Thorolf turned away from the church door and began to climb the mountain.  At the lane leading to his home he did not stop, but kept on into the woods.  It was not so lonely there.

Up and up he climbed, the thrilling scent of fir-balsam in his nostrils, the small friendly noises of the forest all about him.  Only a few months ago he had come down this very road with his father, driving the cattle and goats home from the summer pasture.  All the other farmers were doing the same, and the clear notes of the lure, the long curving horn, used for calling the cattle and signaling across valleys, soared from slope to slope.  There was laughter and shouting and joking all the way down.  Now the only persons abroad seemed to be thieving ruffians whose greed for plunder was more than their fear of the plague.

A thought came to the boy.  How could he leave his father’s cattle unfed and uncared for?  What if he were to drive the cows himself to the saeter and tend them through the summer?  He faced about, resolutely, and began to descend the hill.

Within sight of the familiar roofs he heard some one coming from the village, on horseback.  It proved to be Nils the son of Magnus the son of Nils who was called the Bear-Slayer, with a sack of grain and a pair of saddlebags on a sedate brown pony.  Nils was lame of one foot and no taller than a boy of nine, although he was thirteen this month and his head was nearly as large as a man’s.  He had been an orphan from baby-hood, and for the last three years had lived in the priest’s house learning to be a clerk.

“Hoh!” called Nils, “where are you going?”

“To the farm to get our cattle and take them to the saeter.  There is no one left to do it but me.”

“Cattle?” queried the other interestedly, “She will be glad of that.”

“She!” said Thorolf, “who?”

“The Wind-wife[2]—­Mother Elle, who used to sell wind to the sailors—­the Finnish woman from Stavanger.  She has gathered up a lot of children who have no one to look after them and is leading them into the mountains.  She has Nikolina Sven’s daughter Larsson, and Olof and Anders Amundson, and half a score of younger ones from different villages.  She says that if it is God’s will for the plague to come to the saeter it will come, but it is not there now, and it is in the valleys and the towns.  She has gone on with the small ones who cannot walk fast, and left Olof and Anders and me to bring along the ponies with the loads.  I’ll help you drive your beasts.”

Without trouble the lads got the animals out of the byres and headed them up the road.  Norway is so sharply divided by precipitous mountain ranges and deeply-penetrating fiords, that it may be but a few miles from a farm near sea level to the high grassy pastures three or four thousand feet above it where the cattle are pastured in summer.  The saeter maidens live there in their cottages from June to September, making butter and cheese, tending the herds and doing such other work as they can.  The saeter belonging to Ormgard and its neighbors was the one chosen by Mother Elle as a refuge for her flock.