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TIIE A M E li IC A N - S C A NI) IN A VIA N RE VIE JV 
down beside it. While sitting thus they hear the howling of a dog on 
the other side of the valley, repeated again and again, then ceasing, 
and then beginning once more. 
“What’s that?’’ says one. 
“I wonder,” says the other. 
The dog goes on howling. 
The hunters go to a knoll from which they can see a saeter and a 
dog sitting on the grass outside; but they can see no people about. 
“I wonder if there’s anything wrong over there,” says the taller 
of the two, a muscular young fellow with well-marked features. Mov¬ 
ing on, they enter the saster-field from the south, but here their dog 
grows remarkably eager. They follow him and come upon the dead 
moose. The animal has been shot in the right place, low down behind 
the shoulder. 
At that moment the howling ceases, and Storm comes towards 
them with bristling back, but runs in again in front of them. A man 
is lying on the bed, and a gun is leaning against the wall. The man 
talks incessantly. 
“That got him!” he says. “Just look at him falling!” And then 
he murmurs something they do not understand. One of the men goes 
up to him, and sees that he is damp with perspiration and in a fever 
heat. 
“Are you sick?” he asks. 
Peter opens his eyes wonderingly. “Yes, I must ha’ been sick,” 
he says. 
Storm springs up on to the bed and lies down close to his master’s 
head, whence he growls at the strange dog down on the floor. One 
of the men has already begun to make a fire on the hearth. An hour 
later he is on his way down to the valley, while the other remains at 
the seeter. All night the fire burns and Peter Varpet talks more wildly 
than ever. 
* * * 
Three weeks later Peter is at home in his cottage, pale and thin. 
The yellow leaves of October are dropping one by one on the fields, 
as the trees throw off their raiment, to stand at last bare and naked; 
but the fir-clad slopes to the west are as green as ever, creeping higher 
and higher until they change into bare mountain. Far off in these 
mountains Peter can see a little cleft. It is Bjodal. 
On the wall of his stabur are two great moose-horns, with 
thirteen tines on the one, and eight on the other—the horns of the 
magic moose. 
Peter lights his pipe, and the smoke drifts away, blue and strong 
on the clear air. 
“It was a long moose-hunt this time!” he thinks. “But it was good 
fun all the same!” 
