The Saga of Gosta Berling

by Selma Lagerlof

  But think, think if the bear had not found them to be really dead, but rather kept on biting awhile, or if he had been very hungry and wanted to eat them right away, or if he had seen them as they moved and run after them! Oh, God!

  Terror is a witch. She sits in the forest twilight, composing troll songs for human ears and filling their hearts with gruesome thoughts. The result is paralyzing fear, which stifles life and blocks out the beauty of smiling places. Nature is spiteful, treacherous as a sleeping snake, not to be believed. There is Löven lake in magnificent beauty, but don’t trust him, he is waiting for prey: every year he must collect his tax of drownings. There is the forest, peaceful and enticing, but don’t trust him! The forest is full of unholy animals, possessed by the souls of evil trolls and blood-thirsty scoundrels.

  Don’t trust the brook with its smooth water! Wading in it after sundown brings sudden illness and death. Trust not the cuckoo who called so merrily in spring! Toward autumn he becomes a hawk with forbidding eyes and gruesome claws! Trust not the moss, not the heather, not the rock; nature is evil, possessed by invisible forces who hate humankind. There is no place where you can safely set your foot. It is strange that your weak race can avoid so much persecution.

  Terror is a witch. Is she still sitting in the dark of the Värmland forests, singing troll songs? Does she still darken the beauty of smiling places, does she still paralyze the joy of being alive? Her dominion has been great, that I know, I who have had steel in my crib and charcoal in the bathwater, that I know, I who have felt her iron hand around my heart.

  But no one should think that I am now going to tell of something gruesome and terrible. This is only an old story about the great bear in Gurlita Bluff that I must relate, and it is completely up to anyone to believe it or not, just as it should be with all real hunting stories.

  The great bear has his home on the splendid hilltop known as Gurlita Bluff, which rises, sheer and inaccessible, on the shore of upper Löven.

  The roots of an overturned pine, between which the peat moss still hangs, form walls and roof around his dwelling, branches and twigs shield it, the snow insulates it. He can lie inside there and sleep a good, calm sleep from summer to summer.

  Is he a poet then, a delicate dreamer, this hirsute forest king, this slant-eyed robber? Does he want to sleep away the bleak nights and colorless days of the cold winter, to be wakened by purling brooks and birdsong? Does he want to lie there, dreaming of ripening lingonberry slopes and of anthills filled with brown, tasty beings, and of the white lambs who pasture on the green slopes? Does he, the fortunate one, want to avoid the winter of life?

  Outside the driving snow blows hissing in between the pines, outside the wolf and fox prowl around, crazy with hunger. Why should the bear alone get to sleep? May he rise up and feel how the cold bites, how heavy it is to wade in deep snow. May he rise up!

  He has bedded down so well. He is like the sleeping princess in the fairy tale; just as she is awakened by love, so he wants to be wakened by spring. By a sunbeam that filters in through the twigs and warms his muzzle, by a few drops from the melting snowdrift that moisten his fur, he wants to be wakened. Woe to anyone who disturbs him at the wrong time.

  If only someone were to ask how the forest king wants to arrange his existence! Not that a swarm of buckshot were suddenly to come whistling between the twigs and work its way into his hide like angry mosquitoes!

  Suddenly he hears shouts, clamor and shots. He shakes sleep out of his limbs and pushes aside the twigs to see what it is. There is work to be done for the old combatant. It is not spring that rumbles and clamors outside his winter lair, nor is it the wind that throws down spruce trees and tears up the drift snow, but it is the cavaliers, the cavaliers from Ekeby.

  Old acquaintances of the forest king. He no doubt recalls the night when Fuchs and Beerencreutz sat in ambush in the barn of a Nygård farmer, where a visit by him was expected. They had just fallen asleep over their flask of liquor when he swung in through the turf roof, but they woke up as he was about to lift the dead cow from the stable, and fell upon him with rifle and knife. They took the cow from him and his one eye, but he salvaged his life.

  Yes, the cavaliers and he are indeed old acquaintances. The forest king no doubt recalls how they came upon him another time, when he and his high consort had just lain down for a winter’s sleep in the old royal fortress here on Gurlita Bluff and had cubs in the den. He no doubt recalls how they came upon them unsuspecting. He did get away, tossing aside everything in his way, but he had to limp the rest of his life from a shot that he took in his thigh, and when at night he returned to the royal fortress, the snow was red-colored from the blood of his high consort, and the royal children were carried off to the plain to grow up there and be the servants and friends of man.

  Yes, now the ground is trembling, now the drift that covers the winter lair is shaking, now he bursts out, the great bear, the old enemy of the cavaliers. Attention now, Fuchs, old bearkiller, attention, Beerencreutz, colonel and kille player, attention, Gösta Berling, hero of a hundred adventures!

  Curses on all poets, all dreamers, all love-heroes! There stands Gösta Berling now with his finger on the trigger, and the bear is coming right toward him. Why doesn’t he shoot, what is he thinking about?

  Why doesn’t he send a bullet in the broad brisket at once; he is standing in the right place to do it. The others will not have a chance to shoot at just the right moment. Does he think he is on parade for the forest monarch?

  Gösta is of course dreaming of the lovely Marianne, who is now lying seriously ill at Ekeby, taken sick after that night when she slept in the snowdrift.

  He is thinking about her, who is also a victim of the curse of hatred that is on the earth, and he shudders at himself, who has gone out to pursue and kill.

  And there comes the great bear right toward him, blind in one eye from a cut by a cavalier’s knife, limping on one leg from a bullet from a cavalier’s rifle, surly and shaggy, alone ever since they killed his wife and carried off his children. And Gösta sees him as he is: a poor, hunted animal, whose life he will not take from him, the last thing he has left, since humans have taken everything else away from him.

  “May he kill me,” thinks Gösta, “but I won’t shoot.”

  And while the bear charges toward him, he stands completely still as if on parade, and as the forest king stands right in front of him, he shoulders the rifle and takes a step to one side.

  Then the bear continues his way, well knowing that he has no time to lose, charges into the forest, clears a path through man-high drifts, trundles along steep slopes, and flees irretrievably, while all those who had stood with triggers cocked waiting for Gösta’s shot fire their rifles after him.

  But it is in vain; the circle is broken and the bear is gone. Fuchs grumbles and Beerencreutz swears, but Gösta only laughs.

  How could they expect that a person as fortunate as he should do harm to one of God’s created beings?

  Thus the great bear in Gurlita Bluff came out of that business alive, and he is wakened from his winter sleep; the farmers find that out. No bear can more readily tear apart the roofs of their low, cellarlike sheep pens than he, none can better slip out of a trap.

  The people at upper Löven were soon at a loss with him. Message after message was sent down for the cavaliers, that they should come up and kill the bear.

  Day after day, night after night during all of February the cavaliers now wander up to upper Löven to find the bear, but he avoids them. Has he learned shrewdness from the fox and quickness from the wolf? If they lie in wait at one farm, then he ravages at the neighboring farm; if they search for him in the forest, then he pursues the farmer who comes driving across the ice. He has become the boldest of robbers; he creeps into the loft and empties Mother’s honey jar, he kills the horse hitched to Father’s sleigh.

  But gradually they begin to understand what kind of bear this is and why Gösta was not able to shoot at him. T
errible to say, dreadful to believe, but this is no ordinary bear. No one can imagine felling him, as long as he does not have a silver bullet in his rifle. A bullet of silver and bell metal, cast on a Thursday evening at the new moon in the church tower, without the minister or organist or any person knowing of it, would quite certainly kill him, but such a bullet is perhaps not so easy to secure.

  At Ekeby there is a man who, more than anyone else, must be mortified by all this. This is, as can well be understood, Anders Fuchs, the bear killer. He is losing both appetite and sleep in the indignation over not being able to fell the great bear in Gurlita Bluff. Finally he too understands that the bear can only be felled with a silver bullet.

  The forbidding major, Anders Fuchs, was not a handsome man. He had a heavy, clumsy body and a wide, red face with hanging pouches under his cheeks and multiple chins. The small, black mustaches sat stiff as brushes above his thick lips, and his black hair stood rough and thick straight out from his head. Besides that he was a man of few words and a glutton. He was not the sort that women meet with sunny smiles and open arms, nor did he look at them with approval in return. No one thought he would ever see a woman he could put up with, and everything in the realm of love and romance was far removed from him.

  Then comes a Thursday evening, when the moon is just two fingers wide and lingers over the horizon a few hours after the sun has set, when Major Fuchs heads away from Ekeby without mentioning where he intends to go. He has flint and steel and a bullet mold in his hunting vest and the rifle on his back and goes up to Bro church to see what fortune may be willing to do for an honorable man.

  The church is on the eastern shore of the narrow sound between upper and lower Löven, and Major Fuchs has to cross the sound bridge to get there. Thus he is walking down toward the bridge deep in thought without looking up toward the Broby hills, where the houses are sharply outlined against the evening sky, or toward Gurlita Bluff, which raises its round crown in the evening radiance; he is only looking toward the ground, brooding about how he will get hold of the church key, without anyone knowing about it.

  As he comes down onto the bridge, he hears someone shouting so desperately that he has to raise his eyes.

  At that time Faber, the little German, was the organist in Bro. He was a delicate fellow, meager both in weight and in merit. And the parish clerk was Jan Larsson, a capable farmer but poor, for the Broby minister had tricked him out of his paternal inheritance, a whole five hundred riksdaler.

  The parish clerk wanted to marry the organist’s sister, fine little Miss Faber, but the organist would not let him have her, and therefore the two were not friends. This evening the parish clerk has met the organist down at the bridge and rushed right at him. He grasps him by the chest and lifts him right out over the bridge railing and swears that he will throw him down into the sound if he does not give him the fine little miss. The little German will not yield, however; he struggles and shouts, saying “no” all the while, although below him he sees the black furrow of open water rushing along between white borders.

  “No, no,” he shouts. “No, no!”

  And it is uncertain whether or not the parish clerk in his fury would have let him dance down into the cold, black water, in the event Major Fuchs had not come down to the bridge just then. Now the parish clerk becomes afraid, sets Faber down on solid ground, and runs away as fast as he can.

  Little Faber now falls on the major’s neck to thank him for his life, but the major shoves him aside and says that is nothing to be thankful for. The major has no love for Germans, ever since he was billeted in Putbus at Rügen during the Pomeranian War.

  He had never in his life been so close to starving to death as during that time.

  Then little Faber wants to run up to Sheriff Scharling and accuse the parish clerk of attempted murder, but the major lets him know that that sort of thing does not pay in this country, for there is no penalty for killing a German.

  Then little Faber calms down and invites the major to his home to eat pork sausage and drink mumma.

  The major goes with him, for he thinks that the organist must surely have a church key there at home, and so they walk up the hill where Bro church is, with parsonage, parish clerk’s home, and organist’s residence round about it.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” says little Faber, as he and the major step into his home. “It’s not exactly tidy inside here today. We’ve been busy, my sister and I. We have butchered a rooster.”

  “I’ll be damned!” exclaims the major.

  The fine little Miss Faber comes right in after that with mumma in large clay mugs. Now everyone knows that the major did not look at women with approval, yet he had to observe little Miss Faber with pleasure, as she showed up so pretty in a lace cap. Her light hair was so smoothly brushed around her forehead, her home-woven dress was so natty and so blindingly clean, her small hands were so helpful and eager, and her little face so rosy and round, that he could not help thinking that if he had seen such a little woman twenty-five years ago, he surely would have gone ahead and courted her.

  As pretty and rosy-red and nimble as she is, her eyes are completely cried out. This is exactly what infuses him with such tender thoughts about her.

  While the men eat and drink, she passes in and out of the room. One time she goes over to her brother, curtsies, and says, “How do you command, my brother, that we should place the cows in the shed?”

  “Place twelve to the left and eleven to the right, then they won’t butt each other,” says little Faber.

  “What in blazes, do you have that many cows, Faber?” exclaims the major.

  But the way it was with that business was that the organist only had two cows, but he called one of them “Eleven” and the other one “Twelve,” so that it would sound important when he talked about them.

  And then the major was informed that Faber’s barn was being rebuilt, so the cows go out during the day and at night stand in the woodshed.

  Little Miss Faber passes out of and into the room; again she comes up to her brother, curtsies to him, and says that the carpenter had asked how high the barn ought to be made.

  “Look at the cow,” organist Faber says then, “look at the cow!”

  Major Fuchs thinks that was well answered.

  All at once the major starts to ask the organist why his sister’s eyes are so red, and then he is informed that she cries because he will not allow her to marry the poor parish clerk, indebted and without inheritance as he is.

  From all this Major Fuchs starts to sink into deeper and deeper thought. He empties mug after mug and eats sausage after sausage, without noticing it. Such appetite and thirst make little Faber dizzy, but the more the major eats and drinks, the clearer his mind becomes and the more decisive his heart.

  His decision to do something for little Miss Faber also grows firmer.

  In the meantime he has been keeping his eyes on the large key with the curled bit that is hanging on a knob by the door, and no sooner does little Faber, who has to keep the major company at the drinking mug, lay his head on the table and start snoring, than Major Fuchs takes hold of the key, puts his cap on, and hurries away.

  One minute later he is feeling his way up the tower stairs, lit by his small horn lantern, and finally comes up to the bell room, where the bells open their wide chasm above him. Up there he first scrapes off a little bell metal with a file and is just about to take out the bullet mold and brazier from his hunting vest when he notices that he is lacking the most important thing: he has not brought any silver with him. If there is to be any power in the bullet, of course it must be cast there in the tower. Now everything is in order: it is Thursday evening and a new moon, and no one knows he is there, and now he can do nothing. He sends up an oath in the silence of the night with such vigor in it that it resonates in the bells.

  Immediately thereafter he hears a faint noise from down in the church and thinks he can hear steps on the stairs. Yes, verily, so it is, heavy footsteps are
coming up the stairs.

  Major Fuchs, up there swearing so that the bells quiver, becomes a trifle thoughtful at this. He may well wonder who it is who is coming to help him with the bullet molding. The steps come nearer and nearer. Whoever is coming intends to go all the way up to the bell tower.

  The major sneaks away, far in among beams and rafters, and extinguishes the horn lantern. He is not exactly afraid, but the whole business would be ruined if someone were to see him standing up there. No sooner has he hidden himself than the new arrival sticks his head up over the floor.

  The major knows him well: it is the stingy Broby minister. He, who is well nigh mad with greed, has the habit of hiding his treasures in the most peculiar places. Now he is coming with a bundle of banknotes that he wants to stash away in the tower room. He does not know that someone is watching him. He lifts up a plank in the floor and sets down the money, and then he makes his way out again.

  But the major does not delay, he lifts up the same plank. Oh, so much money! Bundle upon bundle of banknotes, and among them brown leather bags full of silver coins. The major takes just as much silver as is needed for a bullet; the rest he lets be.

  As he is coming down to the ground again, he has the silver bullet in his rifle. He is wondering about what else fortune has in store for him this night. Thursday nights are peculiar, as everyone knows. First he makes a turn up to the organist’s residence. Imagine now if that rogue of a bear knew that Faber’s cows were in a miserable shed, as good as under the open sky.

  Well, in truth does he not see something black and big coming across the fields over toward the woodshed; it must be the bear.

  He sets the rifle to his cheek and is just about to fire, but then he changes his mind.

  Miss Faber’s cried-out eyes appear before him in the darkness; he thinks that he wants to help her and the parish clerk a little, but it is no doubt hard for him not to get to kill the great bear of Gurlita Bluff himself. Later he himself said that nothing in the world was so trying to him, but because the little miss was such a fine, charming little woman, he just had to do something for her.