But now they have separated without bloodshed or ill-feeling in a way that is almost, if not quite, unique in history, and I believe that if an enemy was to attack Sweden the Norwegians would be just as ready to light on their side as when the two countries were united.
During my second year in Tydal I had often heard of the hunting ex¬ ploits of a certain Ole Larsen, a Swede from the frontier district of Jemtland, who had the reputation of killing elk with or without leave or right wherever he found them. As the local hunters did not seem to he able to find the big bulls which were often reported as having been seen or tracked in the valley, a letter was written to Ole Larsen inviting him to come and help us. One very wet evening we were sitting after dinner before a roaring fire at Aune about the middle of September, when a very thin, poorly dressed and badly shod individual, who had more, the appearance of a clerk out of work than of a mighty hunter, came in dripping with rain and accompanied by a couple of wolfish looking grey elk-hounds, and carrying a rusty old breech-loader which did not look as if it had been cleaned for years. As he sat to dry himself before the fire and eat his supper, I asked him, through Peter, if lie ever cleaned his rifle. He replied that if the cartridge would go into the breech, and lie could see down the barrel, the bullet would go right enough, and we learnt by degrees that this was quite true, for, during the week I hunted with him, we got four elk of which two fell to his rifle, and if he got up to the elk first, I believe he would not have waited even for the King of Sweden to shoot first. Ole Larsen was, if the truth was told, a desperate poacher, and at the time was wanted in his own country on various charges, but he taught me the art of hunting with loose dogs, the system commonly adopted in Sweden, though illegal in Norway at present, and so well described by Mr. E.N. Buxton in Short Stalks that I will not say much about it. I very soon found that I was too old, too slow, and not half tough enough to follow loose dogs to the end in such a country as this. And though, no doubt, it is a most deadly way of killing elk, for a young man in first-class condition who is not afraid to sleep in his wet clothes in the forest if the chase leads him too far from home; yet it has the great drawback that, when the dogs have brought an elk to bay, it has to be killed regardless of age or sex, in order to blood the dogs, which are said to become slack if, after bringing an elk to bay, the hunter does not come up and shoot it. Old bull elk which have not been disturbed and have not winded the hunter will often stand after a very short run, as I found out soon afterwards; but if the hunter comes up down-wind, or if the elk breaks bay from any other cause, they will often go for very long distances, and if the day is windy and the country rough, the hunter some¬ times loses his dog altogether.
Peter Norbye told me that he formerly had a dog which would stay with an elk all night, and that on one occasion, when he had been run out of hearing, and had had to sleep in the forest, he heard his dog in the still night baying the elk, and was able himself to get up and kill the elk at daybreak. It is a more exciting sport than hunting with a dog in a leash, but too hard work for most men, and nothing like so scientific as the method adopted by the best hunters, who never under any circum-
