On the fourth day, he found his way to lower ground and a small village called Furuflaten. He saw a house and stumbled inside. This turned out to be Baalsrud’s great stroke of luck. The house belonged to the sister of Marius Gronvoll, an active member of the resistance. A building nearby was a German military headquarters; he just as easily could have barged in there, and his story would have ended.

Instead, in a remarkably coordinated effort, many in the village came together to help harbor the fugitive and get him on his way, all without the Germans noticing. The Gronvoll family stashed Baalsrud in their barn for four days as he tried to recuperate. According to Haug and Karlsen Scott, two German soldiers searched the barn once but walked out before checking the loft where Baalsrud was hiding behind a bed of hay. Slowly, the Gronvolls brought Baalsrud back to life. But the frostbite had taken hold, and Baalsrud was no longer able to walk on his own. Marius recruited three others to help put Baalsrud on a stretcher, sneak him past the Germans into a rowboat and take him across the fjord, pretending to fish the whole time. When the terrain on the other side proved too steep to negotiate with a stretcher, Marius hid Baalsrud in a small shed and returned to Furuflaten, where he convinced a local schoolteacher with carpentry skills to make a sled — no small feat, considering the school was where all the soldiers congregated. The teacher made it in pieces, and it was assembled on the other side of the fjord.

Today, Furuflaten is still very small, with about 250 people. Along the main road is a little museum devoted to Baalsrud — really just an alcove inside a community center, a wooden barn-style building with a stage for assemblies and community theater. It’s open only a few days a week, and there is no sign outside to tell anyone that it exists. There are Baalsrud’s wooden skis, recovered by a local resident in the bottom of the valley in the summer of 1943 and hidden until the end of the war. There is Baalsrud’s gun, the snub-nosed Colt, which Baalsrud’s brother had given to a museum near Oslo before it was transported back to Furuflaten. There are four little dioramas, each depicting a scene in Baalsrud’s escape in an almost twee Wes Anderson fashion. And there is a replica of the sled that transported Baalsrud, with a mannequin of Baalsrud himself lying on top. A few feet away is a stuffed fox, with a paper sign hanging around its neck. The message, in Norwegian: ‘‘I saw him, but I didn’t say anything.’’ This is a museum devoted to the successful keeping of a secret.

The Gronvoll family’s barn, where Baalsrud, snow-blind and lame, recovered after the avalanche, is still standing just up the road. After the war, Marius married a young woman named Agnete Lanes, who had helped him tend to Baalsrud. They had seven children, three of whom met me at the barn: two sons, Are and Dag, and a daughter, Kjellaug. They are all at least 50 now, decades older than their parents were when Baalsrud came into their lives. Kjellaug still lives in Furuflaten, working as a nurse in a neighboring town. Dag works in the pharmaceutical industry in Tromso. Are, who has an uncanny resemblance to the pictures I saw of his father, works in the local fish-feed industry.

Staying silent about helping Baalsrud, keeping the secret, took a toll on the Gronvoll family. In a very real sense, it fractured them. ‘‘My father had two sisters,’’ Are said, ‘‘and he sent them away’’ for the duration of the war. ‘‘If the Germans found out what happened, at least his sisters would survive.’’ Their heroism, like Baalsrud’s, was of an ambiguous kind, and Howarth’s question occurred to me again. Even years after the war — despite the book, the movie and the indomitable legend — some of his neighbors, Are said, still thought of Marius and his family as troublemakers, the ones who had endangered their community, who put everyone at risk.