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At first his course lay along the banks of the river, every rock and shrub of which he knew. Farther on he left the stream on the right, and struck into the mountains just as the sun went down. High up on the fells a little cottage stood perched on a cliff. It was one of the "saeters" or mountain dairies where the cattle were pastured in summer long ago just as they are at the present day.
Here and there on the hillslopes a grey hut or two show out saeters, which have lain there unchanged for perhaps a couple of thousand years. But a new time is coming. The saeter-horns will be heard no longer, and the song of the turbines will rise in their place. An icy wind is blowing; the horse throws up its head and snorts.
The saeters were beginning to wake. Musical cries came echoing as the saeter-girls chid on the cattle, that moved slowly up to the northern heights, with lowings and tinkling of bells. But Peer lay still where he was and presently the dairy-maid at the saeter caught sight of what seemed an empty boat drifting on the lake, and was afraid some accident had happened.
The dairy maids are supposed to have a peculiar costume, and photographs are often seen of them arrayed in picturesque dress, but I never saw them worn. In all the saeters I visited the clothes worn were very plain and ordinary, and seemed to have been selected for wear and not for looks.
Hundreds of backwoods families, large ones at that, exist in "blind" cabins that remind one somewhat of Irish hovels, Norwegian saeters, the "black houses" of the Hebrides, the windowless rock piles inhabited by Corsican shepherds and by Basques of the Pyrenees. Such a cabin has but one room for all purposes.
They are diminutive in size, dun-colored, docile in habits, and excellent milk producers. It is said when they are well-fed they average from six to nine hundred gallons of milk a year. The mountain saeters, or dairies as we would call them, are the centers of the butter and cheese industry during the summer months. The peninsula is also supplied with an excellent breed of small but hardy horses.
It was nearly midnight when he stood by the shore of a broad mountain lake, beneath a snow-flecked hill-side. Here were a couple of saeters, and across the lake, on a wooded island, stood a small frame house that looked like some city people's summer cottage.
"How beautiful it is!" he said. The girl lifted her head and looked round. "Yes," she answered, and Peer fancied her voice had taken a new tone. It was past midnight. Heights and woods and saeters lay lifeless in the soft suffused reddish light. The lake-trout were not rising any more, but now and again the screech of a cock-ptarmigan could be heard among the withies.
A young girl in a white boat, moving over red waters in the evening a secret meeting on an island no one must know just yet. . . . Would it ever happen to him? Ah, no. The sun goes down, there come sounds of cow-bells nearing the saeters, the musical cries and calls of the saeter-girls, the lowing of the cattle.
Men began to grow weary of smoked rafters and frequent festivities, and to long for the free, fresh air of heaven. Some went off to drive the cattle to the "saeters" or mountain pastures, others set out for the fisheries, and not a few sailed forth on viking cruises over the then almost unknown sea.
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