A walk in Himlinge (75)

  There is a place where we like to walk my wife and I. It´s called Himlinge. The landscape is fascinating, with slope hills with lots of big junipers and pines with heavy branches. The summertime the farmer has his cows there and You already know that we don´t like to walk among cows. Therefore we only take walks there in the spring and the autumn. We can combine the walk with purchase of eggs. The farmer sells eggs in a shed on the side of the cowshed. Today we bought chicken eggs, small eggs that cost one euro for 30 eggs, that´s cheap, isn´t it? In the springtime the moss is covered with brown grass, the branches crushes under the feet when you walk and there is a terrible noise in the air and the fields. There are; birds. There are cranes, they are the biggest ones, their sounds seem like trumpets and they are an impressing sight when they fly over my head. The cranes are the most brave birds, they wait a long time before they escape, you can come very close. How different are the geese. In a rather long distance they begin to cackle and if you come closer than 100 meters they run away. And then they circulate in the sky watching a retired man who is too fat walking between the junipers and under the pines. There is a lake, of course, very near. Now the ice covers it, but soon it will open so the birds can swim, eat and make their nests in the reeds. Some of the gees and the cranes stay at the lake. The others continue their journey to the north. There are swans too, two kinds, mute swan and wooper. Once when we were walking there we met moose. We were in a distance of three meters or something. The moose got scared and were afraid. It went away with a terrible hullabaloo and the silence returned.   But what´s happening now? Two men with dogs are coming in the field. They approach the geese a little bit further away. First the geese only look. After that they withdraw a bit to see what the two with the dogs are going. And thereafter they begin cackling and some of them prepare to leave. And finally an ocean of geese passes over us with an incredible noise. The geese move to the lake. There they rest on the ice. One understands why they use geese to watch the whisky Ballantine, if there come thieves they cackle and the guards will come. One of our most famous writers is Selma Lagerlöf. She has written The Wonderful Travels of Nils Holgersson, a narrative for children and adults. It deals with Nils Holgersson, who travels on the back of a goose, Akka. He sees a lot on his journey through Sweden. If you want to learn more about Selma there´s a link here: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_Lagerl%C3%B6f