In northern Sweden there
are tales from the past of a creature known as Vittra. Usually she
could be found roaming around at the bogs at night and in daytime she
could hide in a cave or under a big tree. Sometimes she could help
those in need. There are stories about her blue cattle grazing at
night in distant marshlands, sometimes if a poor family did not get
enough milk from their cows it could happen that she let her cattle
go along with the poor family's for a while so that they could milk
from her cows that always gave plenty of milk. But in most cases it
was best to keep away from her as she was not so keen on humans.
There are rumors that she has been on the farm and may be still is
here. Anyway the rumor about this creature inspired the woman that
now live at the farm to make a sculpture picturing Vittra.
I found that some hunters
had thrown away some moose skins and moose heads. I took one skin to
tan and one head to eat. I dragged the skin since it was so heavy to
the closest river and laid it in the stream. It was going to be there
for some days until the hair started to fall off. Then I dragged it
back to the farm and scraped it on a scraping beam with scraping
knife. It was heavy work for the arms. The days were still sunny and
quite warm so I could dry it in the sun. Later on when I had time I
was going to tan it.
The tanner that visited us
earlier in summer returned. He wanted to help me build a shelter out
of logs. I wanted this to become the new outside kitchen sine the
other one was really only provisional. We had some logs that had
been taken down in early spring but we needed more logs so we took
down more trees and debarked them. Building with logs is slow work,
and we managed to build a layer in a day.
One evening two young
girls arrived, they had hitchhiked here. They were from Iceland and
Denmark they had come here to get some experience and work for food
and shelter. Thanks to them, me and the tanner could focus on
building sine they took care of cooking, cleaning, feeding animals
and debarking logs. They also helped out to slaughter roosters and
some hens. We needed to reduce the number of animals because we had
too many in relation to how much feed we had. They were lucky the
second evening we saw a beautiful northern light it was first time
for them.
The tanner had to return
after two weeks and I finished the shelter by my self. I used some of
the metal plates as roof. It was to cold now to cook outside so we
had to wait with the opening of the shelter until next year
An old man who owned a lot
of forest next to my lad said that we could take wind fallen trees
for wood and construction so we went out in the forest and pulled
many logs back home, it was heavy work to pull the logs. We also find
a big aspen tree that we shopped up to firewood and brough back to
the farm. We got help from a neighbor with a quad to transport some
of the bigger trees.
Some snow fell and the
girls made a snowman, but the snow melted. It was now November, it
was warmer than usually. Usually snow comes already in late October.
But it was getting darker, we did not have many hours of daylight.
In the end of November the
girls had been one month at the farm and decided to return back home. Now we were two people at the farm me and the woman from Schweben. We burned the sprucebranches from the trees that we had taken down to build the shelter.
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