The schoolmaster first took two or three readings of the letter, his lips forming the words but not his tongue. Then he read aloud:
“From my good friend up there I learn that there runs in the woods a remarkable elk, which no forest-men can manage to kill. Of course a great deal of superstition is connected with the animal, the dalesmen of Lower Valley being presumably as superstitious now as when I was a child. Lower Valley is on the outskirts of civilisation. But if you, who are, as I have heard, the greatest hunter in those parts, would consent to guide me on a trip after the mysterious elk, you would give great pleasure to an old acquaintance. I long for Ré Valley.
The schoolmaster folded up the letter looking as if he had accomplished a great deed, something that no one else in all the valley could manage.
“You’ll answer for me, won’t you?” said Gaupa. “You’ll say he can come?”
And going home to Lynx Hut he felt himself greater than before. A gentleman from Branæs had sent him a letter, saying it would be a pleasure to have his company. The last “Yours truly” sounded so full of respect and so courteous that one might think it had been written in mockery.
One day Mr. Braathe knocked at the door of Lynx Hut. Gaupa was at home, but did not answer. What did that knocking mean? After another knock he went to open the door.
Mr. Braathe was a long lath of a man, who seemed to have been pulled too hard length-ways and grown too narrow. Everything about him hung loosely—his cheeks, shoulders, even his clothes. He was as shrivelled up as a bat.
“Please sit down on the bed,” said Gaupa; “there are no more lice there than the fleas have managed to eat.”
That was a joke he usually quoted to strangers, but this time he swore to himself the moment he had said it. The man before him hailed from Vermin Camp, and might think the words an allusion to his past.
But Mr. Braathe kept smiling, and asked Gaupa to call him plain Hans just as in the old days.
That same evening they stood on the slope above Tolleiv Mountain Farm in Ré Valley. Bjönn was not with them, because Hans did not want him, and in Gaupa’s opinion even a dog could not avail when he was hunting Rauten.
If Gaupa had nursed any ideas about the townsman being worth but little, he was mistaken. Gaupa walked quickly all day, but Hans kept up with him, and there was not a sign of perspiration about him. Once he took out from his bag a strange instrument, a short trumpet of birch-bark with a kind of mouthpiece at one end.