THE ELK IN NORWAY. 148 
position to shelter your head and part of your bodies 
from the wind and rain at night), blankets, two or 
three tin kettles, tea, sugar, ship biscuit, and salt pork, 
and last, but most important of all, an axe. It is 
no easy work sometimes in ‘ changing country’ after a 
hard morning’s hunting to have to shoulder your heavy 
bundle in the afternoon and trudge some ten miles more 
through the dense forest, often through swamps and 
over ‘ windfalls,’ with only the left hand free to climb 
over the latter. Happy is one if encamping that night 
one can feel out a ‘var,’ or Balsam fir, to make one’s 
bed. But it is a glorious life!” 
“J think,” adds my informant, “that the moose 
of North America is larger than the European elk. 
Certainly the heads are much finer in America. I have 
seen a great number of heads in Osterdalen and else- 
where, and none are to be compared to mine, or to 
many others I have seen in Nova Scotia.” But to 
return. 
Amongst the wild animals of Norway the bear, the 
wolf, the lynx, and the glutton are the elk’s deadliest 
foes. Probably fewer fall a victim to the “ paw of the 
bear” than to either of the animals above mentioned. 
Indeed, Mr. Asbjérnsen mentions that in Osterdal it 
was locked upon as an improbability, almost amounting 
to an impossibility, that a bear would kill an elk, 
and that when such was reported to have been the 
