THE FISHERMAN AND THE DRAUG

On Kvalholm, down in Helgeland,[1] dwelt a poor fisherman, Elias by name, with his wife Karen, who had been in service at the parson’s over at Alstad.  They had built them a hut here, and he used to go out fishing by the day about the Lofotens.

There could be very little doubt that the lonely Kvalholm was haunted.  Whenever her husband was away, Karen heard all manner of uncanny shrieks and noises, which could mean no good.  One day, when she was up on the hillside, mowing grass to serve as winter fodder for their couple of sheep, she heard, quite plainly, a chattering on the strand beneath the hill, but look over she durst not.

They had a child every year, but that was no burden, for they were both thrifty, hard-working folks.  When seven years had gone by, there were six children in the house; but that same autumn Elias had scraped together so much that he thought he might now venture to buy a Sexaering,[2] and henceforward go fishing in his own boat.

One day, as he was walking along with a Kvejtepig[3] in his hand, and thinking the matter over, he unexpectedly came upon a monstrous seal, which lay sunning itself right behind a rock on the strand, and was as much surprised to see the man as the man was to see the seal.  But Elias was not slack; from the top of the rock on which he stood, he hurled the long heavy Kvejtepig right into the monster’s back, just below the neck.

The seal immediately rose up on its tail right into the air as high as a boat’s mast, and looked so evilly and viciously at him with its bloodshot eyes, at the same time showing its grinning teeth, that Elias thought he should have died on the spot for sheer fright.  Then it plunged into the sea, and lashed the water into bloody foam behind it.  Elias didn’t stop to see more, but that same evening there drifted into the boat place on Kvalcreek, on which his house stood, a Kvejtepole, with the hooked iron head snapped off.

Elias thought no more about it, but in the course of the autumn he bought his Sexaering, for which he had been building a little boat-shed the whole summer.

One night as he lay awake, thinking of his new Sexaering, it occurred to him that his boat would balance better, perhaps, if he stuck an extra log of wood on each side of it.  He was so absurdly fond of the boat that it was a mere pastime for him to light a lantern and go down to have a look at it.

Now as he stood looking at it there by the light of the lantern, he suddenly caught a glimpse in the corner opposite, on a coil of nets, of a face which exactly resembled the seal’s.  For an instant it grinned savagely at him and the light, its mouth all the time growing larger and larger; and then a big man whisked out of the door, not so quickly, however, but that Elias could catch a glimpse, by the light of the lantern, of a long iron hooked spike sticking out of his back.  And now he began to put one and two together.  Still he was less anxious about his life than about his boat; so he there and then sat him down in it with the lantern, and kept watch.  When his wife came in the morning, she found him sleeping there, with the burnt-out lantern by his side.