“Until thou canst swim like the duck or the drake,
     The egg[8] thou’dst be hatching no progress shall make;
     The Finn shall ne’er let thee go southwards with sail,
     For he’ll screw off the wind and imprison the gale.”

At the end of it the Gan-Finn was standing there, and bending right over him.  The skin of his face hung down long and loose, and full of wrinkles, like an old reindeer skin, and there was a dizzying smoke in his eyes.  Then Jack began to shiver and stiffen in all his limbs, and he knew that the Finn was bent upon bewitching him.

Then he set his face rigidly against it, so that the magic spells should not get at him; and thus they struggled with one another till the Gan-Finn grew green in the face, and was very near choking.

After that the sorcerers of Jokmok sent magic shots after Jack, and clouded his wits.  He felt so odd; and whenever he was busy with his boat, and had put something to rights in it, something else would immediately go wrong, till at last he felt as if his head were full of pins and needles.

Then deep sorrow fell upon him.  Try as he would, he couldn’t put his boat together as he would have it; and it looked very much as if he would never be able to cross the sea again.

But in the summer time Jack and Seimke sat together on the headland in the warm evenings, and the gnats buzzed and the fishes spouted close ashore in the stillness, and the eider-duck swam about.

“If only some one would build me a boat as swift and nimble as a fish, and able to ride upon the billows like a sea-mew!” sighed and lamented Jack, “then I could be off.”

“Would you like me to guide you to Thjoettoe?” said a voice up from the sea-shore.

There stood a fellow in a flat turned-down skin cap, whose face they couldn’t see.

And right outside the boulders there, just where they had seen the eider-duck, lay a long and narrow boat, with high prow and stern; and the tar-boards were mirrored plainly in the clear water below; there was not so much as a single knot in the wood.

“I would be thankful for any such guidance,” said Jack.

When Seimke heard this, she began to cry and take on terribly.  She fell upon his neck, and wouldn’t let go, and raved and shrieked.  She promised him her snow-shoes, which would carry him through everything, and said she would steal for him the bone-stick from the Gan-Finn, so that he might find all the old lucky dollars that ever were buried, and would teach him how to make salmon-catching knots in the fishing lines, and how to entice the reindeer from afar.  He should become as rich as the Gan-Finn, if only he wouldn’t forsake her.

But Jack had only eyes for the boat down there.  Then she sprang up, and tore down her black locks, and bound them round his feet, so that he had to wrench them off before he could get quit of her.

“If I stay here and play with you and the young reindeer, many a poor fellow will have to cling with broken nails to the keel of a boat,"[9] said he.  “If you like to make it up, give me a kiss and a parting hug, or shall I go without them?”