The evenings were already quite dark, and north of the church the path passed through the woods and beneath the shadow of Hammer Ridge. There gusts of cold wind always issued from Rost Gorge, and the din of the river brought a trace of moisture to the air. Swarms of big white moths hovered and flitted under the trees, sometimes flying straight at her. The pale glow of the linen around her face and on her breast seemed to draw them in the dark. She swatted them away with her hand as she rushed upward, sliding on the slippery carpet of needles and stumbling over the writhing roots that sprawled across the path she was following.
A certain dream had haunted Kristin for many years. The first time she had it was on the night before Gaute was born, but occasionally she would still wake up, soaked with sweat, her heart hammering as if it would shatter in her chest, and she had dreamed the same thing.
She saw a meadow with flowers, a steep hill deep inside a pine forest that bordered the mound on three sides, dark and dense. At the foot of the slope a small lake mirrored the dim forest and the dappled green of the clearing. The sun was behind the trees; at the top of the hill the last long golden rays of evening light filtered through the boughs, and at the bottom of the lake sun-touched, gleaming clouds swam among the leaves of water lilies.
Halfway up the slope, standing deep in the avalanche of alpine catchflies and globeflowers and the pale green clouds of angelica, she saw her child. It must have been Naakkve the first time she had the dream; back then she had only two, and Bj?rgulf was still in the cradle. Later she was never certain which of her children it might be. The little round, sunburned face under the fringe of yellow-brown hair seemed to her to resemble first one and then another of her sons, but the child was always between two and three years old and dressed in the kind of small dark yellow tunic that she usually sewed for her little boys as everyday attire, from homespun wool, dyed with lichen, and trimmed with red ribbon.
Sometimes she seemed to be on the other side of the lake. Or she might not be present at all when it happened, and yet she saw everything.
She saw her little son moving about, here and there, turning his face as he tugged at the flowers. And even though her heart felt the clutch of a dull anguish—a premonition of the evil about to occur—the dream always brought with it first a powerful, aching sweetness as she gazed at the lovely child there in the meadow.
Then she sees emerging from the darkness at the edge of the woods a furry bulk that is alive. It moves soundlessly, its tiny, vicious eyes smoldering. The bear reaches the top of the meadow and stands there, its head and shoulders swaying, as it considers the slope. Then it leaps. Kristin had never seen a bear alive, but she knew bears didn’t leap that way. This is not a real bear. It runs like a cat; at the same moment it turns gray, and like a giant light-colored cat it flies with long, soft strides down the hill.
The mother is deathly frightened, but she can’t reach the child to protect him; she can’t make a sound of warning. Then the boy notices that something is there; he turns halfway and looks over his shoulder. With a horrifying, low-pitched cry of terror he tries to run downhill, lifting his legs high in the tall grass the way children do. And his mother hears the tiny crack of sap-filled stalks breaking as he runs through the profusion of blossoms. Now he stumbles over something in the grass, falls headlong, and in the next instant the beast is upon him with its back arched and its head lowered between its front paws. Then she wakes up.
And each time she would lie awake for hours before her attempts to reassure herself did any good. It was only a dream after all! She would draw into her arms her smallest child, who lay between herself and the wall, thinking that if it had been real, she could have done such and such: scared off the animal with a shriek or with a pole. And there was always the long, sharp knife that hung from her belt.
But just as she had convinced herself in this manner to calm down, it would sieze hold of her once again: the unbearable anguish of her dream as she stood powerless and watched her little son’s pitiful, hopeless flight from the strong, ruthlessly swift, and hideous beast. Her blood felt as if it were boiling inside her, foaming so that it made her body swell, and her heart was about to burst, for it couldn’t contain such a violent surge of blood.
Ingebj?rg’s hut lay up on Hammer Ridge, a short distance below the main road that led up to the heights. It had stood empty for many years, and the land had been leased to a man who had been allowed to clear space for a house nearby. An ill beggar who had been left behind by a procession of mendicants had now taken refuge inside. Kristin had sent food and clothing and medicine up to him when she heard of this, but she hadn’t had time to visit him until now.
She saw that the poor man’s life would soon be over. Kristin gave her sack to the beggar woman who was staying with him and then tended to the ill man, doing what little she could. When she heard that they had sent for the priest, she washed his face, hands, and feet so they would be clean to receive the last anointment.
The air was thick with smoke, and a terribly oppressive, foul smell filled the tiny room. When two women from the neighboring household came in, Kristin asked them to send word to J?rundgaard for anything they might need; then she bade them farewell and left. She suddenly had a strange, sick fear of meeting the priest with the Corpus Domini, so she took the first side path she encountered.
It was merely a cattle track, she soon realized. And it led her right into the wilderness. The fallen trees with their tangle of roots sticking up frightened her; she had to crawl over them in those places where she couldn’t make her way around. Layers of moss slid out from under her feet when she clambered down over large rocks. Spiderwebs clung to her face, and branches swung at her and caught on her clothes. When she had to cross a small creek or she came to a marshy clearing in the woods, it was almost impossible to find a place where she could slip though the dense, wet thickets of leafy shrubs. And the loathsome white moths were everywhere, teeming beneath the trees in the darkness, swarming up in great clouds from the heath-covered mounds when she trod on them.
But at last she reached the flat rocks down by the Laag River. Here the pine forest thinned out because the trees had to twine their roots over barren rocks, and the forest floor was almost nothing but dry grayish-white reindeer moss, which crackled under her feet. Here and there a black, heath-covered mound was visible. The fragrance of pine needles was hotter and drier and sharper than higher up. Here all the branches of the trees always looked yellow-scorched from early spring on. The white moths continued to plague her.