CHAPTER I

SEVEN FRIENDLESS CHILDREN

It is a year of famine up in Norrland.[1] ‘A year of famine’ means that one is almost without food in those places where the flock of children is large and the bit of ground small, from which one has to live.

[1] Norrland means the provinces farthest north in Sweden.

In good years there are gladness and laughter and noise wherever one turns. One has sweet white turnips to eat, and peas in full pods grow in the fields. Enough of bread, butter, cheese, and of other nice good things is found even in tiny cottages and poor men’s homes.

But in _years of famine_ one sees little happiness. The snow lies on the ground until toward midsummer. The turnips, which are planted as seed in the ground, have hardly time to become as big as small potatoes before the frost comes and makes the ground around them so hard and crowded that they cannot grow any more. The pea-pods hang withered like little blackened rags out in the pea-field--not a single pea in them. The same with the ears of barley which used to hold themselves so proudly on their high waving stalks; they hang on the short green blades as if broken.

So you can understand that in a year of famine no grain and no peas come to the mill to be ground, and if, on some farm higher up, the frost has come more sparingly, the grain is still so weak and queer that the flour becomes gray-black, and the pancakes one bakes of it are like a thin mud puddle. One mixes the bark of trees in the flour to make bread.

There is not much nourishment in such food. The children soon become thin. Their rosy cheeks take on a grayish color and their eyes no longer shine.

When the children in groups follow their parents down to the frost-free districts to beg for food, they look like little old men and women. It cuts one to the heart to see them.

* * * * *

During the awful year of famine late in the 1860’s, just such a group came wandering down from Barren Moor away up in Norrland, a group of seven children who wandered alone through lonely, impoverished winter settlements. No father or mother accompanied them: seven emaciated little ones, and the one who led them was only twelve years old. His name was Andy, or really Anders.

The children were from Barren Moor, where the frost had been hardest.

Their father, weakened by bark bread and starvation food, had fallen under a giant pine which he had been helping to fell in the woods, and had been killed.

His wife, worn out by trouble and sorrow and hunger, died soon after. Her greatest anxiety had been the children for whom she had worked and suffered. She feared that they would have to go to the poor-house, or, still worse, ‘be put up at auction’ for those who would take them for the little sum of money the community would pay, in such a year when all must earn in order to live.

But Andy promised: ‘We’ll go away from here, mother. We’ll put the little girls on the sled and go from farm to farm like other grown-up, wandering people. The school-teacher’s Carl says that his father says that people in the settlements have both grain and potatoes. You’ll see, mother, that there is enough for us too.’ And she was comforted.

Mother was hardly in the grave before the men of the parish came together to put the children in the poor-house or auction them out.

But the day they came to the tumble-down cottage where they expected to find the children, it was empty.

The shelter of boards near by, where the goat used to be, was also empty. In the cottage, everything was scrubbed and tidy, as if orderly grown folk had intended to leave it to others.

The children they came to seek had apparently set out the day before. But the men agreed that they would not have to wait long before they had them back again. Telephone and telegraph were not to be found up there in the wilderness, and nothing could be done about finding them. All the horses which belonged in the village were in the lumber camps. And if they had been at home, who would have had time to go out on a hunt for mere youngsters?

So the children wandered away undisturbed. But during the day the two littlest girls, Brita-Carrie and Martha-Greta, began to whimper and whine.

They did not cry because they were so cold that nose and hands were as blue as cornflowers and toes so frozen that they could not stand on their feet. No, they wailed and wept from hunger. They would have eaten the hardest crust of bread or the tiniest potato with gusto. But the road through the Great Woods was twelve miles long, and they had not been within the door of a cottage all day long. They stayed away from houses first for fear they would be held and sent to the poor-house, and later of necessity, because there was not even the poorest kind of hut in all the woods.

‘Come, Golden Horn,’ coaxed Andy at last, ‘I can’t stand hearing the children cry like that. You’ll have to pull at her again, Anna-Lisa.’

‘Yes, but it is a sin the way we have torn at her for milk to-day,’ objected Anna-Lisa, who was ten.

‘But be quiet then, children. You’ll get another drop of milk. Golden Horn, nice good little girl, come now so I can milk you. The children are starving to death.’

Golden Horn, the thin yet splendid goat, emerged from the low firs beside the road where she had made a good meal. She stood quietly beside Anna-Lisa, who squatted down and drew a few streams of milk into a small wooden bowl she held in her left hand.

‘Give me too! Give me too!’ whimpered Per-Erik and Magnus.

‘You should be ashamed! Big men like you. You, Per-Erik, are five years old, and you, Magnus, six.’

‘No, sir, I’m five! Mother said so, and she gave me milk sometimes too.’

‘But you’ll be six at Candlemas, and it is only a week until then. We men-folk mustn’t give up like that. Run ahead and hold on to Golden Horn’s fur and then your hands won’t be cold.’

It was Andy who talked and commanded, and the little boys knew no other way than to obey, and especially since Golden Horn, ‘who had human sense,’ as they firmly believed, came close to them with her warm woolly coat.

‘Bring Golden Horn here, so we can get warm too,’ cried the little maids on the sled.

‘But you must be good. Think if mother heard her little girls whine like that. You’ve just had milk that was both sweet and warm.’

‘But that was like nothing,’ wailed Brita-Carrie. ‘Like nonnin,’ repeated Martha-Greta, with tears in her great sorrowful eyes.

‘It was two spoonfuls each. And now soon we’ll come to some big farm where you’ll get food. Sit down on the sled--you too, Maglena, then you can warm each other. So there now, good little girls who don’t cry any more. Mother would be so happy if she saw you.’

Andy stroked the blue-cold cheeks of his little sisters, tucked their stiff cold hands in the ragged shawls they had tied crosswise about their waists, and bundled the worn old sheepskin robe tightly around their feet.

‘Now you push, Anna-Lisa, so we’ll get out of the woods. The school-teacher’s Carl said that as soon as we saw what was left of the hut where the Lapp Israel died, we shouldn’t be far from the settlement.’

‘Yes, but he told me that wolves wandered around in the mountains. He said I was crazy to go off with you.’

Anna-Lisa walked stooped forward and pushed the sled. Her tears fell on the little sisters’ bundled-up heads. She sobbed so that it sounded as though she hiccoughed.

‘I won’t bother to answer when you talk so foolishly,’ shrieked Andy in a loud voice in order to make himself heard. He walked far ahead and pulled with the rope over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps you think that Carl would have taken care of you, given you food and clothes. Maybe they don’t have the house full of children themselves.’

‘But then I wouldn’t have to starve, and freeze to death!’

‘Just as if they had wanted to have you there! You would have been in the poor-house this day with leprous Barbara and crazy Lars.’

‘They don’t starve, and they don’t freeze to death either.’

‘Ugh, what a girl! This morning you ate all the water gruel you wanted, and you had as much as we did of the goat’s-milk cheese and bread that Sven Paul gave us. But because you can’t eat the whole day long you whine and want to turn back, and to the poor-house besides.’

‘Well, where do you think we’ll come to now, then? I suppose you think of taking us to the king. Boo-hoo-hoo,’ sobbed Anna-Lisa.

‘As far as that goes, I could do that too--and ask him to take you. You could at least watch his goats for him. That would be something big, that would, instead of sitting and staring in front of the poor-house fire.’

‘How many goats do you suppose he has, the king?’ piped Maglena out of the shawl opening.

She thought that at this talk about the king, life began to brighten a bit. To tell the truth, she had agreed with Anna-Lisa the whole time, though she thought it unfair that both of them should attack Andy, who, she knew, had not tasted a bite before they left in the morning until all the rest had had enough.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Andy, ‘how many goats the king has. Little-hut people like us can have one, a cottager five or six, a big farmer twenty or more.’

‘Goodness, then the king must have a hundred. I certainly can’t take care of so many.’

Anna-Lisa let go of the sled, and wiped the tears out of her eyes.

Even Andy stopped, so the rope hung slack. He took off the moth-eaten fur cap which had been father’s and wiped the sweat from his beautiful forehead. His blue eyes shone indignantly as he looked back at his sister.

‘Maybe the king has one hundred goats, maybe he has a thousand--yes, just as many as a Laplander has reindeer. But do you think the king hasn’t sense enough to figure out how many goats a little one like you can watch? If he thinks you can take care of a hundred, then you can, for then he has a special kind of easily watched goats, maybe from Jerusalem, or maybe he has some wonderful goat watchdogs that can call them together.’

‘Just think how fine you’ll be, Anna-Lisa. Maybe you’ll have shoes with elastic sides and a silk shawl on your head and a skirt with little roses on it so you will look like the briar-rose hill in the summer. To think that you’ll be so fine!’

Maglena drew the shawl from her nose and tried to turn so she could gaze at Anna-Lisa. A sweet little lass was Maglena, with golden brown hair, bright and curly, and big deep blue eyes glowing with kindness. It was as if she believed that Anna-Lisa, who walked behind and pushed the sled, was already dressed in elastic shoes and a briar-rose dress and silk headcloth, just because she imagined her so.

Anna-Lisa did not look especially attractive at this moment, with a gray-black woolen scarf wound about her head and tied in a knot at the back of her neck, with mother’s old striped jacket, the waist of which reached her knees, and mother’s ragged run-down shoes. The hay which they had stuffed in for warmth and filling stuck out through the holes.

It certainly was not easy to walk through the woods for many, many miles in such an outfit, and it was perhaps not to be wondered at that Anna-Lisa’s otherwise not unpleasant face with the blue eyes and light hair now had a dark and bitter look.

She and her brother struggled on again with the sled. Anna-Lisa muttered and mumbled to herself, but Maglena was in high spirits--in her mind’s eye she saw the glorious existence of the king’s goatherd.

‘Per-Erik, Magnus, wait,’ she called to the two brothers. In ragged Lapp shoes and father’s clothes, so hopelessly ill-fitting, they pattered away, one on either side of the goat, their hands in her coarse hair.

The boys stopped and waited. They were thoroughly disgusted, and tired of the endless journey. ‘Men-folk,’ if you like, and five and six years old as much as you please, hunger gnawed in small stomachs just the same, the cold bit into fingers and toes, and the clothing had more weight than warmth. But enough that they were sufficiently manly to keep their whining and complaints to themselves, though tears ran down the blue cheeks and small shoulders sometimes shook with suppressed sobs.

‘What is it now?’ they said with manly superiority, when they were beside the sled. ‘Shall we help you pull? You must be getting tired, Andy.’

Magnus pushed up over his forehead the cap, which had been grandfather’s at Sven Paul’s and which reached down over his ears, and stealthily rubbed away any possible traces of altogether too unmanly tears.

Andy spat in his hands, took hold of the rope so that it cut a deep groove in the homespun jacket just on the shoulder, where, old and worn as it was, it could not stand much more wear.

He strained and pulled as if the uphill they had just reached were a slanting downhill stretch, and paid no attention to Magnus’s pitiable suggestion. Even the rounded back seemed to show how miserable he thought it was.

‘You can’t pull us all; any one knows that such talk is only boasting,’ said Maglena, who felt talkative and wasn’t so cold now that the little sisters were squeezed close against her and were still, for they had fallen asleep. ‘But now you’ll hear something nice. Do you know, Anna-Lisa is going to be goatherd for the king! He has many hundred goats, bigger than our Golden Horn.’

‘No goat is like Golden Horn, if you please,’ said Magnus, and looked threateningly at Maglena.

‘Is that so? Have you seen goats from Jerusalem, maybe? They have horns that look exactly like the moon when it is new and shiny, just like that they shine. And they come in hundred thousands, and you can see them running over the marshes and eating berries.’

‘If we only had some here! I could eat a thousand quarts,’ sighed Per-Erik.

‘Yes, they eat berries.’ Maglena’s voice had a longing, dreamy sound. ‘They eat berries, for the whole marsh is full of them--and cream out of big troughs; the king never thinks twice about it.’

‘And as much clap-bread[2] as we could carry on the sled,’ added Per-Erik with a disapproving glance at the useless burden it then carried.

[2] Clap-bread is a dark bread, large and round, almost as thin as paper, folded twice to make four layers, dry, and almost tasteless.

‘Of course the king’s goats eat clap-bread.’ Maglena continued her description without in the least minding her brothers’ lack of interest in the subject and their perpetual return to the question of food. ‘Yes, they eat clap-bread out of the little mangers.’

‘I thought they were out in the marshes just now. Goats certainly aren’t indoors that time of the summer,’ remarked Andy, who, in order to hear what Maglena said, even if it was silly, had pushed his cap up sideways away from his ears so that it was on the point of falling off his head altogether.

‘I suppose they must come in in the evening because of the mosquitoes and insects and because of old Bruin. They can’t be free of old Bruin even at the king’s, can they?’

‘Who’d want to be out and watch goats all night anyway, for that matter?’ Anna-Lisa graciously entered into the conversation. ‘Be out and watch goats when you should be in eating the pork that they fry at the king’s so the grease runs and it smells so--yes, so that----’

Anna-Lisa could not find words to express how wonderful the smell of fried pork was at the king’s.

‘And whole kettles full of potatoes,’ added Magnus eagerly.

‘That have cracked in their jackets, and that you can eat by the peck,’ said Per-Erik.

‘Yes, after the goats have had theirs. Listen. They come over the marsh and they have eaten so much that they are just as round as the sow they killed at Sven Paul’s this fall.’

‘Then they can’t jump so much either, and it will be easier to look after them,’ said Anna-Lisa approvingly.

‘No, they walk just like the sow walked, waddling like that. And then they climb up on the mountain. It is as bright as the rooster on the church at the king’s dairy farm. And then the goats come there, you see, and it is perfectly light from all those hundred thousand horns that are like the moon when it is new.’

‘And how they’d milk, such goats!’ said Magnus with yearning in his voice. ‘You could have some then.’

‘And make cheeses so that you’d burst, you could eat so much,’ from Per-Erik.

‘Yes, but you see the king must have as much as he can eat first, and all his men-servants and maids,’ said Maglena, all eagerness.

‘Besides, you know, children, the king can have much finer things even than pork and potatoes and goat’s-milk cheese. He can have fresh salmon if he wants it,’ said Andy loftily.

‘Not in the winter, though. When the salmon creeps along the bottom of the river to the big water, then it isn’t good to take,’ remarked Anna-Lisa.

‘In the winter he eats fine things, anyway.’ Andy settled the question without allowing himself to be put out of countenance. ‘Then he eats the finest food, and it is like a catechism party[3] every single day.’

[3] Catechism party. At certain times each year the people of the parish gathered together to be examined by the parish minister in the catechism as a test of their ability to read, and a feast always followed.

‘Then does he have meat-balls and Christmas fish[4] and prune soup?’ questioned Maglena. Her eyes sparkled at the thought of such an existence.

[4] Christmas fish. Codfish or ling steeped in lye and eaten at Christmas time; it becomes very white and fluffy and is considered a special delicacy.

‘Yes, and rice gruel as much as he is able to eat.’

‘And coffee, of course,’ put in Anna-Lisa. ‘And he never drinks a drop without having bread to sop in it as much as he wants. Oh, but that coffee would be strong and salty!’[5]

[5] In northern Norrland it is customary to salt coffee.

‘Oh, if we only were the king so we could have all that!’ cried Magnus from the depths of his heart.

‘And then he has a big, big house, where it is nicer than the parsonage, truly like a golden house; and then he knows where he is going to sleep, not in such an old shack as ours was,’ muttered Anna-Lisa.

‘As ours was! Isn’t that good enough? If we were lucky enough to own that! With a little vegetable garden and the big fine bird-cherry tree. If it were so that we could be there again, Golden Horn and all of us, then I think that we should be just as well off as the king.’ Andy, who spoke, looked earnestly at his brothers and sisters. ‘You see, it is something that mother was there--and died there, and never shall we find such a hut again.’