Note 1316 — Chapter XVI · —Influences Of A Mountain Environment

While the high pastures are ample for the summer feeding, the chief problem of mountain stock-farmers is to secure feed for the winter support of their animals. This taxes their industry and ingenuity to the utmost. While the herdsmen are away tending their charges on the heights, the rest of the population are kept busy at home, getting fodder for the six or seven months of stall-feeding. This includes the cultivation of hardy crops like oats, rye and barley, which will mature at a great altitude, hay-making and collecting twigs and even leaves for the less fastidious goats. In Switzerland as in Norway the art of mowing has reached its highest pitch. Grass only three inches high is cut thrice yearly. The Norwegian peasant gathers a small hay harvest from the roofs of his house and barns, and from the edges of the highways. In Switzerland not a spear of grass escapes. In places inaccessible to cattle and goats, the peasant gathers hay by the handful with crampons on his feet, generally from the ledges of cliffs. He stacks it in one spot, and brings it down to the valley by sledge in winter. He is the Wildheuer or wild hay gatherer. His life is so dangerous, that the law permits only one Wildheuer to a family.1316 In high Alpine cantons this office is the privilege of the poor.1317 The traveler in Norway frequently sees huge bundles of hay sliding down to the valley on wires stretched from some high point on the precipitous fiord wall. This represents the harvest from isolated spots or from the field of the summer shepherd. In the vicinity of every saeter hut, a plot of ground is fenced in, enriched with the manure gathered during the summer, and utilized to grow fine nourishing grass, which is mown and transported down to the valley farm.1318 Here economy of vegetative resources reaches its climax.