It was a glittering morning, dewy and warm.  The hunter who had been out since daybreak had thrown himself down in the heather behind King Atle’s pile.  He lay on his back and slept.  He had dragged his hat down over his eyes; and under his head lay his leather game-bag, out of which protruded a hare’s long ears and the bent tail-feathers of a black-cock.  His bow and arrows lay beside him.

From out of the wood came a girl with a bundle in her hand.  When she reached the flat rock between the piles of stones, she thought what a good place it would be to dance.  She was seized with an ardent desire to try.  She laid her bundle on the heather and began to dance quite alone.  She had no idea that a man lay asleep behind the king’s cairn.

The hunter still slept.  The heather showed burning red against the deep blue of the sky.  An anthill stood close beside the sleeper.  On it lay a piece of quartz, which sparkled as if it had wished to set fire to all the old stubble of the heath.  Above the hunter’s head the black-cock feathers spread out like a plume, and their iridescence shifted from deep purple to steely blue.  On the unshaded part of his face the burning sunshine glowed.  But he did not open his eyes to look at the glory of the morning.

In the meanwhile the girl continued to dance, and whirled about so eagerly that the blackened moss which had collected in the unevennesses of the rocks flew about her.  An old, dry fir root, smooth and gray with age, lay upturned among the heather.  She took it and whirled about with it.  Chips flew out from the mouldering wood.  Centipedes and earwigs that had lived in the crevices scurried out head over heels into the luminous air and bored down among the roots of the heather.

When the swinging skirts grazed the heather, clouds of small grey butterflies fluttered up from it.  The under side of their wings was white and silvery and they whirled like dry leaves in a squall.  They then seemed quite white, and it was as if a red sea threw up white foam.  The butterflies remained for a short time in the air.  Their fragile wings fluttered so violently that the down loosened and fell like thin silver white feathers.  The air seemed to be filled with a glorified mist.

On the heath grasshoppers sat and scraped their back legs against their wings, so that they sounded like harp strings.  They kept good time and played so well together, that to any one passing over the moor it sounded like the same grasshopper during the whole walk, although it seemed to be first on the right, then on the left; now in front, now behind.  But the dancer was not content with their playing and began after a little while to hum the measure of a dance tune.  Her voice was shrill and harsh.  The hunter was waked by the song.  He turned on his side, raised himself to his elbow, and looked over the pile of stones at the dancing girl.

He had dreamt that the hare which he had just killed had leaped out of the bag and had taken his own arrows to shoot at him.  He now stared at the girl half awake, dizzy with his dream, his head burning from sleeping in the sun.