He moves along the western side of a valley; wooded ground, with leafy trees among the spruce and pine, and grass beneath.  Hours of this, and twilight is falling, but his ear catches the faint purl of running water, and it heartens him like the voice of a living thing.  He climbs the slope, and sees the valley half in darkness below; beyond, the sky to the south.  He lies down to rest.

The morning shows him a range of pasture and woodland.  He moves down, and there is a green hillside; far below, a glimpse of the stream, and a hare bounding across.  The man nods his head, as it were approvingly—­the stream is not so broad but that a hare may cross it at a bound.  A white grouse sitting close upon its nest starts up at his feet with an angry hiss, and he nods again:  feathered game and fur—­a good spot this.  Heather, bilberry, and cloudberry cover the ground; there are tiny ferns, and the seven-pointed star flowers of the winter-green.  Here and there he stops to dig with an iron tool, and finds good mould, or peaty soil, manured with the rotted wood and fallen leaves of a thousand years.  He nods, to say that he has found himself a place to stay and live:  ay, he will stay here and live.  Two days he goes exploring the country round, returning each evening to the hillside.  He sleeps at night on a bed of stacked pine; already he feels at home here, with a bed of pine beneath an overhanging rock.

The worst of his task had been to find the place; this no-man’s place, but his.  Now, there was work to fill his days.  He started at once, stripping birch bark in the woods farther off, while the sap was still in the trees.  The bark he pressed and dried, and when he had gathered a heavy load, carried it all the miles back to the village, to be sold for building.  Then back to the hillside, with new sacks of food and implements; flour and pork, a cooking-pot, a spade—­out and back along the way he had come, carrying loads all the time.  A born carrier of loads, a lumbering barge of a man in the forest—­oh, as if he loved his calling, tramping long roads and carrying heavy burdens; as if life without a load upon one’s shoulders were a miserable thing, no life for him.

One day he came up with more than the load he bore; came leading three goats in a leash.  He was proud of his goats as if they had been horned cattle, and tended them kindly.  Then came the first stranger passing, a nomad Lapp; at sight of the goats, he knew that this was a man who had come to stay, and spoke to him.

“You going to live here for good?”

“Ay,” said the man.

“What’s your name?”

“Isak.  You don’t know of a woman body anywhere’d come and help?”

“No.  But I’ll say a word of it to all I meet.”

“Ay, do that.  Say I’ve creatures here, and none to look to them.”