ELK-HUNTING IN INDEROEN. 
213 
grouse of three kinds,^ woodcocks, and white hares were 
frequently observed. Sometimes the Kongs-brn (golden 
eagle) treated us with majestic flight, soaring across 
some glen; buzzards and goshawks hunted the hill¬ 
sides ; now the domestic cares of mergansers, or red- 
throated divers, teaching their youngsters to catch trout, 
engaged attention. Anon an aggressive hawk-owl 
menaced us and our dog with outstretched claw, wheel¬ 
ing around within arm’s-length, and perching on the 
dead limb of a pine. 
Then, and beyond all, there was the forest itself. 
What written words can convey even a feeble conception 
of its pristine glory, the impress of that primaeval scene, 
its strange juxtaposition of life, death, and decay ? Here 
no axe intrudes—the living and the dead stand side 
by side; dead giants, centenarians perhaps, still erect 
though blanched and rotten to the core. Others half¬ 
dead, dying from the top downward—weather-bleached 
skeletons, their white bones gleaming in the sunshine 
in contrast with the living greens of the survivors of the 
forest that surround and protect them. Here a long- 
decayed trunk, though thicker than one can span, may 
be overthrown with one hand, and the very ground is 
a graveyard. The dead lie piled one upon another, 
the older corpses already half-hidden in long mossy 
sepulchres—for nature provides her own sexton, and 
moss and lichen fulfil their office in concealing evidence 
of what is past. Such is the home of the elk; to 
convey an initial idea of the habits of the beast, and of 
* Namely, blackgame, willow-, and hazel-grouse. The hills 
immediately around our camp were not high enough for ptarmigan, 
which, however, were found on the higher ranges towards Finvolden. 
