Far back across the field was a wire pen which caught Roald’s eye. At first he thought that he was looking at a chicken house. But as he walked closer he saw that foxes and not chickens lived in the pen. What cunning foxes they were! Baby foxes lay sleeping in the sun. Other foxes ran about the pen, jumping up on the box houses and off as they pleased. The foxes had long black fur. Down the back of each fox was a stripe of fur tipped with white. Such animals are called silver foxes because of the white tips on the black fur.
At first Roald felt sorry for the baby foxes. He imagined that they were unhappy and longing to be free to run away into the woods. But his father said, “These foxes have never lived anywhere except in this pen. They are well fed, and, no doubt, are very contented in the pen.”
Farmers in this northland often raise foxes for sale. The silver foxes are very valuable. People pay large prices for fox furs and they like the pretty silver tips on them. Ships that sail from Norway to other countries carry many fox pelts to those other lands.
But Roald soon forgot the foxes as he watched some boys busily working in another field. Rows of poles were sticking in the ground in that field and bunches of grain hung on each pole. The boys were pulling up the poles, turning them around, and sticking them back into the ground.
Roald watched them for some time. From one of the boys he learned that grain in that part of Norway is usually dried on poles. By the time the oats, barley, and rye are ripe enough to cut summer is nearly over. The wet fall weather begins. The grain must be dried as quickly as possible. Stacking it in shocks on the ground would not do, for the rainy weather would rot it. The farmers in Norway fasten their grain on short poles to hold it up off the wet ground.
The grain on one side of the poles which Roald saw had received more sunshine than the grain on the other side of the poles. That is why the boys were in the field turning the poles. They wanted all the grain on the poles to dry quickly.
Roald was surprised to see other boys cutting small shrubs and branches of trees and hanging them on fence posts to dry. What would they ever do with those dry leaves? But his father told him that if he stayed on the farm during the winter he would see the goats eating the dried leaves and liking them too. And most farmers in Norway keep goats as well as cows, horses, and pigs.