Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (4 page)

So spring and summer and fall went by, and the hunter and the white bear cub travelled the length and breadth of the Northern countries together. In Spring they fished in bitter-cold streams just breaking free of the ice; the bear was better than the hunter at this, and caught them many a fat trout. In the long days of summer they stayed in the cool of the shadowy forests, moving at their ease, while the hunter caught martens for their fur, and red deer for venison. In fall they lingered to enjoy the last of the fair weather, raiding the occasional bee-tree for honey: and they met trappers moving north, who looked at the bear with wonder.

And at last winter came round again, and they began to make their way south together, the hunter and the white bear. It was no longer the tiny cub it had been. It was a great shaggy-coated beast, blue-eyed and wise-eyed, that followed the hunter like a dog. The hunter began to be sore of heart. He was a poor man, with nothing to live on but what he caught and could sell or eat. The bear was always hungry, so it was a trouble to keep fed, and its sale would bring him a great deal of money. But when he looked at the bear across the campfire of an evening, and it ate what meat he could find, and licked his hand afterwards: when he turned in the night and found its broad warm back bumped up against his: when it nosed him awake in a silent morning, breathing bear-breath on him, and pawed him merrily to get up and greet the day—at those times the hunter did not want to sell the bear, not for all the gold in the Cheapinghaven, not for the King’s own crown.

But still they went south together—the hunter partly out of habit, the bear because its friend was going that way. The year grew very old, and the days very short. In those high northern parts of the world, when Midwinter grows near, the Sun only rides above the horizon for four or five hours out of the twenty-four. Dark things come out of the woods then, reveling in the shadows and troubling the houses of men. Those nights, when the hunter fell asleep, many a time he woke in the starlight to see the great white bear drowsing by the fire like a great shaggy toy, one half-closed blue eye resting on him; and he was very glad the bear was with him still.

They were still travelling when it got to be Yuletide—that time of year which is Christmas now, but was just starting to be Christmas then. People would travel from their lonely farmsteads to some neighbor’s large house, and eat and drink and dance and make bonfires to celebrate the days slowly getting longer. But first there would be Midwinter Eve, a terrible night when monsters would run loose, and ghosts would fly and the evil sort of witches do all the harm they could. It was a bad time to be out in the open, away from a friendly hearthfire. People made it a point not to travel then, and to be all gathered together by the time night fell. They considered that there was safety in numbers.

The hunter and the bear were still up on the high fells far north of the Cheapinghaven when Midwinter Eve came. Now the hunter was brave, but not foolhardy. When he realized what night it was, he decided to turn in at the nearest farmhouse and ask their hospitality for a night. Farmsteads were few and far between up on that fell, the Dovrefell, but the gleam of firelight shines a long way in those empty places. The hunter and the bear made for the light of windows, and came to a great farmstead, and the hunter knocked on the big house’s door.

There had been much hectic laughing and singing going on inside, and now it stopped dead. This puzzled the hunter. After a little he saw someone peer at him from a window; and after a little while more the door was unbarred, and men and women (and some children staying up late) looked out at him and the bear in astonishment.

“That’s not a troll!” one of the youngest children said. She sounded slightly disappointed.

“Come in!” said the people inside, and they pulled the hunter inside, and made respectful room for the bear as it shambled in and snuffled at the house-smells. Well it might have, for there was a feast laid out, as they still lay out in the northern countries at Yule—fish of every kind, fresh and pickled and smoked and dried: and lobsters, and chickens, and sausages and hams, and black bread and brown, and rice puddings, and cheeses, and butter and cream, and enough ale and beer to swim in. The farmfolk gave the hunter a chair, and hot ale to drink, and more food than he usually saw in a week. The bear helped itself to a whole smoked salmon from the sideboard, and settled down with it at the hunter’s feet, very pleased with itself. Then the farmers all drank the hunter’s health, and began eating and drinking again, and doing it very quickly.

“Forgive me,” said the hunter a little later (for it had been a long time since he had had ale), “but why should I have been a troll?”

The farmers and the farmers’ wives and their children all looked embarrassed, even those who were still eating. “It is because,” they said, “this whole area is infested with trolls, and every Yule Night they come in a great crowd to wherever feasting is held, and they ride the roofs, and scream and yell, and eat everything and drink everything, and kill whatever man or beast they can catch. So we are feasting, but very quickly, and as soon as we finish we are all going to take our horses and cows, and run and hide in the woods and the caves. Of course we would offer you hospitality for the night if we could, but if you stay here, the trolls will kill you too.”

Now the hunter was extremely sorry to hear this. What with the ale inside him and the warmth outside him, he was getting very reluctant to do anything at all, much less run away into the woods and hide in a freezing cold cave all night. While he was thinking this, the bear got up and went to the sideboard and ate a five-pound firkin of butter, and swallowed a roast chicken whole, and then put its head in a huge bowl of pickled cod and started work on that—sneezing at the dill and garlic, but not slowing down.

The hunter watched this, and thought for a few moments, while everyone else kept eating. “Listen here,” he said at last, “I have an idea. I’m a wandering man, and I have no house of my own to bid you to, to thank you for this feast. As my guest-gift to you, let me rid you of these trolls.”

Then there was great noise of people crying “Yes,” and “No,” and everything else imaginable; and the hunter drank his ale until they quieted down. After that came more arguing, and many entreaties, but the hunter’s mind was made up and he would not budge. And eventually the arguing stopped, for it was getting on towards midnight, and the wind was rising. So the farmers said their last goodbyes to the hams and the cold lobster, and dressed for the cold and went out, leaving the hunter by the fire with a fresh hornfull of ale and an amused look. Several children who wanted to wait and see the trolls eat him had to be removed by force.

The bear settled down beside the hunter with a smoked ham and began gnawing on it meditatively. There they sat together, waiting for midnight. There were no clocks in that part of the world in those days; you told midnight by the way the stars stood, or by the way your heart tightened when midnight came. As it grew close, the hunter took the ham away from the bear—carefully—and shoved it under the room’s tall tiled stove. The bear, unconcerned, squeezed and curled itself under too, till only a little of its white furry back showed, and then it went back to gnawing the ham bone again.

Then the hunter’s heart tightened, and the wind began to scream, and the hunter went to the side of the room where there was a lockbed. This was a sort of bunk bed built into the wall, with a thick wooden shutter that came down and locked from the inside, and little peep-holes to see through. Very quickly the hunter took all the best food and drink, in bowls and pitchers and platters, and put them in the lockbed. Then he climbed in and made the shutter fast—not forgetting to take the ale-horn with him.

There the hunter drank comfortably for some few minutes, while the wind howled and wailed outside; and then something hit the roof, BUMP, and the hunter realized that the howling was not all wind, but voices. That was when the door burst open, and in came the trolls.

There were about a hundred of them, and they were so ugly that hardly even their mothers could have loved them. Some of them had tails. Some of them had extra arms, or legs, or heads. A few of them had given up heads entirely. They came in all sizes, and they were all either the color of dirty snow or of mud, except for the ones that were completely covered with bristles. Their teeth were yellow and their nails were long, and if any of them had ever had a bath, it was an accident. What the dark stuff was under their nails, the hunter tried not to consider. He made a hurried prayer to the young hero-God who died to save men from the dark things; and if he then made another one, out of habit, to brave old Thor the Trollbasher, perhaps it was understandable.

The trolls swarmed all about the big room, screaming and howling, tearing down the hangings and knocking over the furniture, until they saw the food. Then they screeched with delight, and leapt onto the tables and the sideboard and began eating everything left in sight, and also rolling in the food and throwing it on the floor. They sat in the rice-puddings, they hit each other with dried herrings, they danced with garlands of sausages around their necks.

One of them, a troll with no nose and a mouth that went halfway round his head, snatched up a fireplace poker and stuck a sausage on it, to toast it at the fire. As he squatted there he chanced to look sideways, and what should he see under the nearby stove but some white fur showing, like the fur of a cat.

“Look, look everybody,” he screamed, “a cat! A cat!” And all the other trolls screamed in wicked delight too, for trolls like nothing better than to seize some helpless creature and tear it limb from limb; but they always torment it first if they can. “Kitty, kitty,” screeched the troll, “does it want a nice sausage?” And he poked the white fur, hard, with the fireplace poker.

The fur jerked, and vanished further under the stove. The troll howled with laughter, and got down on his hands and knees to peer under. Back in the darkness beneath the stove there were two glints of green fire, very big and round, that could have been taken for the eyes of a cat frightened to death.

“Puss, puss, come have your sausage!” screamed the troll, and jabbed under the stove with the poker again.

That was when the bear came out.

Trolls are even louder when they’re frightened than they are when they’re pleased—but being loud did not help them. They climbed what curtains had not been torn down, they tried to squeeze out through little windows, they jammed together in the door, so many at once that no one could move. They hid under overturned furniture and even under the stove. None of it did them any good. Only a few of them got away. The bear found all the rest.

A surprisingly short time later it was quiet again. The hunter came out of the lockbed with his ears ringing. He poured himself another cup of ale, and went to scratch the bear behind the ears. It looked up at him, a very cheerful and satisfied look, and went back to washing its paws. The bear was not hungry any more.

The hunter cleaned up the mess as best he could, and put out all the food and drink he had saved, and shut the door and built up the fire again, and sat down beside it. That was how the farmers found him when they came back, with the Sun, on Yule morning: snoozing comfortably in the chair, with the bear stretched out in the middle of the floor on its back, with its feet in the air, and its stomach very full, and one eye open.

Then there was real rejoicing, and the farmers unlocked their storehouse and loaded the tables again, and there was singing till the rafters rang, and dancing till they shook; and the hunter’s health and the bear’s were drunk so many times that they are still probably alive somewhere. Indeed the feasting went straight on through the day and the dark, till toward midnight everyone was too full to eat another bite—except the bear, who had finally gotten up around elevenish and was nibbling on another half-salmon. Contentment reigned.

—until something went BUMP against the door, and everyone’s hearts tightened.

The hunter stood up with the ale-horn in his hand. “Yes?” he said, very loud. “Who is it?”

“It’s the trolls,” said a voice from outside—a nasty voice that was frightened, and trying to hide it.

“And what do you want?” said the hunter.

“We want to know—do you still have your big cat in there, that you had last night?”

The farmers all stared at each other. The bear looked up with interest, and licked its chops. “Yes,” said the hunter. Then he had a thought, and said quickly, “And what’s more, she had kittens this morning, and they look like they’re going to be bigger than she is, and all the neighbors hereabouts are taking one apiece. Want one?”

There was screaming from outside. “No,” yelled the troll, “and we’re never coming back, so don’t bother saving us one just in case!”

And the screaming dwindled away to nothing, and the night was quiet again.

The trolls never did come back; and the hunter knew this for certain, for the farmer whose Yuletide he saved made the hunter a present of a snug bit of land on the eastern side of the Dovrefell, by a little lake. There the hunter built a small neat house, and though he still wandered and hunted the forests as he loved to do, he always came home again. The bear went everywhere with him, and in later times his children and grandchildren drowsed against it by the fire in the winters, and swam with it in its cold blue lake in the summers. And it must still be there, for even now some people in the north of the world put a little food out “for the Bear” at Yuletide, and the food is always gone in the morning. And who would dare to take it?

Certainly not the trolls….

The following story is based on yet another tale from the Nordic end of things.

For some reason the Scandinavian fairytale landscape seems full of the non-squeamish, no-nonsense kind of heroine whose answer to life’s problems, either natural or supernatural, is astonishingly straightforward: just go on and hang up your dead horse’s head and start having long conversations with it; or go ahead and skin the bull and then carry its magic hide all over the landscape with you so it’ll conjure up the things you need. These are women for whom part of the solution to a thorny magicak problem may well include a bucket of lye soap and a good stiff brush.