During the summer months you might hear a Norwegian girl, high up on a mountain, calling her cows with such a rhyme. She would, no doubt, call each cow by name, just as the girl does in the old rhyme.
Dotted here and there far up in the mountains stand lonely little huts. For months during the year, the roofs of those huts are covered with snow and no smoke comes from the chimneys. But as soon as the winter snows are gone and the tender green grass covers the mountain slopes, the girls take the cattle to the mountains to feed on the fresh grass. Those girls will live in the lonely huts until the snows of the next winter begin to fall on the mountains. In Norway the people call a farmer’s mountain pasture his saeter (say ter).
Sometime in June many girls start on the journey to a saeter. The girls look forward to that day for weeks even though they will be very lonely up in the mountains. Anne and Hulda are sisters who go to a saeter each summer. Anne is only fourteen years of age and Hulda is seventeen. Sigrid, who is about the same age as Hulda, and Martha, who is much older, live on a farm not far from the farm where Anne and Hulda live. Anne, Hulda, Sigrid, and Martha take their cows to the same saeter. So the four girls live together for three months each summer.
One summer, Anne, Hulda, Sigrid, and Martha started for the saeter on June 25. They live in a part of Norway that is far from a fjord or a railroad, so they had to travel on foot. They did not go alone, for there was too much to take to the saeter. Their older brothers went with them. The girls dressed in heavy brown khaki suits and high-topped shoes, walked ahead with the cows, the sheep, and the goats. The boys came behind them with horses loaded with food, churns, milk cans, bedding, and cooking vessels. At first they traveled along a main road and walking was easy. Only a few miles from their homes, they stopped for a week at a house near the road. The cows ate the grass off the mountain slopes near the house, and the boys planted potatoes on a patch on the mountainside which was level enough that crops would not be washed away.
At the end of the week they again loaded the horses and started on the rest of their journey. To reach the high pastures, they must walk up a narrow zigzag road. The small dun-colored horses climb the paths carrying the bundles. What a lot of turns the road has! One mountain path has twenty-seven turns. Of course, the many turns make a longer road than a straight one would be, but the girls are glad for the zigzags. They make the road less steep and they follow the smoother paths.
By the end of the day, the cattle reached their green pastures. And the girls opened the hut which was to be their home for almost three months. The hut was made of rough timber. It had a sod roof on which grew grass and small shrubs.
The boys helped the girls clean the hut which had been closed for so many months. They unloaded the goods which the horses had carried up the mountain and put everything in place. In one corner of the one big room, they put the churn, the milk cans, and the tools. In another corner was a fireplace. On it they hung iron kettles on which the girls would cook their food and boil the milk to make cheese. On a table at one side of the room they put the crocks for the milk and on a shelf above the table, they placed the dishes. At one end of the room on wooden beds, they put the mattresses of straw and warm covers which look like small feather beds.
The next morning the boys set out down the mountain again. They must return to help gather the grain and cut the grass on the farm. The girls are left alone with the cattle.
All four of the girls got up early each morning. They milked the cows and the goats. After breakfast of cheese and bread and butter and milk, Anne and Sigrid each morning took the cattle to the pasture. While the cattle wandered about on the mountain eating the fresh grass, the girls lay in the sun or searched for wild berries—blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.
Each evening Anne and Sigrid called the cattle. They knew each one by name, and perhaps some of their cows were named Rose, Birchen Bough, and Morning Pride like the cows in the old rhyme. They drove the herds back to the barns near the hut and went home for supper.
Hulda and Martha had supper ready. They had smoked herring, goat’s cheese (goat’s cheese is dark brown in color and tastes sweet), potatoes, bread, butter, milk, and fresh berries. Hulda and Martha were busy all day. They took care of the milk, cleaned the house, and walked two miles to the main road to meet the postman who passes in the afternoon each day. One day each week they got the milk ready for the man who came to take it to factories where butter and cheese are made.
The girls were glad when Saturday nights came. Then some of their relatives and friends came out to see them. Girls from other saeters came too if they were not too far away. On these nights sometimes the girls and boys sang songs and danced on the grass.
Ole, Kristian, and Sofie are other Norwegian girls who take cows to the high pastures. They live on a farm near a fjord. They take their cattle part way up to the saeter on a boat. The girls, dressed in dark dresses and heavy shoes, carrying big knapsacks on their backs, travel on the same boat with the cows. When they leave the boat, they drive the cows a few miles up the mountain. They live much as Anne, Hulda, Sigrid, and Martha live on their saeter. These girls can go to the village by boat to buy groceries.
Automobile roads have been built in some parts of the high mountains. Tourists climb the high mountains in automobiles. Round and round they climb, sometimes on a road that is like a shelf sticking out from the rocky wall. And here and there they may go right through the wall itself, for holes, or tunnels, have been cut through the rocky banks.
Tourists who travel through those mountains are glad to find a hotel at a saeter on their way where they can get food or stay over night. And hotels have been built at saeters which are near the automobile roads. The hotel is a large wooden building. It stands near the huts which are the homes of the family which cares for the cattle.
Matti, Ingrid, and their brother Ole go each summer to a large saeter called Grotli. Their father has a hotel there. Grotli means “Goat’s Hill,” and Grotli looks like a goat’s hill in the summer when the goats run about on the mountain.
Early in the spring Matti, Ingrid, and Ole, and their father and their mother move to Grotli. Sometimes the snow is still on the ground when they arrive. Then the children may think that Grotli looks more like reindeer hill. A farmer, who lives near the saeter, has a herd of tame reindeer. They wander about on the mountain. They rub the snow out of the way with their noses and eat the fresh grass and moss which they find underneath.
Sometimes visitors in Norway ask, “Why must the cattle go so far away from the farm to the high pastures?” If they ask a Norwegian milkmaid, she might say, “The grass which grows on the farm must be saved for winter feed. Not enough grass grows on the farm for both summer and winter. Fresh, tender grass grows on the high mountains, so the cattle eat it in the summer. Then no grass is wasted.”
But the milkmaid may not know why the saeter is so far away from the farms. And, of course, it does seem strange to American girls and boys that a farmer sends his cattle to feed in high pastures miles from his farm, while in the mountains just above his own farm graze the cattle of another farmer who lives miles away. Why cannot a farmer graze his cattle on the mountains near his home? The answer to that question is a story of long, long ago in Norway.
Long ago the farmers in Norway found that they must use the grass on the high mountains for summer feed. The king said, “Each farmer may have a part of the grass lands on the high mountains for his pasture. But each farmer must use only a certain amount of land and he must find a place which no other farmer has already claimed.”
So each farmer hunted himself a mountain pasture. When he found a space which he liked, if it had not already been claimed, he drove stakes into the ground to mark it off. He put his name on the stakes and then the land was his. Many farmers had to take pasture lands which were far from their farms. They could find no other free land.
Years and years have passed since the days when a farmer drove stakes and marked off his pasture land. The farms have passed to other owners. Perhaps now the great-great-great-grandsons of some of the farmers live on the farms, or some farms may have been sold to other families. But the new owners of the farms are also owners of the same saeters that the old farmers staked off for the farm. And that is why many a farmer today takes his cattle to a saeter far from his home.