The Power of Evil in High Places
- Per Hansa and his boys sit around the kitchen table getting their wheat seeds ready for the planting season. It's pretty boring work, but the boys are happy to have anything to do at all after a long winter.
- Per Hansa is so confident that he runs out to plant all of his seeds early. His neighbor Tönseten tells him he's crazy, but he doesn't mind.
- When Hansa wakes up the next morning, he finds that a late frost has frozen the ground again. All of his seeding efforts are ruined and now he's going to lose out on the whole season. Looks like Tönseten was right.
- He looks out later and sees Tönseten planting his own seed. But it looks like Tönseten's will be healthy while Hansa's will all die.
- The next morning, though, Ole comes charging into the house and yelling about how all of Per Hansa's wheat is growing after all.
- That spring, a new group of settlers moves into the area. They're Norwegian, thankfully, but one of them is a super braggy and annoying guy named Tallaksen. No one really likes him, and his kids are nearly as braggy as he is. His son gets into a fight with Store-Hans at one point, but after a while, the two become friends.
- One day, Tallaksen asks Hansa to use his oxen to ship some supplies for Tallaksen's new house. But when Hansa finds out that the house will be nicer than his own, he refuses to help. Tallaksen ends up not getting the lumber he needs for the season, so he builds a house just like everyone else's.
- Some time later, a ragged family pulls up to the settlement. The father has tied the mother down to the wagon because she has gone crazy with grief after her son died on their trip out west. They had to bury their son in the prairie, but she's determined to run back and dig him up. The father is looking for help so he can actually go back and get the boy. Even though he doesn't get a good vibe from them, Per Hansa offers to take them all in for the night.
- That night, Beret wakes up and finds that her daughter And-Ongen is missing. She understandably freaks out about it and runs to her husband to tell him. She and Hansa run outside and see the crazy woman from the travelling family, standing on top of a nearby hill and holding And-Ongen. They quickly take the child back. But the woman stays behind, searching up and down the hill. Beret wants badly to tell the woman to leave the prairies and never come back.
- Two days later, the strangers leave.
- After this incident, Beret falls deeper and deeper into paranoia about the prairie. She starts to think the she sees evil faces in the clouds above her house. She's convinced that the devil is master of the prairies.
- On Per Hansa's end, everything is looking great. His wheat fields are springing up like crazy and he has the best crops of everyone in the settlement. As you can imagine, he's not humble about his accomplishment, either.
- Here's the problem, though. Per Hansa is so proud of his wheat field that he doesn't want to harvest it, even though Tönseten warns him that waiting too long will ruin the wheat.
- Eventually, Hansa relents and lets Tönseten use the harvesting machine to cut his wheat for him.
- But wouldn't you know it: no sooner is Hansa's wheat cut when… wait for it… a gigantic plague of locusts descends on the settlement, ruining everyone else's crops.
- This plague of locusts pretty much puts Beret over the edge. Now she's absolutely convinced that she and her family and friends are all doomed. Her mental health goes downhill really quickly after this. She retreats deeper and deeper into religious ideas and the belief that everyone she knows is a sinner.
- But at least the locust plague has to end sometime, right? Well that's true. But the locusts make a good run of it. They return for every planting season for the next six years. The only thing that saves them is the steady influx of settlers that keeps coming and supporting the settlement.
- After a while, people just get used to the locusts and figure that things could be worse. After all, at least the bugs only eat crops and not livestock… or people!