104 
WILD NORWAY. 
sweeps. Here we chanced on a wheatear’s nest, which 
already contained callow young, though literally islanded 
amidst snowfields. At the highest point passed (two 
thousand feet), willow-wrens were singing, and the few 
other birds seen included ryper, golden plovers, and a 
distant-soaring buzzard. 
Anders-vand is a lake of about two miles in length, 
lying in a fold of the fell, and almost entirely sur¬ 
rounded by forest, chiefly birch and alder, with a few 
pines. Its surface is studded with rocky islets, mostly 
scrub-clad, and some wooded. From a distance, imagi¬ 
nation pictured country houses on its lonely shores, 
with green lawns sloping down to the water’s edge; but 
the lawns were only boggy clearings, verdant with rank 
vegetation, the “ halls ” log-huts used in summer for 
storing hay. No one lives on the fjelds, nor had human 
foot trodden the shores of Anders-vand since the latest- 
lingering peasant latched the door of his sseter in Sep¬ 
tember. The last half-mile of our route was over snow 
marked by a track that, Ivar asserted, was that of a 
bear prowling along the side of a noisy little torrent 
that led to the lake. The boat, relieved from her winter 
covering of pine-branches, proved desperately leaky; 
but, with Norwegian resource, Ivar produced from his 
capacious pockets store of tarred felt and oakum, with 
which we caulked the faulty seams. During this opera¬ 
tion I watched a gull—one of three or four that were 
drifting about—settle down on a rocky islet, whereon 
we presently (having got the boat made fairly tight) 
found its nest with three eggs, half incubated. I shot 
the owner, which proved to be Larus canus, the only 
species of gull we found breeding on these fells, and of 
