The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson

by Selma Lagerlof

  ‘Cluck, cluck, cluck! It serves him right!’ called the hens, and they went on like that endlessly. The geese gathered in a tight cluster, stuck their heads together and asked, ‘Who could have done that? Who could have done that?’

  But the most remarkable thing about this was that the boy understood what they said. He was so surprised that he remained standing quietly on the step and listened. ‘It must be because I’ve been turned into a gnome,’ he said. ‘That’s probably why I understand birdsong.’

  He thought it was insufferable that the hens would not stop saying that it served him right. He threw a rock at them and called, ‘Be quiet, you rabble!’

  But he hadn’t thought that he was no longer anything the hens needed to be afraid of. The whole crowd of hens rushed towards him, gathered around him and shrieked, ‘Cluck, cluck, cluck! It serves you right! Cluck, cluck, cluck! It serves you right!’

  The boy tried to get away from them, but the hens ran after him and shrieked so that he was about to lose his hearing. He probably never would have escaped them if the cottage cat had not come along. As soon as the hens saw the cat, they fell silent and pretended not to think about anything other than scratching in the dirt for worms.

  The boy ran up to the cat at once. ‘Dear Pussy-cat,’ he said, ‘you know all the corners and crannies here on the farm, right? Please tell me where I can find the gnome.’

  The cat did not answer at once. He sat down, set his tail neatly in a ring in front of his legs and stared at the boy. This was a big, black cat with a white patch on his chest. His fur was smooth and glistened in the sunshine. His claws were drawn in, and his eyes were an even grey with only a small, narrow slit in the middle. The cat looked very good-natured.

  ‘Of course I know where the gnome lives,’ he said in a silken voice. ‘But that’s not to say I want to tell you about it.’

  ‘Dear Pussy-cat, you have to help me,’ said the boy. ‘Don’t you see that he has enchanted me?’

  The cat opened his eyes a little, so that the green malice started to shine forth. He purred and hummed with contentment, before he answered. ‘Shall I perhaps help you, because you pulled my tail so often?’ he said at last.

  Then the boy became angry and completely forgot how little and powerless he now was. ‘I can still pull your tail again, I can!’ he said, running towards the cat.

  The next moment the cat was so transformed that the boy could hardly believe it was the same animal. Every hair on his body stood on end. His back had arched, his legs were extended, his claws scraped the ground, his tail had become short and thick, his ears were pulled back, his mouth spat, his eyes stood wide open and shone with red fire.

  The boy did not want to let himself be scared by a cat, but instead took a step forward. But then the cat made a leap, coming down right on the boy, knocked him over and placed himself over him with his front paws on his chest and his jaws open above his throat.

  The boy felt how the claws pierced through his vest and shirt into his skin, and how the sharp canine teeth tickled his throat. He screamed for help for all he was worth.

  But no one came and he thought, of course, that his last hour had arrived. Then he felt the cat draw in his claws and let go of his throat.

  ‘There now,’ he said, ‘that’s enough for now. I’ll let you get away this time for the sake of my mistress. I only wanted you to know which of us has the power.’

  With that the cat went his way and looked just as sleek and pious as shortly before, when he came in. The boy was so ashamed that he did not say a word, but instead only hurried to the cow stall to search for the gnome.

  There were no more than three cows. But when the boy came in, there was such a mooing and a racket that you might well believe there were at least thirty.

  ‘Moo, moo, moo!’ May-Rose bellowed. ‘It’s good that there is justice in this world!’

  ‘Moo, moo, moo!’ all three chimed in. He could not hear what they said, they were bellowing so much at the same time.

  The boy wanted to ask about the gnome, but he could not make himself heard, because the cows were in full uproar. They behaved the way they always did when he let a strange dog into their stall. They kicked with their hind legs, shook their neck chains, turned their heads out and took aim with their horns.

  ‘Just you come here,’ said May-Rose, ‘then I’ll give you a kick that you won’t forget for a long time!’

  ‘Come here,’ said Sweet-Lily, ‘then you’ll get to dance on my horns!’

  ‘Come here, then you’ll get to feel how it tasted when you threw the wooden shoes at me, like you did last summer!’ Star bellowed.

  ‘Come here, then you’ll get paid back for the wasp that you let into my ear!’ Sweet-Lily roared.

  May-Rose was the oldest and wisest of them, and she was the maddest of all. ‘Come here,’ she said, ‘so that I can pay you back for all the times you’ve pulled the milking stool out from under your mother, and for all the obstacles you’ve set for her when she’s come carrying the milk pails, and for all the tears she has stood here and shed over you!’

  The boy wanted to tell them that he regretted having been mean to them, and that he would never be anything other than nice if they only told him where the gnome was. But the cows were not listening. They were making so much noise that he was afraid one of them would manage to tear herself loose, and he thought it was best to slip away out of the cow stall.

  When he came out again, he was completely dispirited. He could understand that no one on the farm wanted to help him find the gnome. And it would probably be of little avail if he were to find him.

  He crept up on the broad stone wall that went around the croft and was overgrown with thorns and blackberry branches. There he sat down to think about what would happen if he did not become human again. When Father and Mother came home now from church, they would wonder. Yes, they would wonder all across the country, and people would come from parishes all around, from Östra Vemmenhög and from Torp and from Skurup, from all of Vemmenhög County they would come to look at him. And perhaps Father and Mother would take him along and display him at the market in Kivik.

  Now, that was terrible to think about. He wanted most of all that no human being would ever see him again.

  It was awful how unhappy he was. No one in the whole world was as unhappy as him. He was no longer human, but a monster.

  Little by little he started to understand what it meant to no longer be human. He was separated from everything now: he could not play with other boys, he could not take over the croft from his parents, and he absolutely could not get any girl to marry him.

  He sat and looked at his home. It was a small, whitewashed, half-timbered house and stood as if pressed down in the ground under the high, steep straw roof. The outbuildings were small too, and the patches of arable land were so narrow that a horse could barely turn around on them. But as small and poor as the place was, it was now much too good for him. He could not demand better lodging than a hole under the stable floor.

  The weather was marvellous. There was rippling and budding and chirping all around him. But he felt so sad. He would never again be happy about anything.

  He had never seen the sky so blue as today. And the migratory birds were arriving. They came from abroad and had travelled over the Baltic, steering right towards Smygehuk, and now they were on their way north. There were certainly many different types, but he did not recognize any but the wild geese, who came flying in two long rows that met at an angle.

  Several flocks of wild geese had already gone past. They flew high up, but he still heard how they shrieked, ‘Now it’s off to the mountains! Now it’s
off to the mountains!’

  When the wild geese saw the domestic geese on the farmyard, they lowered themselves towards the ground and called, ‘Come with! Come with! Now it’s off to the mountains!’

  The domestic geese could not keep from stretching their heads up and listening. But they answered quite reasonably, ‘We have it good, as we have it! We have it good, as we have it!’

  It was, as mentioned, an incredibly lovely day with air that must have been a true joy to fly in, so fresh and so light. And with every new flock of wild geese that flew past, the domestic geese became all the more restless. A couple of times they flapped their wings, as if they had a desire to follow along. But then an old goose mother always said, ‘Don’t be crazy now! They get both hungry and cold!’

  There was a young gander, whom the call of the wild geese had given a real itch to travel. ‘If one more flock comes, then I’m going with them,’ he said.

  Then came a new flock, shrieking like the others. Then the young gander answered, ‘Wait! Wait! I’m coming!’

  He spread his wings and raised himself in the air, but he was so unaccustomed to flying that he fell down to the ground again.

  The wild geese must have heard his call anyway. They turned around and flew slowly back to see if he was going with them.

  ‘Wait! Wait!’ he called and made a new attempt.

  The boy heard all this from where he was on the stone wall. ‘It would be a great loss,’ he thought, ‘if the big gander were to go away. It would be a sorrow for Father and Mother, if he were gone when they come home from church.’

  When he thought about this, he again completely forgot that he was little and powerless. He took a leap right down in the goose flock and threw his arms around the neck of the gander. ‘Don’t even think about flying away!’ he shouted.

  But just at that moment the gander had figured out what he had to do in order to raise himself from the ground. He could not stop to shake off the boy, but instead he had to follow along up into the air.

  They were off towards the heights so quickly that the boy was dizzy. Before he could think that he ought to let go of the gander’s neck, he was so high up that he would have been killed if he had fallen to the ground.

  The only thing he could do to make it somewhat better was to try to get up on the gander’s back. And he wriggled his way there too, although not without great effort. And it was no easy matter either to keep himself on the smooth back between the two swinging wings. He had to grip deeply into feathers and down with both hands so as not to fall to the ground.

  THE CHEQUERED PIECE OF CLOTH

  The boy was so dizzy that for a long time he did not know how to react. The air whistled and hissed against him, the wings waved, and there was roaring in the feathers like a big storm. Thirteen geese were flying around him. All of them flapped and cackled. His eyes could not focus, and there was whistling in his ears. He did not know if they were flying high or low, or where they were headed.

  Finally he came to his senses enough to realize that he ought to find out where the geese were taking him. But this was not easy, because he did not know how he would get the courage to look down. He was quite certain he would get vertigo if he tried.

  The wild geese were not travelling particularly high, because their new travelling companion could not breathe in the very thinnest air. For his sake they also flew a little slower than usual.

  At last the boy forced himself to cast a glance towards the ground. Then he thought that below him a large cloth was spread out that was divided into an unbelievable number of small and large squares.

  ‘Where in the world have I come to now?’ he asked.

  He saw nothing but square upon square. Some were tilted and some oblong, but everywhere there were corners and straight edges. Nothing was round and nothing was crooked.

  ‘What kind of big, chequered piece of cloth is it that I’m looking down on?’ the boy said to himself without waiting for anyone to answer.

  But the wild geese who were flying around him called out at once, ‘Fields and meadows! Fields and meadows!’

  Then he understood that the big, chequered piece of cloth was the flat ground of Skåne over which he was travelling. And he started to comprehend why it looked so multi-coloured and square. The clear green squares he recognized first: those were the rye fields, which had been sown last autumn and stayed green under the snow. The yellow-grey squares were stubble fields where grain had grown last summer, the brownish ones were old clover pastures, and the black ones were empty grazing land or ploughed-up fallow fields. The squares that were brown with yellow edges were surely beech forests, for in those the big trees that grow in the middle of the forest stand bare in the winter, but the small beeches that grow at the edge of the forest retain their dry, yellowed leaves until spring. There were also dark squares with grey in the middle: these were the large, enclosed farms with the blackened straw roofs and stone-paved courtyards. And then there were squares that were green in the middle and encircled with brown: these were the gardens where the lawns had already started to turn green, although the bushes and trees that stood around them were still in bare, brown bark.

  The boy could not keep from laughing when he saw how square everything was.

  But when the wild geese heard him laughing, they called as if in rebuke, ‘Fruitful and good land! Fruitful and good land!’

  The boy had already become serious. ‘How can you laugh, when you’ve been subjected to the most terrible thing that can happen to a person?’ he thought.

  He kept serious awhile, but soon he had to laugh again.

  Because he had got used to the ride and the speed, so that he could think about something other than keeping himself on the gander’s back, he started to notice how full the air was of flocks of birds that were flying north. And there was hollering and shouting from flock to flock. ‘I see you’ve come over today!’ some shrieked.

  ‘Yes, so we have,’ answered the geese. ‘How do you think it’s going with spring?’

  ‘Not a leaf on the trees and cold water in the lakes,’ came the reply.

  When the geese flew ahead over a place where there were domestic poultry outside, they called, ‘What’s the farm called? What’s the farm called?’ Then the rooster stuck his head up and answered, ‘The farm is called Lillgärde this year like last year, this year like last year!’

  Most of the cottages were probably named after their owners, as is usually the case in Skåne, but instead of answering that this was Per Matsson’s or Ola Bosson’s, the roosters thought up names that they thought were suitable. Those who lived on poor crofts and smallholdings called, ‘This farm is called Grainless!’ And those who belonged to the very poorest shrieked, ‘This farm’s called Chew-a-little, Chew-a-little, Chew-a-little!’

  The big, prosperous farms got fancy names from the roosters, such as Happy Acres, Egg Hill and Coinville.

  But the roosters at the estates were too conceited to think of anything humorous. One of them crowed and called loudly, as if he wanted to be heard all the way up to the sun. ‘This is Dybeck’s estate! This year like last year! This year like last year!’

  And a little farther away was one that called, ‘This is Svaneholm! The whole world must know that!’

  The boy noticed that the geese did not fly straight ahead. They drifted here and there over all of the southern plain, as if they were happy to be in Skåne again and wanted to visit every farm.

  They came to a place where there were some large, massive buildings with tall chimneys and around these a number of smaller buildings. ‘This is Jordberga sugar mill!’ the roosters called. ‘This is Jordberga sugar mill!’
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br />   The boy was startled, sitting there on the goose’s back. He ought to have recognized that place. It was not far from his home, and he’d had a job here last year as a goose-tender. But it was probably the case that nothing was really the same when you saw it from above like that.

  And think! And think! Åsa the Goose-girl and Little Mats, who were his friends last year! The boy would really like to have known if they were still here. What would they say if they thought that he was flying around high over their heads?

  Then Jordberga was out of sight and they travelled away over Svedala and Skaber Lake and back over Börringe Priory and Häckeberga. The boy got to see more of Skåne in that one day than he had seen during all the years he had lived.

  When the wild geese encountered domestic geese, they had the most fun. Then they flew up very slowly and called down, ‘Now it’s off to the mountains! Are you coming with? Are you coming with?’

  But the domestic geese answered, ‘It’s still winter in the land. You’re out too early. Go back! Go back!’

  The wild geese came lower so that they could be heard better, and called, ‘Come along, we’ll teach you how to fly and swim!’

  Then the domestic geese got annoyed and did not respond with a single cackle.

  But the wild geese came down even lower so that they almost grazed the ground, and then they raised themselves, lightning quick, as if they had been terribly frightened. ‘Oy, oy, oy!’ they called. ‘Those weren’t geese! They were just sheep! They were just sheep!’

  The ones on the ground were furious and shrieked, ‘May you be shot, as many as you are, as many as you are!’

  When the boy heard all this joking, he laughed. Then he remembered what a bad situation he was in, and then he cried. But in a little while he was laughing again.

  Never before had he travelled around at such good speed, and he had always liked riding fast and wild. And, of course, he had never thought it could feel as fresh as it did up in the air, and that such a good smell of topsoil and resin rose from the earth. Nor had he thought what it might be like to travel so high above the ground. But it was like flying away from worries and sorrows and annoyances of every imaginable kind.