Animal Heroes

When they ranked together by the lake that fall, the Fossekal sang his old song: When I am hiding Norway's luck On a White Storbuk Comes riding, riding, as though this was something he had awaited, then disappeared no one knew where. Old Sveggum had seen it flying through the stream, as birds fly through the air, walking in the bottom of a deep pond as a Ptarmigan walks on the rocks, living as no bird can live; and now the old man said it had simply gone southward for the winter. But old Sveggum could neither read nor write: how should he know?