Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read Online Free PDF

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