WILD-LIFE IN FOKEST AND FJELD. 
2 77 
the forest opens out into coppice and glade, and in the 
sub-alpine belt of birch and willow, that conditions are 
found more congenial to a diversity of wild-life. Here, 
amidst the boggy plateaux of the lower fjelds, on moor 
and highland tarn—above the forest but below the 
snowfield—breed the various ducks and divers, the 
wading-birds and others characteristic of Scandinavia. 
Some of these—taking the one district of Surendal as 
an example—are described in Chapter VIII. ; while, in 
the present, I propose briefly to notice some few of the 
chief characteristic denizens both of the deep forest 
and of the wooded fjelds that adjoin. 
To begin with the forest. As just stated, one may 
wander for days without seeing any noteworthy sign of 
life. But there are creatures that are not seen. Thus 
one may easily spend years in the haunts of the 
Glutton without obtaining (in summer) so much as 
one glimpse of the beast; for he is strictly nocturnal 
and of secretive habit, lying up all day in the 
wildest and most rugged corries and rocky glens. I 
have never myself met with the least evidence of his 
existence, though hunting forests where we knew him 
to be. So I can say nothing of the glutton, and almost 
as little of the Northern lynx, though I have, on more 
than one occasion, come across the spoor of the latter, 
and in 1894 my hunter, Ole, shot a full-grown male, as 
elsewhere mentioned. Both these beasts affect the deep 
forest, and few of either, I imagine, are killed, except in 
winter, when the spoor can be followed on ski (snow- 
runners). The summer haunts of the bear, on the other 
hand, are chiefly the more open moorlands, where fell- 
berries literally cover the ground. 
