“I wonder if any one out in this wilderness counts his stacks, and compares them with his neighbour’s?” he said.

A little later they came to Ljungen, a river which glides through a broad valley.  Immediately everything was so changed that they might well think they had come to another country.  The dark spruce forest had stopped on the inclines above the valley, and the slopes were clad in light-stemmed birches and aspens.  The valley was so broad that in many places the river widened into lakes.  Along the shores lay a large flourishing town.

As they soared above the valley the eagle realized that the boy was wondering if the fields and meadows here could provide a livelihood for so many people.

“Here live the reapers who mow the forest fields,” the eagle said.

The boy was thinking of the lowly cabins and the hedged-in farms down in Skane when he exclaimed: 

“Why, here the peasants live in real manors.  It looks as if it might be worth one’s while to work in the forest!”

The eagle had intended to travel straight north, but when he had flown out over the river he understood that the boy wondered who handled the timber after it was stacked on the river bank.

The boy recollected how careful they had been at home never to let a grain be wasted, while here were great rafts of logs floating down the river, uncared for.  He could not believe that more than half of the logs ever reached their destination.  Many were floating in midstream, and for them all went smoothly; others moved close to the shore, bumping against points of land, and some were left behind in the still waters of the creeks.  On the lakes there were so many logs that they covered the entire surface of the water.  These appeared to be lodged for an indefinite period.  At the bridges they stuck; in the falls they were bunched, then they were pyramided and broken in two; afterward, in the rapids, they were blocked by the stones and massed into great heaps.

“I wonder how long it takes for the logs to get to the mill?” said the boy.

The eagle continued his slow flight down River Ljungen.  Over many places he paused in the air on outspread wings, that the boy might see how this kind of harvest work was done.

Presently they came to a place where the loggers were at work.  The eagle marked that the boy wondered what they were doing.

“They are the ones who take care of all the belated harvest,” the eagle said.

The boy remembered the perfect ease with which his people at home had driven their grain to the mill.  Here the men ran alongside the shores with long boat-hooks, and with toil and effort urged the logs along.  They waded out in the river and were soaked from top to toe.  They jumped from stone to stone far out into the rapids, and they tramped on the rolling log heaps as calmly as though they were on flat ground.  They were daring and resolute men.