The rejoicings of the Birchlegs were however, a little premature. Erling Skakke was, by no means, dead yet, and he had no sooner heard of Sverre's performances in Tröndelag than he gathered a large fleet and sailed northward to have a reckoning with him. Sverre did not care to meet the relentless earl just then, and he therefore sought refuge again in the mountains. For two years he led, most of the time, a life which no dog would have envied him; now descending into the valleys on foraging expeditions, now again retiring into the wilderness and suffering untold privations. Occasionally hunger drove him to play a practical joke on the peasants, surprising them as an uninvited guest at their Yule-tide feasts, sitting down with his Birchlegs at the banqueting boards and devouring their holiday fare. Altogether his hardships were not unrelieved by humor. Like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, he had pity on the small, and often dispensed a kind of rough justice to the great. His name was cursed from one end of the kingdom to the other; as he himself remarked, many believed him to be the devil incarnate. Nurses scared naughty children with the threat that Sverre would come and take them, and the girls when they pounded the wet clothes at the river brink never failed to wish that Sverre's head was under the pounder. At the same time, a certain admiration for the power of the man and his undauntable spirit can scarcely have failed to affect those who had not directly suffered by his depredations. His many battles and guerilla fights with King Magnus and his liegemen, his second and unsuccessful attempt to capture Nidaros, and his skirmishing with the peasants cannot here be described in detail, though the saga, which was prepared under his own supervision, enables us to follow all his movements with tolerable accuracy. It was not until June, 1179, that he fought a battle which gave a decisive turn to his future. Then, he made a sudden descent from Gauldale upon Erling, who was feasting in Nidaros. "Would that it were true," said the earl, when the approach of the Birchlegs was announced to him; "they shall then get their deserts, but for that matter, we may sleep soundly to-night, for I have been told that they have already retired into the mountains, and Sverre will not venture to attack us, when we are watching for him, as we are doing now." Accordingly he told his men to go to bed; and this they did in a condition which made it no easy task to wake them. When Sverre, who, as usual, was well informed, was about to make his attack, he addressed his men as follows: "Now it is necessary to fight well and bravely; for a beautiful victory is to be won. I will tell you what you can now obtain by your bravery. He who can prove by truthful witnesses that he has slain a liegeman shall himself become a liegeman; and every man shall get the title and dignity of the man who falls by his hand."