Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, a hunter and ex-military man, lives alone in a hut in the forest with his faithful dog, Aesop.

Glahn has left Nordland and moved to India to be alone in the forest and to hunt, but he is suicidal because of his lost love, and when he can not bear it any longer he provokes the narrator of the Epilogue into shooting him.

In 1937, a German-made version was produced under the sponsorship of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who considered Hamsun one of his favorite authors.

The next version, a color production by the Swedish studio Sandrews, was directed by Bjarne Henning-Jensen and released in 1962 under the title Kort är sommaren (Summer is short).

[1] The book is also the basis of Guy Maddin's 1997 Canadian film Twilight of the Ice Nymphs[2] and the primary inspiration for Ben Rivers' 2011 docufiction Two Years at Sea.