258 
WILD NORWAY. 
concourse remained unexplained. Perhaps it was an 
election. 
Another day we came on a pine-marten. We were 
following our young hound Springe , when, amidst 
cavernous roots of a dead pine, the yellow chest of the 
maar * caught our eye, not three yards distant. Close 
beyond, in a forest-glade, lay two newly-killed caper- 
cocks, their brains eaten, as well as part of the breast. 
They had evidently been caught while feeding, martens 
springing on them simultaneously from the spreading 
spruce-boughs above. Martens are quite common in 
these forests, harbouring in hollow trees ; but they are 
cunning and excessively wary. In the forests over¬ 
hanging Kvye-Sjoen, on September 17th, I sprang also 
a white fox, the only one seen, but failed to score. The 
wild-life of the forest, however, is too diverse to be 
crowded into the corner of a chapter already too long, 
and deserves a place for itself elsewhere. 
Having received word that the Lapps had finally 
retired southward from the Mcerrafjeldetne, we shifted 
camp thither, to give that beautiful forest another trial. 
A single day’s work satisfied us that not an elk had 
traversed it since we hunted the ground three weeks 
before. After midday, when about to exchange rifle for 
gun, and commence operations on the willow-grouse 
that abounded among the birch-scrub, Johannes drew 
attention to a whitish object on the distant shores of 
Kjcerdals-tjernen. A scrutiny with the glass showed 
this to be a reindeer buck lying close to the water’s 
edge on a rocky point. The landward base of this was 
* In proper Norsk, “ marde ”—the word as given above being 
local. 
