The Jonas Lie MEGAPACK ® - Jonas Lie

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be hatching no progress shall make;

      The Finn shall ne’er let thee go southwards with sail,

      For he’ll screw off the wind and imprison the gale.”

      At the end of it the Gan-Finn was standing there, and bending right over him. The skin of his face hung down long and loose, and full of wrinkles, like an old reindeer skin, and there was a dizzying smoke in his eyes. Then Jack began to shiver and stiffen in all his limbs, and he knew that the Finn was bent upon bewitching him.

      Then he set his face rigidly against it, so that the magic spells should not get at him; and thus they struggled with one another till the Gan-Finn grew green in the face, and was very near choking.

      After that the sorcerers of Jokmok sent magic shots after Jack, and clouded his wits. He felt so odd; and whenever he was busy with his boat, and had put something to rights in it, something else would immediately go wrong, till at last he felt as if his head were full of pins and needles.

      Then deep sorrow fell upon him. Try as he would, he couldn’t put his boat together as he would have it; and it looked very much as if he would never be able to cross the sea again.

      But in the summer time Jack and Seimke sat together on the headland in the warm evenings, and the gnats buzzed and the fishes spouted close ashore in the stillness, and the eider-duck swam about.

      “If only some one would build me a boat as swift and nimble as a fish, and able to ride upon the billows like a sea-mew!” sighed and lamented Jack, “then I could be off.”

      “Would you like me to guide you to Thjöttö?” said a voice up from the sea-shore.

      There stood a fellow in a flat turned-down skin cap, whose face they couldn’t see.

      And right outside the boulders there, just where they had seen the eider-duck, lay a long and narrow boat, with high prow and stern; and the tar-boards were mirrored plainly in the clear water below; there was not so much as a single knot in the wood.

      “I would be thankful for any such guidance,” said Jack.

      When Seimke heard this, she began to cry and take on terribly. She fell upon his neck, and wouldn’t let go, and raved and shrieked. She promised him her snow-shoes, which would carry him through everything, and said she would steal for him the bone-stick from the Gan-Finn, so that he might find all the old lucky dollars that ever were buried, and would teach him how to make salmon-catching knots in the fishing lines, and how to entice the reindeer from afar. He should become as rich as the Gan-Finn, if only he wouldn’t forsake her.

      But Jack had only eyes for the boat down there. Then she sprang up, and tore down her black locks, and bound them round his feet, so that he had to wrench them off before he could get quit of her.

      Then she threw herself into his arms like a young wild cat, and looked straight into his eyes through her tears, and shivered and laughed, and was quite beside herself.

      Then Jack understood that she was going to take counsel of the Gan-Finn, and that he had better take refuge in his boat before the way was closed to him. And, in fact, the boat had come so close up to the boulders, that he had only to step down upon the thwarts. The rudder glided into his hand, and aslant behind the mast sat some one at the prow, and hoisted and stretched the sail: but his face Jack could not see.

      Away they went.

      And such a boat for running before the wind Jack had never seen before. The sea stood up round about them like a deep snow-drift, although it was almost calm. But they hadn’t gone very far before a nasty piping began in the air. The birds shrieked and made for land, and the sea rose like a black wall behind them.

      It was the Gan-Finn who had opened his wind-sack, and sent a storm after them.

      “One needs a full sail in the Finn-cauldron here,” said something from behind the mast.

      The fellow who had the boat in hand took such little heed of the weather that he did not so much as take in a single clew.

      They sped along in a wild dance right over the firth, and the sea whirled up in white columns of foam, reaching to the very clouds.

      Unless the boat could fly as quick and quicker than a bird, it was lost.

      Then a hideous laugh was heard to larboard—

      “Anfinn Ganfinn gives mouth,

      And blows us right south;

      With three clews we must tack.”

      And heeling right over, with three clews in the sail, and the heavy foremost fellow astride on the sheer-strake, with his huge sea-boots dangling in the sea-foam, away they scudded through the blinding spray right into the open sea, amidst the howling and roaring of the wind.

      The billowy walls were so vast and heavy that Jack couldn’t even see the light of day across the yards, nor could he exactly make out whether they were going under or over the sea-trough.

      The boat shook the sea aside as lightly and easily as if its prow were the slippery fin of a fish, and its planking was as smooth and fine as the shell of a tern’s egg; but, look as he would, Jack couldn’t see where these planks ended; it was just as if there was only half a boat and no more; and at last it seemed to him as if the whole of the front part came off in the sea-foam, and they were scudding along under sail in half a boat.

      When night fell, they went through the sea-fire, which glowed like hot embers, and there was a prolonged and hideous howling up in the air to windward.

      And cries of distress and howls of mortal agony answered the wind from all the upturned boat keels they sped by, and many hideously pale-looking folks clutched hold of their thwarts. The gleam of the sea-fire cast a blue glare on their faces, and they sat, and gaped, and glared, and yelled at the blast.

      Suddenly he awoke, and something cried, “Now thou art at home at Thjöttö, Jack!”

      And when he had come to himself a bit, he recognised where he was. He was lying over against the boulders near his boathouse at home. The tide had come so far inland that a border of foam gleamed right up in the potato-field, and he could scarcely keep his feet for the blast. He sat him down in the boathouse, and began scratching and marking out the shape of the Draugboat in the black darkness till sleep overtook him.

      When it was light in the morning, his sister came down to him with a meat-basket. She didn’t greet him as if he were a stranger, but behaved as if it were the usual thing for her to come thus every morning. But when he began telling her all about his voyage to Finmark, and the Gan-Finn, and the Draugboat he had come home in at night, he perceived that she only grinned and let him chatter. And all that day he talked about it to his sister and his brothers and his mother, until he arrived at the conclusion that they thought him a little out of his wits. When he mentioned the Draugboat they smiled amongst themselves, and evidently went out of their way to humour him. But they might believe what they liked, if only he could carry out what he wanted to do, and be left to himself in the out-of-the-way old boathouse.

      “One should go with the stream,” thought Jack; and if they thought him crazy and out of his wits, he ought to behave so that they might beware of interfering

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