160 HUNTING CAMPS. 



twelve days we knew ourselves to be close to elk, but 

 always in thick timber, so that sometimes we could hear 

 the great creatures feeding and moving, but not once 

 did we gain the slightest glimpse of them. These were 

 generally still bright days with wandering winds, such 

 as are in their season very pleasant to all the world 

 but to fishermen and hunters, two deserving classes of 

 the community often much maltreated by the weather. 



Elk-hunting was for the time a game of hide and 

 seek, played out in the vast labyrinth of the woods. On 

 several occasions a very slight softening of the iron 

 countenance of fate would have given us all we needed, 

 but the ill-luck held remorselessly until even Peder 

 spoke no more of " vera bool," although he marched 

 on untiringly over endless kilometres of wood and hill. 

 We wore out our Norwegian boots in our long-day 

 tramps, and existed on hope, fladbrod, trout, and an 

 occasional bottle of beer, and the irony of it the 

 meat of a bull-elk, one of two which had been shot by 

 Geoffrey Gathorne-Hardy in a beautiful right and left 

 higher up the valley ! 



Poor Peder ! darkness clouded his spirit, but only for 

 short intervals. Evening by evening he would say, 

 " Bismarck kill big bool imorgen," but neither the next 

 morning nor many subsequent mornings brought us in 

 sight of a male elk. The only event worth mentioning 

 during this interval might have ended disastrously. 

 We were hunting on Gartland, and about nine o'clock in 

 the morning were crossing an area of unusually dense 

 forest. Bismarck had been trotting along listlessly, so 

 that we were therefore all the more delighted when he 

 suddenly stopped short and then commenced to pull 

 hard up -wind. From the way in which he carried 



