Tourists who travel through those mountains are glad to find a hotel at a saeter on their way where they can get food or stay over night. And hotels have been built at saeters which are near the automobile roads. The hotel is a large wooden building. It stands near the huts which are the homes of the family which cares for the cattle.
Matti, Ingrid, and their brother Ole go each summer to a large saeter called Grotli. Their father has a hotel there. Grotli means “Goat’s Hill,” and Grotli looks like a goat’s hill in the summer when the goats run about on the mountain.
Early in the spring Matti, Ingrid, and Ole, and their father and their mother move to Grotli. Sometimes the snow is still on the ground when they arrive. Then the children may think that Grotli looks more like reindeer hill. A farmer, who lives near the saeter, has a herd of tame reindeer. They wander about on the mountain. They rub the snow out of the way with their noses and eat the fresh grass and moss which they find underneath.
Sometimes visitors in Norway ask, “Why must the cattle go so far away from the farm to the high pastures?” If they ask a Norwegian milkmaid, she might say, “The grass which grows on the farm must be saved for winter feed. Not enough grass grows on the farm for both summer and winter. Fresh, tender grass grows on the high mountains, so the cattle eat it in the summer. Then no grass is wasted.”
But the milkmaid may not know why the saeter is _so far_ away from the farms. And, of course, it does seem strange to American girls and boys that a farmer sends his cattle to feed in high pastures miles from his farm, while in the mountains just above his own farm graze the cattle of another farmer who lives miles away. Why cannot a farmer graze his cattle on the mountains near his home? The answer to that question is a story of long, long ago in Norway.
Long ago the farmers in Norway found that they must use the grass on the high mountains for summer feed. The king said, “Each farmer may have a part of the grass lands on the high mountains for his pasture. But each farmer must use only a certain amount of land and he must find a place which no other farmer has already claimed.”
So each farmer hunted himself a mountain pasture. When he found a space which he liked, if it had not already been claimed, he drove stakes into the ground to mark it off. He put his name on the stakes and then the land was his. Many farmers had to take pasture lands which were far from their farms. They could find no other free land.