beneath him; and the shining spires of ice were vanishing in the dusk, drifting rapidly away upon the arctic currents with death and disaster to ships and crews that might happen to cross their paths.

It was terrible at what a snail’s pace the hours crept along! It seemed to Thoralf as if a week had passed since his father left him. He pinched himself in order to keep awake, but it was of no use; his eyelids would slowly droop and his head would incline – horrors! what was that? Oh, he had forgotten; it was the sharp mandible of the auk that cut his chin. He put his hand up to it, and felt something warm and clammy on his fingers. He was bleeding. It took Thoralf several minutes to stay the blood – the wound was deeper than he had bargained for; but it occupied him and kept him awake, which was of vital importance.

At last, after a long and desperate struggle with drowsiness, he saw the dawn break faintly in the east. It was a mere feeble promise of light, a remote suggestion that there was such a thing as day. But to the boy, worn out by the terrible strain of death and danger staring him in the face, it was a glorious assurance that rescue was at hand. The tears came into his eyes – not tears of weakness, but tears of gratitude that the terrible trial had been endured. Gradually the light spread like a pale, grayish veil over the eastern sky, and the ocean caught faint reflections of the presence of the unseen sun. The wind was mild, and thousands of birds that had been imprisoned by the ice in the crevices of the rocks whirled triumphantly into the air and plunged with wild screams into the tide below. It was hard to imagine where they all had been, for the air seemed alive with them, the cliffs teemed with them; and they fought, and shrieked, and chattered, like a howling mob in times of famine. It was owing to this unearthly tumult that Thoralf did not hear the voice which called to him from the top of the cliff. His senses were half-dazed by the noise and by the sudden relief from the excitement of the night. Then there came two voices floating down to him – then quite a chorus. He tried to look up, but the beetling brow of the rock prevented him from seeing anything but a stout rope, which was dangling in mid-air and slowly approaching him. With all the power of his lungs he responded to the call; and there came a wild cheer from above – a cheer full of triumph and joy. He recognized the voices of Hunding’s sons, who lived on the other side of the promontory; and he knew that even without their father they were strong enough to pull up a man three times his weight. The difficulty now was only to get hold of the rope, which hung too far out for his hands to reach it.

“Shake the rope hard,” he called up; and immediately the rope was shaken into serpentine undulations; and after a few vain efforts, he succeeded in catching hold of the knot. To secure the rope about his waist and to give the signal for the ascent was but a moment’s work. They hauled vigorously, those sons of Hunding – for he rose, up, along the black walls – up – up – up – with no uncertain motion. At last, when he was at the very brink of the precipice, he saw his father’s pale and anxious face leaning out over the abyss. But there was another face too! Whose could it be? It was a woman’s face. It was his mother’s. Somebody swung him out into space; a strange, delicious dizziness came over him; his eyes were blinded with tears; he did not know where he was. He only knew that he was inexpressibly happy. There came a tremendous cheer from somewhere – for Icelanders know how to cheer – but it penetrated but faintly through his bewildered senses. Something cold touched his forehead; it seemed to be snow; then warm drops fell, which were tears. He opened his eyes; he was in his mother’s arms. Little Jens was crying over him and kissing him. His father and Hunding’s sons were standing, with folded arms, gazing joyously at him.

MIKKEL

I.

HOW MIKKEL WAS FOUND

You may find it hard to believe what I am going to tell you, but it is, nevertheless, strictly true. I knew the boy who is the hero of this story. His name was Thor Larsson, and a very clever boy he was. Still I don’t think he would have amounted to much in the world, if it had not been for his friend Michael, or, as they write it in Norwegian, Mikkel. Mikkel, strange to say, was not a boy, but a fox. Thor caught him, when he was a very small lad, in a den under the roots of a huge tree. It happened in this way. Thor and his elder brother, Lars, and still another boy, named Ole Thomlemo, were up in the woods gathering faggots, which they tied together in large bundles to carry home on their backs; for their parents were poor people, and had no money to buy wood with. The boys rather liked to be sent on errands of this kind, because delicious raspberries and blueberries grew in great abundance in the woods, and gathering faggots was, after all, a much manlier occupation than staying at home minding the baby.

Thor’s brother Lars and Ole Thomlemo were great friends, and they had a disagreeable way of always plotting and having secrets together and leaving Thor out of their councils. One of their favorite tricks, when they wished to get rid of him, was to pretend to play hide-and-seek; and when he had hidden himself, they would run away from him and make no effort to find him. It was this trick of theirs which led to the capture of Mikkel, and to many things besides.

It was on a glorious day in the early autumn that the three boys started out together, as frisky and gay as a company of squirrels. They had no luncheon-baskets with them, although they expected to be gone for the whole day; but they had hooks and lines in their pockets, and meant to have a famous dinner of brook-trout up in some mountain glen, where they could sit like pirates around a fire, conversing in mysterious language, while the fish was being fried upon a flat stone. Their tolle knives6 were hanging, sheathed, from their girdles, and the two older ones carried, besides, little hatchets wherewith to cut off the dry twigs and branches. Lars and Ole Thomlemo, as usual, kept ahead and left Thor to pick his way over the steep and stony road as best he might; and when he caught up with them, they started to run, while he sat down panting on a stone. Thus several hours passed, until they came to a glen in which the blueberries grew so thickly that you couldn’t step without crushing a handful. The boys gave a shout of delight and flung themselves down, heedless of their clothes, and began to eat with boyish greed. As far as their eyes could reach between the mossy pine trunks, the ground was blue with berries, except where bunches of ferns or clusters of wild flowers intercepted the view. When they had dulled the edge of their hunger, they began to cut the branches from the trees which the lumbermen had felled, and Ole Thomlemo, who was clever with his hands, twisted withes, which they used instead of ropes for tying their bundles together. They had one bundle well secured and another under way, when Ole, with a mischievous expression, ran over to Lars and whispered something in his ear.

“Let us play hide-and-seek,” said Lars aloud, glancing over toward his little brother, who was working like a Trojan, breaking the faggots so as to make them all the same length.

Thor, who in spite of many exasperating experiences had not yet learned to be suspicious, threw down an armful of dry boughs and answered: “Yes, let us, boys. I am in for anything.”

“I’ll blind first,” cried Ole Thomlemo; “now, be quick and get yourselves hidden.”

And off the two brothers ran, while Ole turned his face against a big tree and covered his eyes with his hands. But the very moment Thor was out of sight, Lars stole back again to his friend, and together they slipped away under cover of the bushes, until they reached the lower end of the glen. There, they pulled out their fish-lines, cut rods with their hatchets, and went down to the tarn, or brook, which was only a short distance off; the fishing was excellent, and when the large speckled trout began to leap out of the water to catch their flies, the two boys soon ceased to trouble themselves about little Thor, who, they supposed, was hiding under some bush and waiting to be discovered.

In this supposition they were partly right and partly wrong.

No sooner had Ole Thomlemo given the signal for hiding, than Thor ran up the hill-side, stumbling over the moss-grown stones, pushing the underbrush aside with his hands, and looking eagerly for a place where he would be least likely to be found. He was full of the spirit of the game, and anticipated with joyous excitement the wonder of the boys when they should have to give up the search and call to him to reveal himself. While these thoughts were filling his brain, he caught sight of a huge old fir-tree, which was leaning down the mountain-side as if ready to fall. The wind had evidently given it a pull in the top, strong enough to loosen its hold on the ground, and yet not strong enough to overthrow it. On the upper side, for a dozen yards or more, the thick, twisted roots, with the soil and turf still clinging to them, had been lifted, so as to form a little den about two feet wide at the entrance. Here, thought Thor, was a wonderful hiding-place. Chuckling to himself at the discomfiture of his comrades, he threw himself down on his knees and thrust his head into the opening. To his surprise the bottom felt soft to his hands, as if it had been purposely covered with moss and a layer of feathers and eider-down. He did not take heed of the peculiar wild smell which greeted his nostrils, but fearlessly pressed on, until nearly his whole figure, with the exception of the heels of his boots, was hidden. Then a sharp little bark startled him, and raising his head he saw eight luminous eyes staring at him from a dark recess, a few feet beyond his nose. It is not to be denied that he was a little frightened; for it instantly occurred to him that he had unwittingly entered the den of some wild beast, and that, in case the old ones were at home, there was small chance of his escaping with a whole skin. It could hardly be a bear’s den, for the entrance was not half big enough for a gentleman of Bruin’s size. It might possibly be a wolf’s premises he was trespassing upon, and the idea made his blood run cold. For Mr. Gray-legs, as the Norwegians call the wolf, is not to be trifled with; and a small boy armed only with a knife was hardly a match for such an antagonist. Thor concluded, without much reflection, that his safest plan would be to beat a hasty retreat. Digging his hands into the mossy ground, he tried to push himself backward, but, to his unutterable dismay, he could not budge an inch. The feathers, interspersed with the smooth pine-needles, slipped away under his fingers, and the roots caught in his clothes and held him as in a vice. He tried to force his way, but the more he wriggled the more he realized how small was his chance of escape. To turn was impossible, and to pull off his coat and trousers was a scarcely less difficult task. It was fortunate that the four inhabitants of the den, to whom the glaring eyes belonged, seemed no less frightened than himself; for they remained huddled together in their corner, and showed no disposition to fight. They only stared wildly at the intruder, and seemed anxious to know what he intended to do next. And Thor stared at them in return, although the darkness was so dense that he could discern nothing except the eight luminous eyes, which were fixed upon him with an uncanny and highly uncomfortable expression. Unpleasant as the situation was, he began to grow accustomed to it, and he collected his scattered thoughts sufficiently to draw certain conclusions. The size of the den, as well as the feathers which everywhere met his fumbling hands, convinced him that his hosts were young foxes, and that probably their respected parents, for the moment, were on a raid in search of rabbits or stray poultry. That reflection comforted him, for he had never known a fox to use any other weapon of defence than its legs, unless it was caught in a trap and had to fight for bare life. He was just dismissing from his mind all thought of danger from that source, when a sudden sharp pain in his heel put an end to his reasoning. He gave a scream, at which the eight eyes leaped apart in pairs and distributed themselves in a row along the curving wall of the den. Another bite in his ankle convinced him that he was being attacked from behind, and he knew no other way of defence than to kick with all his might, screaming at the same time so as to attract the attention of the boys, who, he supposed, could hardly be far off. But his voice sounded choked and feeble in the close den, and he feared that no one would be able to hear it ten yards away. The strong odor, too, began to stifle him, and a strange dizziness wrapped his senses, as it were, in a gray, translucent veil. He made three or four spasmodic efforts to rouse himself, screamed feebly, and kicked; but probably he struck his wounded ankle against a root or a stone, for the pain shot up his leg and made him clinch his teeth to keep the tears from starting. He thought of his poor mother, whom he feared he should never see again, and how she would watch for his return through the long night and cry for him, as it said in the Bible that Jacob cried over Joseph when he supposed that a wild beast had torn him to pieces and killed him. Curious lights, like shooting stars, began to move before his eyes; his tongue felt dry and parched, and his throat seemed burning hot. It occurred to him that certainly God saw his peril and might yet help him, if he only prayed for help; but the only prayer which he could remember was the one which the minister repeated every Sunday for “our most gracious sovereign, Oscar II., and the army and navy of the United Kingdoms.” Next he stumbled upon “the clergy, and the congregations committed to their charge;” and he was about to finish with “sailors in distress at sea,” when his words, like his thoughts, grew more and more hazy, and he drifted away into unconsciousness.

Lars and Ole Thomlemo in the meanwhile had enjoyed themselves to the top of their bent, and when they had caught a dozen trout, among which was one three-pounder, they reeled up their lines, threaded the fish on withes, and began to trudge leisurely up the glen. When they came to the place where they had left their bundles of faggots, they stopped to shout for Thor, and when they received no reply, they imagined that, being tired of waiting, he had gone home alone, or fallen in with some one who was on his way down to the valley. The only thing that troubled them was that Thor’s bundle had not been touched since they left him, and they knew that the boy was not lazy, and that, moreover, he would be afraid to go home without the faggots. They therefore concluded to search the copse and the surrounding underbrush, as it was just possible that he might have fallen asleep in his hiding-place while waiting to be discovered.

“I think Thor is napping somewhere under the bushes,” cried Ole Thomlemo, swinging his hatchet over his head like an Indian tomahawk. “We shall have to halloo pretty loud, for you know he sleeps like a top.”

And they began scouring the underbrush, traversing it in all directions, and hallooing lustily, both singly and in chorus. They were just about giving up the quest, when Lars’s attention was attracted by two foxes which, undismayed by the noise, were running about a large fir-tree, barking in a way which betrayed anxiety, and stopping every minute to dig up the ground with their fore-paws. When the boys approached the tree, the foxes ran only a short distance, then stopped, ran back, and again fled, once more to return.

“Those fellows act very queerly,” remarked Lars, eying the foxes curiously; “I’ll wager there are young un’s under the tree here, but” – Lars gasped for breath – “Ole – Ole – Oh, look! What is this?”

Lars had caught sight of a pair of heels, from which a little stream of blood had been trickling, coloring the stones and pine-needles. Ole Thomlemo, hearing his comrade’s exclamation of fright, was on the spot in an instant, and he comprehended at once how everything had happened.

“Look here, Lars,” he said, resolutely, “this is no time for crying. If Thor is dead, it is we who have killed him; but if he isn’t dead, we’ve got to save him.”

“Oh, what shall we do, Ole?” sobbed Lars, while the tears rolled down over his cheeks, “what shall we do? I shall never dare go home again if he is dead. We have been so very bad to him!”

“We have got to save him, I tell you,” repeated Ole, tearless and stern: “we must pull him out; and if we can’t do that, we must cut through the roots of this fir-tree; then it’ll plunge down the mountain-side, without hurting him. A few roots that have burrowed into the rocks are all that keep the tree standing. Now, act like a man. Take hold of him by one heel and I’ll take the other.”

Lars, who looked up to his friend as a kind of superior being, dried his tears and grasped his brother’s foot, while Ole carefully handled the wounded ankle. But their combined efforts had no perceptible effect, except to show how inextricably the poor lad’s clothes were intertangled with the tree-roots, which, growing all in one direction, made entrance easy, but exit impossible.

“That won’t do,” said Ole, after three vain trials. “We might injure him without knowing it, driving the sharp roots into his eyes and ears, as likely as not. We’ve got to use the hatchets. You cut that root and I’ll manage this one.”

Ole Thomlemo was a lumberman’s son, and since he was old enough to walk had spent his life in the forest. He could calculate with great nicety how a tree would fall, if cut in a certain way, and his skill in this instance proved valuable. With six well-directed cuts he severed one big root, while Lars labored at a smaller one. Soon with a great crash the mighty tree fell down the mountain-side, crushing a dozen birches and smaller pines under its weight. The moss-grown sod around about was torn up with the remaining roots, and three pretty little foxes, blinded and stunned by the rush of daylight, sprang out from their hole and stared in bewilderment at the sudden change of scene. Through the cloud of flying dust and feathers the boys discerned, too, Thor’s insensible form, lying outstretched, torn and bleeding, his face resting upon his hands, as if he were asleep. With great gentleness they lifted him up, brushed the moss and earth from his face and clothes, and placed him upon the grass by the side of the brook which flowed through the bottom of the glen. Although his body was warm, they could hardly determine whether he was dead or alive, for he seemed scarcely to be breathing, and it was not until Ole put a feather before his mouth and perceived its faint inward and outward movement, that they felt reassured and began to take heart. They bathed his temples with the cool mountain water and rubbed and chafed his hands, until at last he opened his eyes wonderingly and moved his lips, as if endeavoring to speak.