On August 3, the Brunborgs and Shipleys left the hytte of Bodil and Rune after another hearty (aren’t they all?) frøkost (breakfast), and continued northward to the hytte of the Brunborgs, which they call Skurvenuten, and about which I will say more later in this article.

The hytte was by far the most remote we visited in this series of hytte-trips.  We drove through an increasingly beautiful landscape as we wound down and (mostly) up along the walls of dramatic canyons of granite formed by glaciers in past ice ages.  Our goal was reach a dam in the southeastern corner of a lake high above the timber line:  Holmavatnet.  Just before reaching the dam we met Bjørgulf and Berit driving out from a visit to their hytte.  (More about them later in this blog.) At the dam we unpacked the small trailer we had pulled behind the Brunborg automobile and transferred our supplies to a small boat powered by a new 4-stroke 8-hp Yamaha engine.  It had begun raining in the last part of our auto trip, so we were all clad in waterproof jackets and trousers and rubber boots.  The car was left in a nearby clear space and we took the boat through the driving rain across the lake to the northeastern corner where Skurvenuten lies.

We moved our supplies into the hytte, and immediately started a toasty fire in the wood-burning stove and hung some our clothes and and some of our bedding (which had gotten wet in the trip across the lake) up above the stove.  Then Lars Helge and Tove took the boat back out onto the lake in order to set about a dozen garner (nets).  When they returned, we had a dinner of tomato soup and sausages and some of the delicious Norwegian bread.  Next day about noon, we all went out into the rain and drizzle and pulled in the nets; Lars Helge always at the motor and the rest of us taking turns retrieving; done by reaching out an arm’s length, grasping the net, pulling it up to the body and securing the net onto a plastic prong held in the other hand — and repeating this process until the entire net is retrieved.  If the net contained trout, the net was placed into one large plastic container; if not, and if the retrieve had been “neat”, then the net was placed into an equally-large but different container.  Tangled nets were placed in the “fishy” container, since they would have to be unsnarled just as the nets that had contained fish would.  When all of the nets had been retrieved, we landed the boat on a shore that had nearby large flat rocks, and took the fishy and tangled nets up to the rocks, where the fish were removed from the nets and the nets were unsnarled and readied for another placement in the lake.  While the three of us did the unsnarling, Lars Helge cleaned the fish down at the lake side.  Then we took the boat and the nets back out onto the lake and set the nets in likely but “new” bays or points along the shore.  We performed this routine each day but the last: eating breakfast, retrieving the nets, removing the fish from the nets, unsnarling the nets, resetting the nets in “new” places, and then returning to the hytte for some lunch, which often consisted of boiled trout and boiled potatoes and thinly sliced cucumbers.  But we also had meals of polser or pork loin or smoked trout.   In the long afternoons (in this part of the world at this time of the year the sun doesn’t set until well after 9 PM) we went for walks, or fished with casting rods or lounged inside or outside the hytte (depending on the weather) or performed everyday chores.

But I have gotten ahead of myself.  It rained on and off all day during our first full day on the lake, and then really rained hard that night, causing the lake level to begin rising.  When Lars Helge went out to the boat late the next morning, he found that the boat, whose bow had been pulled up on the shore, had taken on so much rain water that a corner of the stern was nearly submerged.  Attempting to reposition the boat so that he could bail out the water, he inadvertently moved it off a supporting rock and the stern immediately sank, submerging the new motor!  That was the scene when the rest of us arrived at the shore.  Together, we managed to position the boat so that we could bail out the water.   When an attempt to start the motor failed, we removed it and took it up to the cabin, where we extracted the spark plugs and put a bit of oil in the combustion chambers.  We then put the engine on a saw horse with the foot in a bucket of water, and after replacing the plugs were able to start the motor.  Yippee!

We caught an average of about 15 trout a day.  What did we do with that many fish, you ask?  Every day we ate some, either boiled or smoked.  The rest were reserved for rather unusual treatment, even in Norway.  Lars Helge made a batch of gravøret that we ate after three days of aging, and he began several batches of rakfisk; but that delicacy takes several months to mature to the point that it is ready to eat.  Neither preparation involves cooking; the fish are eaten raw and without heat.  We think that they are both delicious.

What are rakfisk and gravøret, you ask?  First, laks is the Norwegian word for salmon.  Øret is the word for trout.  The gravøret was prepared using essentially the same recipe as that for gravlaks; about which Wikipedia says the following: “Traditionally, gravlaks would be salted, buried in the ground and left to ferment (similar to how rakfisk is still prepared), hence the name. Contemporary gravlaks, however, is salt-and-sugar-cured salmon seasoned with dill and (optionally) other herbs and spices. Gravlaks is often sold under more sales-friendly names internationally.”  You can  read more about gravlaks here.  About rakfisk, Wikipedia says:  “Norwegian fish dish made from trout … salted and fermented for two to three months, or even up to a year, then eaten without cooking.”  You can read more about rakfisk here.

A note about the cabin:  years ago when we first visited Skurvenuten, the “WC” was an outdoor affair that consisted of a wooden “bench” with an appropriate hole mounted between two large boulders up some distance from the hytte.   But now the hytte has a snurredass — an indoor toilet that opens up not into the ground but into a cylindrical container with three chambers under the hytte.  When one chamber fills up after some months or years, the container is rotated so that the waste falls into a new chamber.  By the time the original chamber has come around again, its contents will have decomposed to the point that it is essentially empty, a process facilitated by the addition of a handful of a specially-treated tree bark after each occurrence of serious business.

The hytte has no running water, so we fetched water from the lake for drinking and cooking and washing ourselves and our dishes.  The new room containing the snurredass contains a sink and a shower stall, but, without running water, showers are obtained by using a hand-pressurized garden sprayer.

The hytte Skurvenuten is owned by Bjørgulf Haukelid, who has been a friend of Lars Helge since they were school boys.  The Brunborgs fixed up Skurvenuten and have used it for many years.  Bjørgulf and his wife Berit have on the same lake their own hytte, called Vivik, as well as yet another hytte.  The Haukelids also own the northern half of Holmavatnet, as well as a considerable amount of land and several lakes immediately to the north of Holmavatnet.  The King of Norway has hunted Caribou on the Haukelid land.

Bjørgulf is the oldest son of Knut Haukelid, one of the Norwegian saboteurs of the heavy water plant at Vemork during the World War II occupation of Norway.  The Allies placed great significance on destroying the plant and its heavy water production, since it was feared that the Nazis would use it to help create an atomic bomb.  The Norwegians had been trained in Britain, and after the successful raid on Vemork all but two returned there.  Knut was one of the two who remained behind to train and arm volunteers for the Norwegian Home Army, as the resistance movement was known. He teamed up with another Norwegian named Skinnarland and fled on skis to a mountain hut called “Bamsebu” on the Haukelid property where they remained in hiding until the spring thaw of 1943 when they moved to a farm on the lower slopes, where they were better placed to gather information to relay back to Allied headquarters in London. In July they received an inquiry about reports that production of heavy water at the Vemork plant had restarted. It was decided to attempt to destroy the plant by a United States Army Air Force bombing raid. This wrecked the factory but failed to destroy the heavy water plant, which was protected by seven concrete floors above it.

Norwegian technicians were able to convince the German authorities that the plant as a whole was no longer viable but, on January 29,1944, London advised Skinnarland that it was to be dismantled and shipped to Germany, together with the Vemork stocks of heavy water. Haukelid and he took great risks in entering local towns, where both were well known, to gather information about the planned shipment. Eventually, they discovered that it was to be conveyed in a Norwegian ferryboat which would have to traverse Lake Tinnsjo on its way to the open sea. Assisted by others recruited locally, Haukelid placed charges on the keel of the ferry, which blew up and sank in 1,000ft of water in Lake Tinnsjo in February 1944, unfortunately with the loss of several Norwegian lives.

So much for the background concerning the small hut called Bamsebu.  During one of our fishing expeditions, we took a break and walked up to the hut.  It was my third visit.  On an earlier visit some 15 years ago, Lars Helge and I had repaired the roof, replacing a rotten plank and repositioning stones on the edge of the roof and cutting new clumps of sod to fill bare spots in the grass on the roof.  Remarkably, after all of those 15 years, some of the places from which we got the sod are still bare, a testament to how harsh the conditions are at that latitude and altitude.

The Brunborgs love Skurvenuten, and the Shipleys do too.  We consider it a high privilege to be able to spend time in such a beautiful and such a historic place.