Inger came out often, to watch him at work.  He took no notice, but made as if her coming were no matter, and not at all a thing he wished for her to do; but she understood all the same that it pleased him to have her there.  They had a strange way, too, of speaking to each other at times.

“Couldn’t you find things to do but come out here and get stark frozen?” says Isak.

“I’m well enough for me,” says Inger.  “But I can’t see there’s any living sense in you working yourself to death like you do.”

“Ho!  You just pick up that coat of mine there and put it on you.”

“Put on your coat?  Likely, indeed.  I’ve no time to sit here now, with Goldenhorns ready to calve and all.”

“H’m, Calving, you say?”

“As if you didn’t know!  But what do you think now about that same calf.  Let it stay and be weaned, maybe?”

“Do as you think; ’tis none of my business with calves and things.”

“Well, ’twould be a pity to eat up calf, seems to me.  And leave us with but one cow on the place.”

“Don’t seem to me like you’d do that anyway,” says Isak.

That was their way.  Lonely folk, ugly to look at and overfull of growth, but a blessing for each other, for the beasts, and for the earth.

And Goldenhorns calved.  A great day in the wilderness, a joy and a delight.  They gave her flour-wash, and Isak himself saw to it there was no stint of flour, though he had carried it all the way himself, on his back.  And there lay a pretty calf, a beauty, red-flanked like her mother, and comically bewildered at the miracle of coming into the world.  In a couple of years she would be having calves of her own.

“’Twill be a grand fine cow when she grows up,” said Inger.  “And what are we to call her, now?  I can’t think.”

Inger was childish in her ways, and no clever wit for anything.

“Call her?” said Isak.  “Why, Silverhorns, of course; what else?”

The first snow came.  As soon as there was a passable road, Isak set out for the village, full of concealment and mystery as ever, when Inger asked his errand.  And sure enough, he came back this time with a new and unthinkable surprise.  A horse and sledge, nothing less.

“Here’s foolishness,” says Inger.  “And you’ve not stolen it, I suppose?”

“Stolen it?”

“Well, found it, then?”

Now if only he could have said:  “’Tis my horse—­our horse....”  But to tell the truth, he had only hired it, after all.  Hired horse and sledge to cart his logs.

Isak drove down with his loads of firewood, and brought back food, herrings and flour.  And one day he came up with a young bull on the sledge; bought it for next to nothing, by reason they were getting short of fodder down in the village.  Shaggy and thin, no ways a beauty, but decently built for all that, and wanted no more than proper feed to set it right.  And with a cow they had already....