Once upon a time a Fox lay peeping out of his hole,
watching the road that ran by at a little distance, and hoping to see something
that might amuse him, for he was feeling very dull and rather cross. For a long
while he watched in vain; everything seemed asleep, and not even a bird stirred
overhead. The Fox grew crosser than ever, and he was just turning away in disgust
from his place when he heard the sound of feet coming over the snow.
He crouched eagerly down at the edge of the road
and said to himself, "I wonder what would happen if I were to pretend to be
dead! This is a man driving a reindeer sledge; I know the tinkling of the harness.
And at any rate I shall have an adventure, and that is always something!"
So he stretched himself out by the side of the
road, carefully choosing a spot where the driver could not help seeing him,
yet where the reindeer would not tread on him; and all fell out just as he had
expected. The sledge driver pulled up sharply, as his eyes lighted on the beautiful
animal lying stiffly beside him, and jumping out he threw the Fox into the bottom
of the sledge, where the goods he was carrying were bound tightly together by
ropes. The Fox did not move a muscle though his bones were sore from the fall,
and the driver got back to his seat again and drove on merrily.
But before they had gone very far, the Fox, who
was near the edge, contrived to slip over, and when the Laplander saw him stretched
out on the snow he pulled up his reindeer and put the Fox into one of the other
sledges that was fastened behind, for it was market day at the nearest town,
and the man had much to sell.
They drove on a little further, when some noise
in the forest made the man turn his head, just in time to see the Fox fall with
a heavy thump onto the frozen snow.
"That beast is bewitched!" he said to himself,
and then he threw the Fox into the last sledge of all, which had a cargo of
fishes. This was exactly what the cunning creature wanted, and he wriggled gently
to the front and bit the cord which tied the sledge to the one before it so
that it remained standing in the middle of the road.
Now there were so many sledges that the Lapp did
not notice for a long while that one was missing. Indeed, he would have entered
the town without knowing if snow had not suddenly begun to fall. Then he got
down to secure more firmly the cloths that kept his goods dry, and going to
the end of the long row, discovered that the sledge containing the fish and
the Fox was missing. He quickly unharnessed one of his reindeer and rode back
along the way he had come, to find the sledge standing safe in the middle of
the road; but as the Fox had bitten off the cord close to the noose there was
no means of moving it away.
The Fox meanwhile was enjoying himself mightily.
As soon as he had loosened the sledge, he had taken his favourite fish from
among the piles neatly arranged for sale, and had trotted off to the forest
with it in his mouth.
Source:
Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, and Company,
1904), pp. 245-246. Lang's source "Lappländische Mährchen".
"Lapland"
is an area which extends across Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and North-West
Russia. The Lapps, or to use their own term, Saami, have inhabited this arctic
and sub-arctic region for several thousand years. The Saami or Lapps (or as
they were sometimes also called, "Finns") had a notable effect on Norse culture
and in the Viking age were considered to be among the foremost of sorcerers.
Saami "shamanic" practises probably had a major influence upon Nordic "Seid"
magic.