All latent strength and dexterity in him was called forth by the excitement of danger.  His body became elastic like a steel spring, his foot made no false step, his hand never lost its hold, eye and ear were twice as sharp as usual.  He understood what the leaves whispered and the rocks warned.  When he had climbed up a precipice, he turned towards his pursuers, sending them gibes in biting rhyme.  When the whistling darts whizzed by him, he caught them, swift as lightning, and hurled them down on his enemies.  As he forced his way through whipping branches, something within him sang a song of triumph.

The bald mountain ridge ran through the wood and alone on its summit stood a lofty fir.  The red-brown trunk was bare, but in the branching top rocked an eagle’s nest.  The fugitive was now so audaciously bold that he climbed up there, while his pursuers looked for him on the wooded slopes.  There he sat twisting the young eaglets’ necks, while the hunt passed by far below him.  The male and female eagle, longing for revenge, swooped down on the ravisher.  They fluttered before his face, they struck with their beaks at his eyes, they beat him with their wings and tore with their claws bleeding weals in his weather beaten skin.  Laughing, he fought with them.  Standing upright in the shaking nest, he cut at them with his sharp knife and forgot in the pleasure of the play his danger and his pursuers.  When he found time to look for them, they had gone by to some other part of the forest.  No one had thought to look for their prey on the bald mountain-ridge.  No one had raised his eyes to the clouds to see him practising boyish tricks and sleep-walking feats while his life was in the greatest danger.

The man trembled when he found that he was paved.  With shaking hands he caught at a support, giddy he measured the height to which he had climbed.  And moaning with the fear of falling, afraid of the birds, afraid of being seen, afraid of everything, he slid down the trunk.  He laid himself down on the ground, so as not to be seen, and dragged himself forward over the rocks until the underbrush covered him.  There he hid himself under the young pine-tree’s tangled branches.  Weak and powerless, he sank down on the moss.  A single man could have captured him.

***

Tord was the fisherman’s name.  He was not more than sixteen years old, but strong and bold.  He had already lived a year in the woods.

The peasant’s name was Berg, with the surname Rese.  He was the tallest and the strongest man in the whole district, and moreover handsome and well-built.  He was broad in the shoulders and slender in the waist.  His hands were as well shaped as if he had never done any hard work.  His hair was brown and his skin fair.  After he had been some time in the woods he acquired in all ways a more formidable appearance.  His eyes became piercing, his eyebrows grew bushy, and the muscles which knitted them lay finger thick above his nose.  It showed now more plainly than before how the upper part of his athlete’s brow projected over the lower.  His lips closed more firmly than of old, his whole face was thinner, the hollows at the temples grew very deep, and his powerful jaw was much more prominent.  His body was less well filled out but his muscles were as hard as steel.  His hair grew suddenly gray.