The creature showed its teeth angrily at him and the light, its mouth seeming the whole time to grow wider and wider, and then a huge man rushed out through the boat-house door, but not too quickly for Elias to see, by the light of the lantern, that out of his back there stuck a long iron spike.

Now Elias began to understand a little; but still he was more afraid on account of his boat than for his own life, and he sat in the boat himself, with the lantern, and kept guard.

When his wife came to look for him in the morning she found him sleeping, with the extinguished lantern by his side.
One morning in the following January when he put out to fish with two men in his boat besides himself, he heard in the dark a voice that came from a rock at the entrance to the creek.

It laughed scornfully, and said: "When you get a ten-oared boat, take care, Elias!" However, it was many years before anything happened to the ten-oared boat, and by that time his eldest son, Bernt, was seventeen.

That autumn Elias went into Ranen with his whole family in the six-oared boat, to exchange it for a ten-oared boat.