“It will never do for us to sit quiet here until Knutson returns,” said Nils when at Midsummer nothing had been seen of the ships.  “We shall be at one another’s throats or quarreling with the savages.”  He had been inquiring about the nature of the country, and had learned that westward a great river led to five inland seas, so connected that canoes could go from one to another.  Along this chain of waters lived tribes who spoke somewhat the same language and traded with one another.  Southward lived a warlike people who sometimes attacked the lake tribes.  Beyond the last of the lakes they did not know what the country was like.  The waters inland were not troubled with the water-demon so far as they knew.  Nils, Anders and Thorolf held a council and decided to explore the wilderness as far as they could go in the Rotge.  It was nothing more than all their ancestors had done.  Often, in their invasions of England, France and other unknown regions Vikings had gone up one river and come down another, and the Rotge, for all her iron strength, was no more than a wooden shell when stripped.[6]

They set forth, escorted by a flotilla of small canoes, on a clear summer morning, and found their progress surprisingly easy.  Fish, game and berries were plentiful, the villages along the river supplied corn and beans, and though it was not always easy to drag the Rotge around the carrying-places pointed out by their native guides, they did not have to turn back.  It was a proud moment when the undefeated crew launched their “water-snake” as the Skroelings called her, on the shining waters of a great inland sea.

The journey had been a far longer one than they expected, and to natives of any other country would have been much more exciting than it was to the Norsemen.[7] They had seen cliffs a thousand feet high, cataracts, rapids, a multitude of wooded islands, narrow valleys where floating misty clouds came and went and the sky looked like a riband.  But the precipice above Naero Fiord rises four thousand perpendicular feet, and the water which laps its base is thousands of feet in depth.  The Skjaeggedalsfos is loftier than Niagara, and the mist-maidens dance along the perilous pathways of a hundred Norwegian cliffs.  Nils and Thorolf agreed that the Wind-wife was right when she said that the country of the Skroelings was like Norway but had no end.

“The trouble is,” reflected Nils as he set down the day’s happenings on a birch-bark scroll, “that nobody will believe us when we tell how great the land is.”

At the end of the fifth and largest lake they found people with some knowledge of the country beyond.  It seemed that after crossing the Big Woods one came to great open plains where a ferocious and cruel race of warriors hunted animals as large as the moose, with hoofs and short horns and curly brown fur.  This sounded like a cattle country.  The lake tribes evidently stood in great fear of the plains people, but in spite of their evident alarm the Norsemen determined to go and see for themselves.[8] Leaving the boat with ten of their company to guard it they struck off southwestward through a country of forests, lakes and streams.  After fourteen days they stopped to make camp and go a-fishing, for dried fish would be the most convenient ration for a quick march, and they did not intend to spend much more time in exploring.