ÅE FARM:

A frantic message came to Gunnhild about her brother Bjørgulv, from her sister-in-law at Huvestad. Ingebjørg had heard no word from her husband for three days. He had gone out hunting one crisp autumn dawn in 1839, and when he came across bear tracks leading up into Morgedal heights, he had sent his eighteen-year-old son home with the message that he would continue tracking through the starlit night. Bear pelts brought good money, and he wasn't going to let this gold mine get away.

An early snowstorm blew in the next morning.

Gunnhild was so distraught with worry over her missing brother that Tall Såmund joined the search party.

Several days later they found Bjørgulv's broken body at the foot of a cliff.

BREKKE FARM:

A few weeks later, Birgit's younger brother Talleiv also met an untimely death, all alone out in the wilds. He had withdrawn even further from friends and family in the last couple years and hardly spoke to a single soul, working dawn to dusk to support his wife and daughter. Then one day he turned his hunting rifle on himself.

BRUNKEBERG CHURCHYARD:

After Talleiv's funeral, folk milled around in the churchyard. Not an hour earlier, the priest had preached against succumbing to despair, but that wind of woe blew through every heart in the mountains.

"I couldn't pull the trigger, myself," said Jon's brother Halvor Lamefoot, shaking his head, "but I've had the same dark thought gnaw at my soul when I count the bushels at harvest, and look into the hungry eyes of my nieces and nephews. Desperate times." He sighed. "If I were to quietly disappear, there'd be more food for the young ones."

"These dales have supported our folk for time out of reckoning, before traders came hawking their cotton and spice," said Birgit's older brother Andres. "If our ancestors made a living totally cut off from the world, why can't we?"

"Because we're not cut off. We have to pay taxes and fees. With hard coin." Jon's father Torjus spat on the ground. "And we have to earn that hard coin in trade. But the traders want nothing we produce, if we can't price it as low as those blasted slave-labor factories."

"There has to be something still of value to trade," Andres insisted. "Some specialty of the mountains that the low-landers can't make."

"Bear pelts," Bjørgulv's widow said, her voice low and somber.

"Wolverine," someone else chipped in. "Fox. Mink."

"So we trap in the forests until there's no game left. What then?" Halvor Lamefoot asked.

"What can we make that a factory can't?" His younger brother Sveinung looked at his father and brothers.

Silence fell.

"It's hopeless," Gunnhild's father, Såmund the Former Sawyer, barked at last. "No way out but poverty and death."

Birgit glanced at Jon, who took her hand. They gazed at each other a moment. Birgit squared her shoulders. "There's always hope," she said, with a bleak ache in her heart for her brothers, three of them, who could see no other way out but suicide.

"Fiddles," Jon said, then louder. "Fiddles. It takes a real craftsman with special skills, doing each part carefully, with love. You'll never find that in a factory."

"So who here can make a hardanger fiddle?"

Jon shrugged. "I'm not much good at playing one. Maybe I'll have more luck making one."

"My embroidery still sells," Gunnhild said.

"We have lumber," Halvor Lamefoot added.

"If all else fails," Jon's brother Steinar said, kicking at a rock, "We can all just trek down to Kristiania and work in the factories that are stealing our lives away anyway."

"The land would support us," Tall Såmund said, and his mild voice, falling into a lull in conversation, rang clear. "If only there weren't so many of us." The breeze blew a swirl of leaves past the group, then scattered the dry foliage to right and left.

"Ja, it would," agreed Old Torjus.

"Time to go a-viking," Tall Såmund said.

scene to be continued...

.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Bjørgulv Såmundsson from Huvestad was "found dead on Morgedal's heights which he'd been travelling over by night." No reason is given for his nighttime journey.

"Talleiv Knutsson Midtbø, farm owner and farm laborer. Took his own life while out in the fields by shooting himself in the chest with a rifle."