152 HUNTING CAMPS. 



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 kilo- 

 metres 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, " Bis- 

 marck 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 his head Peder at once said " Elg," and 

 intimated by signs that the dog had the scent straight 

 from the animal's body. A good Norwegian hunter can 

 read a great deal from the demeanour of his dog, and can 

 always approximately tell the distance, small or great, 

 from the quarry. I myself learned to do this to some 

 extent with Bismarck, for when close to an elk the hair 

 along his back stood straight up and his tail curled more 

 and more aggressively over his back. 



In the present instance every sign proclaimed the near- 



