On Nils and Thorolf, Anders, Olof, Nikolina, Karen and Lovisa, who were all over ten years old, rested great responsibility.  Mother Elle always managed to solve her own problems and expected them to attend to theirs without constant direction from her.  She told them what there was to be done and left them to attend to it.

All were hardy, active youngsters who took to fending for themselves as naturally as a day-old chick takes to scratching.  In ordinary seasons the work at the saeter was heavy, for the maidens must not only follow the herds over miles of pasture land, but make butter and cheese for the winter from their milking.  The few cows that were here now could be tethered near by; the milk, when the children had had all they wanted, was mostly used in soups, pudding or groet (porridge).  A net or weir stretched across the outlet of the lake would fill with fish overnight.  The streams were full of trout.  Mother Elle knew how to make fish-hooks of bone, bows and arrows, ropes, and baskets of bark, how to weave osiers, how to cure bruises and cuts, how to trap the wild hares, grouse and plover and cook them over an open fire.  The children found plover’s eggs and the eggs of other wild fowl.  They raised pulse, leeks, onions and turnips in a little garden patch.  They gathered strawberries, cranberries, crowberries, wild currants, black and red, the cloudberry and the delicious arctic raspberry which tastes of pineapple.  Some stores of salt and grain were already at the saeter and the grain-fields had been sowed, before the pestilence appeared in the valley.

In the long summer days of these northern mountains, one has the feeling that they will never end, that life must go on in an infinite succession of still, sunshiny, fragrant hours, filled with the songs of birds, the chirr of insects and the distant lowing of cattle.  There is time for everything.  At night comes dreamless slumber, and the morning is like a birth into new life.

There was a great deal of singing and story-telling at odd times.  A group of children making mats or baskets, gathering pease or going after berries would beg Nils or Nikolina to tell a story, or Karen would lead them in some old song with a familiar refrain.  But some of the songs the Wind-wife crooned to the baby were not like any the children had heard.  They were not even in Norwegian.

Thorolf was a silent lad, who would rather listen than talk, and hated asking questions.  But one day, when he and Nikolina were hunting wild raspberries, he asked her if she thought Mother Elle meant to stay in the mountains through the winter.  Nikolina did not know.

    “’Tis well to be wise but not too wise,
    ’Tis well that to-morrow is hid from our eyes,
    For in forward-looking forebodings rise,”

she added quaintly.  “I have heard her say that it is colder in Greenland than it is here.”

“Has she been in Greenland?”