Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

feast. As my guest-gift to you, let me rid you of these trolls.”
    Then there was great noise of people crying “Yes,” and “No,” and everything else imaginable; and the hunter drank his ale until they quieted down. After that came more arguing, and many entreaties, but the hunter’s mind was made up and he would not budge. And eventually the arguing stopped, for it was getting on towards midnight, and the wind was rising. So the farmers said their last goodbyes to the hams and the cold lobster, and dressed for the cold and went out, leaving the hunter by the fire with a fresh hornfull of ale and an amused look. Several children who wanted to wait and see the trolls eat him had to be removed by force.
    The bear settled down beside the hunter with a smoked ham and began gnawing on it meditatively. There they sat together, waiting for midnight. There were no clocks in that part of the world in those days; you told midnight by the way the stars stood, or by the way your heart tightened when midnight came. As it grew close, the hunter took the ham away from the bear—carefully—and shoved it under the room’s tall tiled stove. The bear, unconcerned, squeezed and curled itself under too, till only a little of its white furry back showed, and then it went back to gnawing the ham bone again.
    Then the hunter’s heart tightened, and the wind began to scream, and the hunter went to the side of the room where there was a lockbed. This was a sort of bunk bed built into the wall, with a thick wooden shutter that came down and locked from the inside, and little peep-holes to see through. Very quickly the hunter took all the best food and drink, in bowls and pitchers and platters, and put them in the lockbed. Then he climbed in and made the shutter fast—not forgetting to take the ale-horn with him.
    There the hunter drank comfortably for some few minutes, while the wind howled and wailed outside; and then something hit the roof, BUMP, and the hunter realized that the howling was not all wind, but voices. That was when the door burst open, and in came the trolls.
    There were about a hundred of them, and they were so ugly that hardly even their mothers could have loved them. Some of them had tails. Some of them had extra arms, or legs, or heads. A few of them had given up heads entirely. They came in all sizes, and they were all either the color of dirty snow or of mud, except for the ones that were completely covered with bristles. Their teeth were yellow and their nails were long, and if any of them had ever had a bath, it was an accident. What the dark stuff was under their nails, the hunter tried not to consider. He made a hurried prayer to the young hero-God who died to save men from the dark things; and if he then made another one, out of habit, to brave old Thor the Trollbasher, perhaps it was understandable.
    The trolls swarmed all about the big room, screaming and howling, tearing down the hangings and knocking over the furniture, until they saw the food. Then they screeched with delight, and leapt onto the tables and the sideboard and began eating everything left in sight, and also rolling in the food and throwing it on the floor. They sat in the rice-puddings, they hit each other with dried herrings, they danced with garlands of sausages around their necks.
    One of them, a troll with no nose and a mouth that went halfway round his head, snatched up a fireplace poker and stuck a sausage on it, to toast it at the fire. As he squatted there he chanced to look sideways, and what should he see under the nearby stove but some white fur showing, like the fur of a cat.
    “Look, look everybody,” he screamed, “a cat! A cat!” And all the other trolls screamed in wicked delight too, for trolls like nothing better than to seize some helpless creature and tear it limb from limb; but they always torment it first if they can. “Kitty, kitty,” screeched the troll, “does it want a nice sausage?” And he poked the white