The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  I spent part of the journey going over my plans. Using Map 1414 IV, I had decided on a triangular route that would take me northwards from Haukeliseter towards Hellevassbu, then westward following the trail to Middalsbu, and then back south-east to return to my starting point at Haukeliseter. I had my map, and the brief route descriptions provided in DNT’s own compendious handbook of marked trails. From the pastel innocence of the map I could see no particular difficulties to take note of. My only unease concerned the final leg of the journey back to Haukeliseter. After the track came down off the mountains to meet the Fv 11 at a place called Fentadokki, there appeared to be a five-kilometre walk along the side of this narrow but fairly busy highway back to the cabin at Haukeliseter.

  The first section of the bus journey, through the Numedal valley, was by now familiar to me from the many times we had driven between Oslo and Veggli. It was years since I had last made a long-distance bus journey and I had been looking forward to the drive, but once we had passed through Kongsberg I fell asleep and did not wake up until shortly before the bus pulled in off the Fv 11 at Haukeliseter in the late afternoon.

  I jumped down, the driver raised the side of the bus and I bent down and dragged my green rucksack from the storage bay beneath the bus. I watched as it drove away, then shouldered the rucksack and headed for the nearest bench. Because of its easy accessibility by road and its situation halfway between the east and the west of central-southern Norway that gives access to trails in all directions across the Vidda, Haukeliseter is a popular starting and stopping point for walkers, both those walking north to south and east to west. There is a sizeable restaurant, and before setting out I decided I needed a cup of coffee and the dish of the day, which today was reinsdyrgryte (reindeer stew).

  I carried the tray with my plate and cup to a seat by a north-facing window, which gave me a view of what would be the first leg of my walk. It involved crossing the road and then following a steep and twisting path that disappeared over the top, where the walk proper would begin. It looked like a ten- or fifteen-minute climb. Every few minutes hikers would appear on that upper horizon and make their way down the twisting track towards Haukeliseter. A burst of late sunshine hit the track and made it glisten like silver, from which I deduced that it was muddy and that it must have been raining a lot recently. Even as I was watching two women make the descent, one of them lost her footing and slipped. As quickly as it had brightened, the sky grew dark again. Sated and comfortable from the stew and the coffee I was briefly tempted to book a bed for the night and postpone my start until the morning. That would be a good idea, wouldn’t it? A fresh start, bright and early, with the whole day before me? What time was it now? Four-thirty? A bit late to be starting, surely? Suddenly a flock of goats passed the window, moving purposefully between the timber buildings on either side of the courtyard. One climbed to the top of a flight of steps outside a cabin and watched. He seemed almost to be counting them as they went by, to make sure none were missing. Then when the last animal had passed by he jumped down and the herd continued its way into the rough fields below the little complex of buildings, spreading out as they went.

  Haukeliseter mountain lodge.

  Bad idea, I told myself firmly. Standing up, I shouldered my rucksack, clumped out of the restaurant and slowly plodded in between two of the dormitory cabins to a gap in the fence where a waymark post pointed the way up. I crossed the road, navigated carefully around the puddled and boot-muddied junction of about six different paths, then bent my back and headed up towards the first of the red ‘T’s that would guide me on my way to Hellevassbu.

  My fully packed rucksack weighed twenty kilos. I knew this because I had weighed it at home, dangling it from a digital suitcase weight. I’d also tested the feel of the full pack at home, walking around in the living room, the bedroom, and the kitchen. It sat very comfortably on my back. The big difference between this and previous mountain-walk packs was that I was walking alone, with no one to share the weight, and I was carrying a tent, a sleeping bag, a full set of cooking equipment, and the food – all the things that spending nights in DNT cabins rendered unnecessary. I had packed the biggest of my tents, a three-person Rondane 3 that weighed four kilos. For cooking I carried a single-burner gas stove and canister, a small aluminium saucepan and kettle, and several packets of dried meals in containers, which, once water was added, could be heated directly on the stove. It was September now, and the nights might be chilly, so I had packed two woollen pullovers and an extra set of warm, full-length underwear. In the identical zippered pouches on either side of the main body of the rucksack were two plastic litre bottles of water. Add the weight of the raingear and the extra pair of lighter walking shoes I had packed, and it made for a heavier pack than I had ever walked with.

  The track turned out to be considerably steeper than it had looked from my window seat in the restaurant, and every bit as slippery as that brief burst of sunshine had suggested. Within five minutes I had stopped, exhausted, and was bent double, hands resting on my knees as I heaved to get my breath back. You should have known, I told myself, recalling my subjective observation that the first moments of any departure from a DNT cabin always seem to involve a brutal, twenty-minute near-vertical ascent in which you find yourself wondering which bastard filled your rucksack with stones while you were innocently sleeping. But then, I recalled, if you just keep going, quite suddenly, like a reward, the track flattens out, you rise to an upright position, the view opens out, and you realise you are indeed in the Norwegian mountains, and there is no more beautiful place on Earth to be than this. So I ploughed on upwards. Sure enough, after a succession of three illusory tops had flattened out momentarily only to reveal yet another, a fourth turned out to be the real end of the climb.

  I stood up straight. Suddenly the rucksack didn’t seem so heavy after all. Peering through the dusk, I traced the line of the path stretching out ahead of me, dipping between and around mountains rather than over them. In the middle distance, in the shadow of a tall dark mountain, I saw a lake and decided to pitch the tent there. I left the marked trail and walked for a further ten minutes until I found a firm, grassy site not far from a small stream that fed into the lake.

  That night was the first time in years I had slept out. The utter remoteness of the site on which I had pitched, on a grass-strewn patch of sandy ground, made me feel as though I was the only human being on Earth. Before settling for the night, before zipping up the tent and climbing into my Egyptian mummy-shaped sleeping bag, I gave in to a strong impulse to take off all my clothes and stroll as far as the water’s edge. In perfect certainty that no one would come by, I walked around completely naked for some fifteen minutes, bending now and then to part the leaves of the dense thickets of dwarf birch, kneeling to scrape a track through the dark yellow lichen on a boulder with my fingernail, touching the pale dust to my lips to taste it.

  I made my way over to a rock about a hundred metres away from the tent. It was about three metres high and turned out to have an opening on one side large enough to slip inside. Once inside it was obvious to me that it must have been used as a storm-shelter. There was room enough to sit and even stand, but not to lie down. Peering through the gloom, I noticed something pale on the floor. Bending to pick it up, I took it outside into the light. It was a rectangular tin can, rusted close to extinction. The words ‘Delito’ and ‘Sardines’ were still just legible on it. From the lettering it looked as though it had lain there since at least the 1950s, and possibly even before that. The Hardangervidda, beyond the powers of the Germans to monitor its vastness, had been a favoured gathering place for members of the Norwegian resistance during the years of the occupation. The British had used the region for parachute drops: perhaps this was a relic from the war years?

  Or perhaps not. In obedience to some half-sincere sense of reverence I put the tin can back where I had found it and strolled back down to the lakeside. If I had had pockets in my skin I believe my hands would hav
e been in them, so relaxed and free and easy did my wandering feel. The clouds had cleared and the sky was full of stars. I looked up. There was tall Perseus, the little triangle of stars like a pointed hat on his head, a string of jewels dangling from his left hand as he danced into the face of Auriga the Charioteer, whose bright eye Capella glared at him in disapproval. Over there was the Great Bear, with the two Hunting Dogs poised to strike at his throat. The majestic Swan skimmed down the Milky Way heading straight for the Eagle, with the Northern Cross and Dolphin in the shallows on the side of the pale river watching to see what would happen when they met, and Vega in the Lyre on the other side looking on with cold blue indifference. I lowered my gaze and on the unruffled surface of the water saw Polaris in the Little Bear trailing a crescent of stars, all reflected so close I could have bent down and scooped them up in the palm of my hand.

  I slept heavily and well and after a breakfast of hot porridge and coffee I was on my way again by nine the next morning. A look at the map told me I had spent the night on the southern shore of Loftsdokktjønn. The terrain ahead for the next few kilometres looked undemanding, and my spirits were high as I set out beneath a cloudless blue sky. The temperature was mild, a gentle breeze wafted me along from behind. I had the map hanging in front of me in a clear plastic folder and periodically stopped to consult it. The track was now at 1320 metres above sea level, well above the treeline. That peak in the east was undoubtedly Vesle Nup, 1510 metres above sea level. Even when following a marked trail, I noticed, there is real pleasure to be had in locating oneself exactly on a map. After about an hour the track ran down and along the shore of Mannevatn, a large lake guarded in the west by the brooding heights of Mannevasstoppen.

  From there the track ran more or less straight ahead, meandering very slightly as it passed a mountain called Klingenberg. Here I stopped to rest on a large, flat white rock I had had in my sights for the last twenty minutes. As I was brewing up coffee, a woman with a dog came up the track in the opposite direction. She had the dog on a leash, which surprised me. Even though the general rule is that dogs should be kept on a leash in the mountains, to stop them chasing after sheep or goats or reindeer, many walkers allow them to run free if there appears to be no immediate sign of any such temptations.

  We stopped to chat. She looked about forty, with dark eyes and round, nut-brown cheeks. I complimented her on her dog, a beautiful Irish Setter with a glossy, deep-rust coat. I asked her if she kept him on a leash all the time, even out there in the wilds, and she surprised me by telling me she had to, as the animal was blind.

  ‘Blind?’

  ‘Yes. He lost his sight when he was a year old. First one eye, then the other.’

  ‘It must be hard work looking after him. He’s lucky to have you.’

  ‘No,’ she said with a diffident smile. ‘I’m the lucky one.’

  I asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee but she said no, they’d had a stop just a half hour ago. I watched them as they walked off. Her pack looked bigger and heavier than mine, and she had a fishing rod strapped to one side of it. She was walking the vidda north to south, she told me, from Finse in the north to Haukeliseter in the south, camping at night with her blind dog and fishing for food along the way.

  After another hour’s walking the track rose up the side of a peak, crossing a scree slope of small and slippery rocks that became steeper as it approached the top. For some hours I had been able to forget about my pack, but now I felt its dead weight bearing down on my shoulders as I bent double to scrabble upwards, often having to use my hands to steady myself. From previous experience I knew the best plan was not to look ahead when negotiating steeply rising terrain but to try to keep your eyes fixed on the ground beneath your feet. Near the top the track began to level out, and I began to feel a sensation of pleasurable relief at the thought of soon being able to rest. My anticipation came a little early, however. Before reaching the top the track encountered an almost smooth wall of rock just over head height. I looked around, hoping I might have made a mistake and come off the track somewhere. But a red ‘T’ visible on a stone set back to one side at the top of the ledge ruled out any possibility of that.

  I stood for at least a minute, staring at that wall of rock. Standing on tiptoe, I could just get my fingertips onto its flat top. On examining the surface closely I now saw that there were indeed ledges on the wall – small, but large enough to be used for toeholds, and sloping the right way, inwards, towards the centre of the mountain. It was technically possible to climb. But what about the rucksack? Should I remove it and toss it up on top first? Should I take it off, make the climb, then somehow find a way to hoist it up after me? Throwing it up first seemed the most sensible choice. But it was heavy, and in my mind’s eye I saw it just failing to clear the top, ricocheting off the ledge and bouncing away down the mountainside.

  There was always the option of turning back, but I knew once I left the marked trail I would be lost. There was nothing for it but to make the climb, and to get it over with as quickly as possible. I tightened the pack until the straps felt as if they were biting into my flesh, raised my left hand to the first handhold I had spotted and my right leg to the first toehold. As my left leg then left the ground and looked for the second toehold, I swung my right arm up as high as I could and clutched for a purchase on top of the ledge. For a nauseating instant I felt the rucksack swing me out over the drop, and then my fingertips gripped on to the rock. The ledge sloped down almost immediately at the top and once I had my left elbow securely wedged over it I was able to haul myself the rest of the way up.

  I lay motionless for the next five minutes, with my eyes closed. Once I had recovered I unbuckled the rucksack and took out the gas canister and the two black cloth bags, one containing the burner with its foldaway legs and the other the little aluminium kettle. I opened the lid of the kettle and took out the plastic bag with the mixture of instant coffee, sugar and powdered milk, unzipped the side pocket and slid out the blue plastic water bottle, lit the gas and sat cross-legged and listened and watched the water boil and looked out over the fabulous landscape spread out below me. Layered and misty blue horizons in all directions, with here and there the silvery splashes of lakes and rivers. I took out my otherwise redundant mobile phone, opened the music player and navigated to Geirr Tveitt’s Concerto for Hardanger fiddle and orchestra and lay back and enjoyed this extraordinary composition. The Hardingfele, or Hardanger fiddle, is a native variant on the violin of European classical tradition. A four-stringed instrument with a variable number of drone strings, it has been used at dances and on social occasions since at least the seventeenth century. Hardanger fiddles and their cases were often ornately decorated with rosemaling. More than any other instrument, its wild and mournful sounds conjure up for me the soul of the Norwegian mountain landscape.

  About twenty minutes later I stood up and cleaned out the green folding plastic cup with grass, packed away the stove, dried the inside of the kettle and put the bag of coffee mixture back inside. For the first time since leaving Haukeliseter, I felt my bowels move. Watched only by a curious crow, head turned to one side on a smooth rock some two metres away from me, I squatted down behind what I took to be a section of fallen tree trunk.

  I buried the evidence of my passing presence beneath a small pile of stones then subjected the tree trunk to a closer examination. It was ridged along the sides, rather like a stick of coltsfoot rock. Ever since leaving Haukeliseter I had been walking above the treeline; so what was a tree trunk doing up here? And it wasn’t the only one. Scanning the plateau I saw several other of these light brown, log-like objects scattered about. Walking over to examine one more closely, I knelt beside it. I tapped the bole with my knuckles. It was rock hard. In fact, it was rock. From a book I had read on the geology of the vidda I knew that it had once been covered in forest; was it possible that I was standing among the remains of a petrified forest?

  The onward track had no visible presence on a surface t
hat was entirely rock, and the longer I failed to pick it up the more uneasy I felt. I was no Lars Monsen, Norway’s favourite television adventurer, who lives out in the wilds for weeks on end with just his dogs for company; nor was I a hunter like Lieutenant Glahn who could tell the time by the lay of the grass beneath his feet. I had, moreover, been without a signal on my mobile phone since leaving Haukeliseter. My wife was not even aware that I had decided, on a whim, to take these few days walking in the mountains; if I should fall, or even simply twist my ankle, I realised for the first time, I might find myself in real trouble. I had already developed an almost religious devotion to the sight of these red ‘T’s in the landscape, and rather than ramble on in a more or less straight line – for what logic would ever suggest that the path ahead ran in a straight line? – I spent a full five minutes minutely systematically scrutinising the terrain ahead for any sign of them.

  These ‘T’s are deliberately marked to intrude as little as possible on the landscape. Almost invariably they are either found on wooden signposts, or on stones or boulders. Only very rarely, and where there is no alternative, are they painted directly onto surface rock. Waymarking the Hardangervidda presents particular difficulties. The land is high, and throughout the year – but especially in winter – it is exposed to extreme weather conditions. The markings are often on small cairns, but the terrain is littered with cairns that mark other, older routes across the vidda. Cairns can collapse. And in the kind of rocky landscape I was now traversing it is all too easy to mistake a natural pile of stones for a constructed cairn. On the heights, after a run of two or three harsh winters, a once-radiant red marking might have been toned down to a pockmarked remnant hardly visible more than twenty yards away. Red lichen too can play tricks, luring the wanderer onwards until he suddenly realises he has lost contact with the last reliable waymark.