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Or, if there be a few days to spare, one can steam across the head of the Sogne Fjord from Gudvangen to Lærdalsören, and thence again take carriole or stolkjærre to the Fillefjeld, and so visit the wildest of Norway's mountain districts, the Jotunheim the Home of the Giants. Everyone has read of the midnight sun and of the sunless winter of the North.
In spite of her income of eighteen thousand francs from landed property, a very considerable fortune in the provinces, she lived on a footing with families who were less rich. When she went to her country-place at Prebaudet, she drove there in an old wicker carriole, hung on two straps of white leather, drawn by a wheezy mare, and scarcely protected by two leather curtains rusty with age.
A sorry carriole or patache it proved to be, with the accessories of a lumbering white mare and a little wizened, ancient peasant, who had put on, in honour of the occasion, a new blouse of extraordinary stiffness and blueness.
The cracking of whips and the howling of dogs were heard, and a little later the tinkling of bells. Then came a train of long-legged, handsomely harnessed dogs hauling a highly decorated carriole behind which trotted a strikingly dressed half-breed dog-driver.
He then had no horse nor carriole, no fur coat nor red-painted luncheon-basket. He had to go on foot from house to house and carry his belongings tied in a blue striped cotton handkerchief.
For hours he had sat like this, unmoving, his gnarled red hands clamping each leg as though to hold him steady while he gazed; and he saw himself as a little lad, barefooted, doing chores, running after the shaggy, troublesome pony which would let him catch it when no one else could, and, with only a halter on, galloping wildly back to the farmyard, to be hitched up in the carriole which had once belonged to the old Seigneur.
Along the line of travel his carriage or carriole had the right of way, and the habitant doffed his cap in salute as the seigneur drove by. Catalogne mentioned that, despite all this, the Canadian seigneurs were not as ostentatiously given tokens of the habitants' respect as were the seigneurs in France. But this did not mean that the relations between the two classes were any less cordial.
Most of the inhabitants of the town were grateful to Mademoiselle Cormon for not humiliating them by the luxury she could have displayed; we may even believe that had she imported a caleche from Paris they would have gossiped more about that than about her various matrimonial failures. The most brilliant equipage would, after all, have only taken her, like the old carriole, to Prebaudet.
In Falaise, the village near which the camp was pitched, Maurice had come across a small farmer, an old friend of his father's, who was about to drive his daughter over to Chene to visit an aunt in that town, and the horse was even then standing waiting, hitched to a light carriole. The prospect was far from encouraging, however, when he broached the subject to Major Bouroche.
No snowshoer could be found who was swift enough to break a trail for those dogs and no horse ever overtook them. Once, while going from Oak Point to Winnipeg, Factor Clark's train ran down six wolves, allowing him to shoot the brutes as he rode in his carriole. Another time they overhauled and threw a wolf which Mr. Clark afterward stunned, and then bound its jaws together.
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