124 SPORT IN NORWAY. 
900 pounds, so that it may be readily imagined that 
the momentum generated cannot be trifling. 
Reader, when first you went out covert-shooting as 
a youth, can you not recall to mind how your heart 
went ‘“‘pit-pat” as a beater shouted, ‘Look out; 
hare!” or “ Mark cock!’ Can you not remember how 
the whirring sound of the first pheasant, as it came 
down quickly with the wind across the ride where you 
were stationed, raised your excitement to the most 
frantic pitch ? If you can still recall these feelings, you 
have a faint, but a very faint idea of what it is to hear 
the sound of breaking boughs coming straight towards 
you in the middle of a dense Norwegian forest. Now 
is the time to be steady, and keep that heart of yours 
from throbbing and bumping as if it would jump clean 
out of your breast. Ten to one you will miss if it be 
the first time you have been out elk-hunting. I did 
(though that is no reason why you should). I could 
no more have fired than have done—I don’t know what 
impossibility. I stood like the cockney who had never 
fired a shot before in his life, when invited down to the 
country to shoot pheasants. Admiration of the pretty 
“ long-tailed” creatures quite got the better of him, to 
the intense disgust of the gamekeeper. 
The Swedes have a very apt term for the feeling 
which such sights produce in the tyro’s breast, viz., 
“‘ skogs-frossa.” And I believe no ‘young sportsman, 
