Towinghome Finner Whales.
Towinghome Finner Whales.
The finner is no stranger in the North. Whalers of all countries have seen him spout and gambol for three hundred years, and have cursed him with maritime point and fluency. Occasionally some harpooner, disbelieving tradition, made fast to a finner, and experienced that sensation which thevaquerofound when he lassoed the Mexican State Express. And as fishing implements developed, they shot at him with harpoon guns and riddled him with explosive lances. But the end was always the same, it was either “cut” or “swamp,” and there was another white-painted whale boat losing way over the swells,with a white-faced crew, no harpoon, and an empty tub of line.
Until 1865 the finner whale defied the fishermen of the world, but in that year Captain Svend Foyn went North with new ideas for conquering the brute’s prodigious vitality; and though he did not succeed at first, though, indeed he was constantly at shoulder-touch with sudden death, he figured out the right scheme at last, and then reaped a harvest well earned. He died, only a year or two back, the richest man in Norway.
Captain Svend Foyn went into this matter in middle life and already rich. He had two objects in view. In the first instance he wished to be successful where all the world had failed, and conquer the only animal remaining which man had not subdued. And in the second place he was desirous of making money. He was a man scientifically ignorant; he was quite uneducated beyond the narrow lines of his own craft; but he was full of wooden-headed pluck, and possessed of a mule’s determination.
He started in the right way. He discarded the slow, clumsy, single-topsail, wooden barque, with auxiliary steam, and her fleet of carvel-built rowing-boats, and set off in a steamer of fifty tons, which would tow in the wake of a harpooned finner without breaking the line. He believed that this would not only tire out the whale with quickness, but would also prevent the carcase from sinking to the bottom when life had gone, after its usual fashion.
Captain Svend Foyn’s first experiences must have been exciting. He was frequently towed by some maddened fish at a twenty-knot rate through a heavy sea, with his fore-deck smothered with water up to the bridge. On these occasions the engines would be rung to “full astern,” and the little steamer would hang on in tow for twelve hours at a stretch, and to the jaded sportsman, in search of a new sensation, this method of hunting may be recommended with confidence. But the conclusion was always the same; either Captain Foyn was forced to cut, or the harpoon drew; or the finner died and sunk: at any rate, he never gathered his game.
Time after time his harpoons made fast, and ninety tons of agonised living flesh plucked the little steamer, like a dragging child, across those desolate plains of ocean. Years came and the years went, each dull with disappointment. But yet he did not give in. He mounted artillery, and bombarded the finner with heavy shot, and still without effect; he tried plot after plan, and plan after plot; he expended £20,000 and human limbs in his experiments, and finally, out of all the failures he evolved success. He mounted on the stem-head of his steamer a stunted heavy-breeched gun, which carried an explosive bomb with a huge harpoon, weighing together over eighty English pounds. The idea of playing the finner like a trout was abandoned once and for all. The explosion of the bomb shot it dead; its huge vitality was snappedin a second, and a three-inch warp made fast to the harpoon kept it from sinking, where a thinner whale line would have been snapped.
The strongest fish that swam in all the seas was beaten, and Captain Svend Foyn patented his tactics and took off his oilskins. Then the business part of him came in, and, until his monopoly ceased, his launches were catching a hundred finners a year, which may be valued at £250 apiece.
The fishery has spread since that monopoly granted by law has run out, and other people are permitted now to profit by the schemes evolved from Captain Svend Foyn’s brain. Anywhere where the rice-like animacula on which the whale feeds are to be found, there the little whaling steamers may be seen also, with a look-out man peering from the crow’s nest at their foremast head. In the fjords and bays which lie round that grim coast to eastwards of the North Cape, in Iceland, and even up some of the snug inlets of the Varanger Fjord, are numberless stations where the little steamers can bring their catch for caldrons and axes to resolve into its commercial elements. The finner soon swells after he is dead, and lies on the water like a half-submerged balloon, striped, too, balloon fashion, with gore-like seams. The tail flukes are cut adrift, and he is towed ignominiously stern first, with a wake of oil fanning out from his jaws, and a smell which grows with the days, and beats down the crisp sea air. But whenthe finner is beached, and the axes and spades strip off the blubber from the pink beef below, and cut away the whalebone from the head, then there arises a stink which poisons heaven. Still, custom is everything. The workers toil at the trying-out the oil, at resolving the carcase into manure, and tinned meats, and cow-fodder, and at packing the precious bone, and it never strikes them that a smell is abroad which is almost palpable in its solidness. But use is everything in tackling these sort of scents. We were beginning to find that out for ourselves.
Meanwhile the cold was making us blue. We had amplified our wardrobes by the purchase of a leather coat apiece in Vardö, and we had on these, and slop-chest oilskins, but the frosty gale beat through them all as though they had been gossamer silk. To go below was impossible. The coaster’s ’tween decks was an Aceldama of unfettered sea-sickness. The only warm spot on the spar deck was the engine-room skylight, and that was occupied by a festive Jew carousing with the skipper and a couple of farmers from the Russian side. We did not feel inclined to rejoice with them just then, for, to tell the truth, we were deadly tired. It was ten o’clock at night, and staring daylight, of course. But then it had been staring daylight with us continuously since we crossed the Arctic circle a fortnight before, and as it is hard to put in regular sleep with the sun burning high in the heavens, we had missed many a regular watchbelow. And the reaction was on us then. So we turned in on the deck planks below the green canvas dodgers in front of the coaster’s wheel, and slept solidly and refreshingly for two whole hours.
The hoot of the syren roused us. We had crossed the broad waters of the fjord, and were close in to the other side. High bare mountains covered with snow that was dappled with hummocky rock rose sheer up from the surf. The sky above was gray and cold. The place was indescribably sterile and savage. At one point, cowering at the foot of the mountains, a little white building stood out like some roosting sea-fowl against a background of dark craggy rock. We were heading towards it, and gradually as we closed with the coast it shaped itself into a church. It was Oscarkirche, which marks the sea end of the frontier line which delimits Russia and Norway.
We shut off steam here, and a boat came out to us from the beach. There is a Russian fishing village in a masked bay to the eastward, to which we sent a pedlar ashore with a travelling box of buttons and German knives. Poor man, he did not seem to anticipate a large rush of business, if one could judge from his face as he lowered himself and his pack into the dancing boat. And yet probably his coming was the event of the summer. It is hard to conceive a more desolate place than that Russian fishing village. But it was a summer settlement only. In winter it was deserted. And the Russian Government do theirbest to foster its puny trade. It is a free port; there is no customs duty on either imports or exports: canny Russia does not wish to thrust available trade into the hands of its Norwegian neighbour next door.
Away we steamed again just outside the spouting reefs, towards the Jacob’s Elv. The wind was blowing straight down on us from Polar ice, and the cold was bitter. A whale swam parallel to us, some half mile to seaward, sending up at intervals spouts of feathery gray-blue fog.
We put into many dreary little coves, where a handful of fisher-folk, with their backs against the snow and the grim walls of stone, dragged a small living from the cold waters which lapped against their thresholds. We lay off the beaches whilst these came off and did their traffic, and then on again through the reefs to the next stop. Wretched as these villages were, their populace had always spirit on hand to wrangle over politics, and no Irish Nationalist could hate his “dacent Protestant” neighbour as thoroughly and efficiently as one of these semi-savages who held “Left” opinions could loathe another who belonged to the “Right.” And they carried this distaste beyond their social relations. They had the “boycott” in full working order; “Right” would not trade with “Left” under any pretence whatever; and if Left could push “Right” a little farther towards starvation than his normal half-fed average, he considered he was doing the State a personal service.
At another time we could have moralised over this self-hindrance principle with weight and dignity, but just then we were too wrapped up in our own discomforts and the prospects of worse to follow to worry very much over the foolishness of other fools. The chill was making us shudder. The grim, savage hills of stone seemed to speak of an infinity of hardships and wretchedness before we sighted the waters of the Bothnia. And each of us told the other so often that he “liked it,” that the very repetition of the statement gave it the lie. Alone of all the ship’s company the Jew did not mind. He sat down below, and nipped brandy all the live-long night, and roared songs in all the tongues of Pentecost. He was a most cheery fellow.
We were off the entrance to Jarfjord a little after midnight. The sun was high above the poop-staff. The air was clear and icy, and spray leaped in jets from reefs on every side of us. The entrance to the fjord lay amongst a huddle of glacier-worn rocks, with a great table mountain set up in the middle of them, all snow-clad, all entirely sterile. The little coaster wound in and out amongst the reefs with easy confidence. Two small whitened islets, alive with sea-fowl, masked the entrance; and spouts of mist like the blowing of whales rose up from reefs awash on either beam. It was a giddy piece of pilotage. In the crevices, snow lay down to the water’s edge, all browned with dust. It was hardto imagine any spot more savage, and grim, and desolate.
But a change came swiftly. Once we had passed the mouth of this sea-river, and green tints grew on the rock walls, which deepened as we steamed on. It was only slime at first, but then came patches of moss, then bosky lawns of grass, and dwarf shrubs in the more sheltered corries. The snow line on the hillsides rose towards the summits. The snow patches in the crevices below grew smaller and more few. Then in a tiny bay we saw a cabin of logs set in a glow of green. Here was young rye sprouting. And yet that horrible coast line of the Varanger which we had just left was only two miles distant, and by straining the eye we could see the horizon whiten where the seas creamed over the guardian reefs.
TheGatesof Russian Lapland.
TheGatesof Russian Lapland.
The walls of the fjord were still high and some quarter of a mile apart. The lane of water ran between them, straight as a canal. But always as we went on mountains grew lower. Presently at the mouth of a contributory valley we opened out on a small settlement of felt-roofed wooden houses, with what looked like colossal pink sausages drawn up on the beach before them. As we drew nearer a waft of odour came to us down a slant of the wind, and we laughed in pleasure because we were going to meet again old friends that we thought we had left behind for good. The pink sausages were flensed Finner whales. In the wooden buildings they were tryingout the blubber, sorting and packing the precious bone, and working up the beef into its many useful shapes. And the smell of it all filled the air till one could almost dredge it out in handfuls.
Once more we steamed on, beyond sight of the sea now, with the mountains drooping to mere uplands on the fjord sides, with the scrub trees replaced by forests of graceful twenty-foot birches, which covered the gentle slopes. The air was warm—warm as an English summer. And, note well the occasion, the first mosquito came to us. We hailed him as a friend then. Hayter had seen him last in Florida, I had heard his music a year before on the Gold Coast, and we both mentioned that the mosquitoes had no power over us, that our skins were invulnerable. Little did we know the biting power of this Northern monster; bitterly were we to learn it.
The fjord narrowed, the little steamer anchored, and we put ashore with some score of others. Our slender baggage was to go round to Elvenaes, on the Syd Varanger, but we had elected to walk across the intervening neck of land.
And now with the memory big in us of that grim savage coast not a dozen miles away, we stepped out down a veritable country lane between slender birches, with linnets singing behind the foliage on either hand. There were oak ferns and bracken under the trees, and in the open meads, buttercups, pansies, cow-parsley, forget-me-nots, wild pelargonium, dandelions,ranunculi, bright pink campions, and cranberries, with everlasting moss, and other mosses, and grotesque lichens in all abundance. The comely woods were musical with birds, and portioned off by rustic fences. Here and there were gates, slung on hinges, and then would come a fine trim house of logs covered with painted weather boarding. We might have been walking in the Tyrol. And when we remembered that the Arctic circle was over two hundred miles farther to the southward, and the desolation we had come through still close at hand to the north, we had to grant that Nature could perform more white magic than we ever credited her with before.
The narrowing fjord ended in a rolling bay, and against a boat-house built there was a great cemetery of reindeer horns, heaped up as things of no beauty or value. A stream went on beside the road, babbling into idyllic trout-pools. Cow-bells tinkled from within the woods. The passengers from the coaster had branched off singly and in groups till only seven of us were left: the roystering Jew, a gloomy young farmer in high boots, with his sick wife, a nondescript girl, and our two selves. At intervals we talked, and the Jew gathered flowers for the women, and then we came to a large house of wood.
It was exactly three o’clock in the morning, but in this sunlit land no one troubles much with bed, and the owner was standing in his doorway to take the air. The Jew made discourse—all tongues seemedequally facile to him,—and the householder came out and shook us all by the hand, and insisted that we should come inside. The women went off in charge of his women-kind, but us men he took into the parlour, where we gazed upon a picture of Martin Luther, some Sloyd work, and an elaborate stove, and watched the farmer grow drowsy over yarns of bear-hunting in the winter months. But presently our host set before us beer—delicious Bayersk öl—which we all drank standing, with a heartfelt cry of “skaal”! We wanted that beer badly, and it came to us as a pleasant surprise. We fancied we had left such luxuries behind us for many a long week; for Lapland is what they call in America “a Prohibition State.”
The Jew by this time had quite assumed our chaperonage, and though inclined to linger over his beer and to hint at another bottle, said he would come with us when we decided to start. Our fellow-travellers came to the door to see us off. The sick woman had grown quite a pretty colour from her walk and from the mild excitement of drinking milk. And we took leave of them all with handshakes as though they were ancient friends. Finally, the Jew tore himself away, and we set out again towards Elvenaes under his convoy.
He was a truly joyous creature, this strayed Hebrew, full of carnal appetites, but revelling in the beauties of this Arctic oasis which we were passingthrough. He discoursed poetry, time-tables, natural history, and the price of furs all in the same breath. He was full of surprising moods (and I fear a trifle drunk), and he swung his brandy-bottle in one hand, and carried a black umbrella tucked under the other arm. He knew all about our expedition and bubbled with advice: there were no horses procurable even if horses would have been any good; there was a Russian Boundary Commission at work in the neighbourhood, which had mopped up all the horses, and all the boats, and all the available men; the Neiden route to Enare was quite impracticable: our way was to push up the Pasvik Elv, and if we would leave it to him he would see that we got both boats and men, even if he had to impress Russian soldiers for our carriers. He was a most liberal Jew—with promises, and other people’s beer.
Pines were growing by the wayside now, and heath, and delicate shrubs. The road was a real road, metalled and embanked, with wooden bridges over the streams, and stone culverts to carry away the water. Low wooded hills rose on either side, and the notes of cuckoos floated down to us faintly over their tree-tops. The scenery was delicately beautiful. We might have been walking through a park, suitable (as the advertisements say) for a nobleman or country gentleman.
The one drawback to our perfect pleasure were the thickening swarms of mosquitoes. The Jewsuffered from them terribly. But even they did not damp his spirits. He slapped the insect pests from his crimson face with a whisk of green leaves, whistled a stirring march, waved the brandy-bottle as a drum major waves his cane, and stepped out finely.
As we went on, higher mountains came into view ahead, violet-tipped on their wooded summits. The road wound stolidly on over bridges, and embankments, and hollows. Lakes appeared round which we had to skirt, and then other lakes with wooded islands, and cascades tinkling down into them from the hills. The Jew struck up the Soldier’s March out of Gounod’sFaustto words of his own to put spirit into the pace, and grew more hot, and slapped at the mosquitoes more busily than ever. He gave us names for all the lakes we passed, and all the rivers, and all the hills, and even went so far in his courtesy as to invent titles for streams that did not negotiate a dozen gallons of water to the hour. The guide mania was strong in him, and he was touching us on a tender place.
Gradually, by failing to notice his remarks, and by skirmishing off the road to hunt for the nests of birds, we contrived to let the festive one draw ahead, and for the next two miles we marched on together in peaceful enjoyment. We had crossed the divide; we were heading down into the beautiful valley of the Pasvik Elv where it joins the Syd Varanger;and we were almost within touch of this mysterious Lapland, which the wise of Vardö had done so much to keep us away from.
But we had not done with the Jew yet. A dip of the road and a sudden turn brought us in view of a gorgeous vista up the wooded Pasvik valley. The silver river sat between two sloping walls of greenery, from which the cuckoos called; and where it forked, a white turreted chapel reared up from beneath an umber cliff. In the distance beyond, the whole river leaped down rocks in a cascade of foaming cream. And there on a bench by the roadside sat our Hebrew incubus waiting for us. He raised the brandy bottle, swigged out the dregs, and quoted Heine. Then “Boris Gleb” said he, and waved the empty flagon towards the pure white tracery of the chapel. And “Russia” quoth he, and flung the bottle towards the rearing wall of trees beyond the river. He slid off on to the turf, and settled himself luxuriously for a doze, and we annexed the bench. We stayed there an hour absorbing the beauties of that scene, and I think speculating not a little on the unknown Lapland which lay beyond. And then the tinkle of a bell roused us. A horse came past, trotting up the road; and after him came a Lapp, with a bridle in his hand, trying to catch the horse.
We got up and moved away. The Jew was still sleeping on the turf under the sunlight. It was the last we ever saw of him, and although we are in hisdebt for beer and fiction, I do not think we ever want to see him more. A little farther on we came across a big shingle-roofed house with outbuildings, set on a neck of land above the narrows, which commands a prospect up and down the river; and there we found entertainment. It was half-past seven in the morning, so we had supper and went to bed.
We made the most of those two unexpected beds. We did not come across beds again for many a weary mile.
Deep-sea Fishing
Deep-sea Fishing
The Lapp in Lapland has his moments of personal cleanliness, as will be remarked in their place. The Russian Lapp, who resides outside Lapland proper, especially if he be of the fisher variety, scorns the outward application of soap and water. In summer a good cake of dirt, especially if it be well smeared in with tar, goes far to ward off the incessant gnawings of the mosquito; and in winter, when the mercury of a thermometer moves always sluggishly far below zero, what poor man would willingly strip off an extra coat of clothing?
The Russian Lapp indeed has few true and Lappish attributes. He resembles far more nearly the ordinary Russianmoujik. He would even wear the orthodox knee-boot if he could afford it, but he is usually in a state of abject poverty, and attires himself in whatever rags may come to hand.
He is not in the least picturesque. Cover up his face and hair, and put him in a Bradford street, andhe would pass for a British tramp, without work, or any inclination to find work. But his gipsyish face, with its black, beady eyes, and high cheek-bones, might betray him somewhat, and anyway the cut of his hair, which is worn along the eyebrows in front and fringing the coat collar (à la moujik) behind, would cause the more curious of Bradford wayfarers to turn round and stare.
The Lapp is not much in the reindeer business here on the Russian side. To begin with, the country is ill-adapted to the raising of deer, as it is mostly made up of lake and swamp; and as a further reason, the demand for venison here would be small, since the Russian orthodox church prohibits meat for quite half the year. So fishing becomes the Lapp’s chief industry, and by fishing he manages to wriggle along just beyond the grip of starvation.
He permeates the lower reaches of the Pasvik Elv and the shores of the Syd Varanger Fjord in considerable quantities, and there is a settlement of him at Boris Gleb, just below the falls of the Pasvik, round the white turreted church which we had seen from the Jarfjord road. At Boris Gleb he is at his best. He is under the direct eyebrow of Holy Russia at Boris Gleb, and has his place in statistics as an orthodox member of the Greek Church. His houses are of wood, raised above the damp of floods on curious three-foot piles, and the elements of sanitation are taught to him by official pressure. He isnot obtrusively sanitary, even in Boris Gleb, which is by way of being a model village, with a rather high-class patron saint, whom the devout from afar honour with pilgrimages; but he wears there a kind of official “company manners,” and he is quaintly ready to be stared at by the foreigner.
In the Elvenaes neighbourhood he is known as a Skolte, or bald Lapp, because though in the present year of grace he wears an ordinary head of hair, at one time a skin disease ran through the community and made the heads as bare as a boulder of ice-worn rock.
Now under the brilliant glare of a summer sun, Boris Gleb is not a good place to visit. Gazed at from afar—say from above Elvenaes, as we saw it first—it is a fairy chapel set in beauty. Looked at close-to, it is merely a flimsy building of wood, freakishly architected, and painted an indifferent white. The inside is tawdry. The priest is a vulgar showman who would bring out his mother’s corpse for a fee, and the interesting model Skolte Lapps are just about as artificial as all the rest of the paraphernalia. One does not exactly blame either parson or flock; they are the possessors of a spectacle, and they exhibit it for a living; only one kicks one’s self for going to stare.
But Boris Gleb during one night of the long dark gloom of winter shows a very different scene. On the Russian 6th of January (the 18th by our reckoning) there takes place the annual Daubsfest, and from over the bleak snows of the fjeld come in the reindeer sledges of Lapps who hold to the Orthodox faith. For a week previous to the 6th, they are straggling in towards the sacred place, and they crowd into the wooden houses of the Skolte Lapps settlement, and spend much time in prayer. On the 5th of January there is a solemn fast. On the day of the Daubsfest they all come out of the warm lamp-lit houses into the Arctic gloom, men and women both, treading barefoot in the snow, all clad merely in a single linen shirt. They are girt under the arm-pits by a stout woollen scarf, and in that bitter windy cold they march three times round the church, solemnly chanting. The priest in his stiff embroidered robes leads, and he is a showman no longer now, but an earnest Russian pope; and with him go the surpliced acolytes bearing candles. Three times round the white church they move, the icy wind whipping the bare bodies of the singers, and the snow curls wreathing round their ankles. And then they go off to the middle of the frozen river, and the ceremony proceeds.
A hole has been dug with hatchets through the ice, and one by one the Lapps come forward from the circle of worshippers, and the attendants take them in charge. They lay hold of the scarf beneath the arms, and the pilgrim is soused once, twice, and a third time deep into the cold black water whichscours so swiftly beneath the ice; and each time the pope waves the three-armed crucifix before the pilgrim’s eyes before they go under. And when all have been immersed, they go back to the houses, men and women both, and rub themselves with cloths, and put on deerskin cloaks, and drink scalding tea in all abundance; and they begin on the morrow to collect upon their persons another twelve months’ dirt.
But whilst it is in action, that Daubsfest at Boris Gleb is an impressive spectacle. The crowd of shirt-clad Lapps standing there in the cold and dark of the Arctic night, the faint light of the candles and torches flaring in the wind, the long-haired pope in his stiff, embroidered vestments bright with barbaric colours, the aurora borealis burning with its unspeakable glories far off on the Northern sky, and the great white church looming weirdly through the gloom, make up a sight that few who have seen it will ever be inclined to forget.
Daubsfestat Boris Gleb.
Daubsfestat Boris Gleb.
At Elvenaes once more a change of plan was forced upon us, and this time it was the Czar who interfered. His Imperial Majesty had sent a Boundary Commission to fix the frontier line between his possessions and those of his cousin of Norway, and almost all the available men of Boris Gleb and Elvenaes had gone to the Commissioner’s camp either as servants, or advisers, or mere camp followers.Consequently the passage to Enare See up the Pasvik Elv, which requires many arms to wield the paddles and make the portages, was debarred. The utmost force we could rake up was two dilapidated Russian Skolte Lapps, who would ferry us in a canoe by the fjords and rivers to the Neiden, where we must trust to luck in finding carriers who would take us through overland.
We accepted the alternative with philosophy, and told them we would start at once. They said “certainly,” and proceeded to waste the next two hours in elaborately doing nothing. We sat down and smoked and watched them: they were most laborious over it; they sweated and perspired; and at last, having completed nothing most satisfactorily, they announced smilingly that they were ready to get under way, and we stepped on board.
The little craft was very much like a Canadian canoe in her lines, and floated corkily. She was stained a rich saddle-colour with tar, which came off in generous patches where one leaned against it. The younger Lapp (whom we called Morris, through his resemblance to an acquaintance) sat on the floor-boards forward, with his back in the curve of the bow, and sculled with a pair of paddles which worked in withy beckets on thole pins. Feodor, the skipper, squatted aft, with his paddles also in beckets, and laboured on whichever side was required. As no more paddles were available, we two English posedas passengers, and lay in magnificence amidship on a luxurious couch of young green birch shoots, with our worldly goods and chattels bestowed fore and aft of us. The canoe just held her load, and there was nothing much to spare, and the Lapps occupied another half hour in getting her trimmed to their satisfaction. Then Morris pushed out into the swirling rapids of the Pasvik, and we left behind us Elvenaes, and those who waved us farewell, probably for always.
That journey down the Syd Varanger lingers in the memory. A blazing sun dwelt overhead, in a sky as blue as one could see in Tripoli. The fjord sides were sloped in graceful curves and draped with comely greenery. The cuckoo cried to us from the woods. The air above the deep-blue water was dancing with heat, and flights of whirring cormorants and duck gave it life. I think, too, that our sense of comfort was accentuated by the knowledge that not a dozen miles to the northward the cold waves of the Varanger chilled the fishers to the bone, and frozen cliffs and snowy ridges glared icily at the sky. Comfort and complacency depend so much upon comparisons.
The absence of mosquitoes, too, was very grateful. Our faces were all mottled in close patterns from the bitings of the day before, and we told ourselves then that we had paid the initiation fee and had earned immunity for the future. We thought that past experience had taught us all about mosquitoes, butwe were destined to learn a deal more about the Northern variety of the breed before we were through at the other side of Arctic Lapland.
The two Lapp canoe men provided us in the meanwhile with plenty of food for observation. Feodor was the wily one. Work was not a thing Feodor loved, and he shirked it like a diplomatist. One or other of his thole pins was constantly carrying away. That naturally had to be replaced. To do this he unshipped his paddles (which had blades shaped like the “Warre” oar at Eton) and clambered forward over the baggage, and sorted amongst the green boughs which formed our couch, till he found a piece of stick of suitable diameter. He had got a reliable eye, and always chose one that would be certain to break if properly handled; and then he went aft again and whittled it accurately down to size with his sheath-knife. Then he would give the withy beckets a thoughtful overhaul, and by the time he had got his paddles shipped again and in the water, he had usually earned a good twenty minutes’ shirk. He was a wrinkled little gnome, this skipper of ours, incredibly dirty, and brimming with good humour. He had one available eye that gleamed like a bird’s, and over the other he wore a grimy patch made fast with a piece of rope yarn round his lank black hair. Later on, when we got into a breeze, this patch kept blowing up and caused him much annoyance. It seemed that the eye itself was missing, and the windgot into the empty socket and gave him cold in the head. For which very sufficient reason he shipped his starboard paddle and held the patch in place with the spare hand, so as to keep out the draught. He was a wonderfully agile “sugarer” was this elderly Skolte Lapp.
Morris was different. He plugged away in the bows with never a grunt and never an easy. He rowed about thirty strokes to the minute, just in the water and out again, with a bent arm and without much pretence at a swing. One of us gauged these matters with a professional eye, but we did not feel inclined just then to set to work and reform the rowing style of Lapland. He was a whimsical fellow, this same Morris, always grinning at something, and always shaking back his wispy black hair from the front of his eyes. We tried to tempt him into travelling up-country with us, but he shuddered at the idea of getting out of touch with his birthplace.
We turned out of the Syd Varanger into Bogofjord and crept up by the flank of gray walls of naked upright rock against a strong ebb-tide, and amused ourselves by taking occasional compass-bearings, and marvelling at the inaccuracy of the published maps. Once we put ashore on a shelving rock covered with mussels, and the crew lunched off kippered salmon, which they ripped from the family joint in pieces with their fingers as they required it; and afterwardsthey sought recreation by scratching themselves thoroughly for half an hour. Then Morris put on a pair of fingerless, brown-skin gloves to keep his delicate paws from blistering, and we started again. A brown team of eider duck rustled past us,ventre à l’eau, heading for the sea, and then a school of porpoises surged by the canoe in chase of a shoal of flickering silver fish.
Swarms of mosquitoes accompanied the canoe in a noisy biting cloud, and it was some gloomy satisfaction to note that the Lapps suffered equally with ourselves. Feodor indeed suffered so much annoyance that he actually knocked off work to tie a grimy kerchief carefully round his head, which it took him twenty minutes to accomplish before he had managed it to his complete satisfaction.
Broods of duck, some familiar, some strange, began to flight, and we sighed and broke the tenth commandment. But the gun perforce had to stay in its mackintosh housing. The Norwegian Government (very properly) keeps a fatherly eye on all the game within its marches, and has appointed vigorous close-seasons for all except the outlaw wolf, the bear, the lynx, the fox, and wild cat. And they ram home the edict by a good healthy fine for wrongdoers, and a reward for the informer. Once over the Russian border it would be different. There are no game laws in Arctic Lapland. There is very little law of any description. We could bag there whatever camein our way. In fact, Feodor assured us with an impish grin that we might shoot a Laplander should we feel so disposed, provided always we ate him afterwards so as to conceal the carcass from a possible public view. Feodor, the one-eyed, was occasionally rather grisly in his ideas of wit and humour.
A heavy, drenching rain-squall came on and blotted out all view, and beat up a small, steep sea, which gave Feodor all he could do to keep the little canoe from being swamped; and as it was, we two passengers had to bale industriously to keep the water under. But we did not mind; the mosquitoes were driven away, and it was an ecstasy to be without them; the rain, too, cooled our itching bites.
But when we crossed the big fjord for the last time, and turned up between the low alluvial banks of the Neiden Elv, the wet squall blew over, and the sun blazed out again, making creation steam. The mosquitoes came back promptly and punctually, and got to work. On the mud banks, flocks of woodcock were digging for supper. Small black ducks took their fluffy broods for excursions on the broad shallow river, where salmon leaped for sheer sportiveness. Wading fowl plodded and cried in the adjacent marshes, and from the graceful birch forests which covered the alluvial flats, cuckoos hooted news of stolen nests. All the Arctic world was rejoicing in its summer.
And then civilisation began. There was a scrapof fencing here, and a rail to dry grass on there. A tiny hay barn on stilts perched gingerly on a promontory, and farther on was a hut with a man building wood sledges before his door. Then came five houses on a bluff, spread over half a mile, then two more single dwellings, and afterwards naked river bank and scrub forest. We had passed the thick of Neiden town.
The shallow river was narrowing, and it became harder to push the canoe up against the stream. Presently some rapids showed in black and white ahead, and Feodor put the canoe’s nose on a bank, and announced with a heartfelt sigh that the voyage was over. We got ashore, we and our chattels, and within an hour we had found a hospitable roof.
We spent some time there in talk, and then we set off along a narrow, muddy, trail up-stream parallel to the rapids. It seemed there was a man with influence who had a farm farther on, and if any one could collect carriers to take our goods across to Enare See, he was the man to do it. So we tramped along the trail till we came to the river again above the rapids, and then ferried over and called on the man with influence. He got out of bed to receive us; yes, he could do this thing we desired—for a consideration; and so we bought his influence, and bade him set about his collection there and then.
We walked on up the bank of the river to the Falls of the Neiden, where the best salmon pools lie.There was a Russian chapel on the way—a rude, bare cabin of naked logs, with a shuttered window, and a three-armed cross on one of its gables. The lower arm of these crosses is always on the slant, as by Russian tradition Christ had one leg shorter than the other. The Finns and Norwegians round here are Lutherans to a man, and they look upon everything outside Lutheranism as degrading superstition. So naturally they do nothing to keep the chapel in repair. And the stray Lapps from the Russian side, to whom it belongs, are too miserably poor to notice much the chapel’s squalor and wretchedness.
There was a graveyard round this lonely fane of an alien faith—a bare, unenclosed patch of mounds, each surmounted by an axe, or shovel, or some implement used by the departed during his earthly life, and it struck me that heathendom and Christianity are sometimes very closely akin. Not a year before I had seen graves in Central African villages similarly decorated.
Farther on were the falls; and though they were too long to be impressive from a mere jaded sight-seer’s point of view, they were most appetising when we considered the pools and rapids with the eye of a fisher for salmon. And here again was another grave, that of a man carried down the river from above, and stranded dank and drowned on a jutting rock of the foss. There was no headstone to speak of his fate and virtues, the mouldering remains of the usual overground coffin showed the manner of his sepulture. We laid the compass on the mound, and found it was orientated accurately magnetic east and west, not allowing for the variation.
So the man had been buried with care and Christian hands, and not bundled into a box and covered up where he lay. And yet he had not been thought worth taking down to one of the Lutheran graveyards on the lower fjords. We wondered much what his story might be, but we could form no very reasonable hypothesis, nor could we find any person round there in the Neiden district who would tell us. They all reddened and said they did not know.
There was a quaintly cumbersome pipe on this lonely grave, and as it happened we were both collectors of the curious in smoking utensils. It was a temptation to carry it away. Let it be recounted then as something of a small virtue that we left the pipe where it lay.
Feodorand Morris—two Skilte Lapps
Feodorand Morris—two Skilte Lapps
The salmon fisheries of the Neiden River are jealously guarded assets. Some are held by riparian proprietors whose rights go to the imaginary line of mid-stream. These are Norwegians and Finns for the most part, though they might be Hebrews from the carefulness with which they strive not to be defrauded of a single fish. And the balance is State’s land, rented out in the usual way. Nets are abundant, set out to stakes, with one end on shore; but rod-fishing is growing commoner. The local rod-fisherman, however, is but a crude production. His “pole” is comely enough, though heavy, but he persists in fishing a colossal fly of the “Jock Scott” order, ten times too big, and he uses it as though the water were a gong and the salmon could be attracted only by noise. Once hooked, the fish either breaks him or is jerked skyward like a silver bird. He would not play a whale; he does not know that such a process exists.
The Neiden fisherman goes out in a canoe, and his wife or a friend poles him in or about the rapids. The fish do not run big—a twenty-pounder is rare—but there are plenty of them, and the local artist annexes just as many as a very green amateur has any right to expect. Salmon-fishing to him has much the same interest as mowing swamp-grass for his cows, or cutting cord-wood for the winter: it is part of the daily labour, and it never occurs to him to look upon it as a sport. In fact the item of “sport” has been left out of his education; he looks with suspicion on any one who hankers after it; and, as a consequence, asks prices for using a rod on his bit of a stream which would be dear on the Namsen or any other crack salmon rivers of accessible Western Norway. It is not that he is averse to fingering the kroner note. On the contrary, he has a very great affection for money. But he has an exalted notion of the value of things, and, moreover, he is woodenly conservative. He likes to handle the salmon himself. He splits it open and kippers it, after which he stores the worst specimens away for future personal consumption, and packs off the balance to some place on the Vavanger fjord, where a steamer calls which will exchange it either for coin or groceries. His father did this, and his son will do it also, unless by the son’s time no fish should be left in the river, as at the present rate of destruction may very well happen.
But even had the fishing prospects of the NeidenRiver been ten times more appetising, they would not have induced us to make a stay there. The interior of Lapland lay beyond—a place of great lakes and rivers, of vast deer-packs and nomad herders; and we hungered to be amongst it all. Over night—under the blaze of a twelve o’clock sun—we had commissioned a man to find us carriers, and in the morning we crossed the river below that lonely Russian chapel, we and our goods, and in ten minutes the real troubles of the journey had fairly begun.
Never were such carriers. They were all able-bodied Finns, though one (and he was the strongest) had a hump like a Brahmin cow, another had a hare-lip, and the headman possessed a most virulent squint; but they were the most impracticable creatures that ever slouched over the face of the earth. Our luggage was not heavy; two negro carriers on the Congo or the Gold Coast would have capered with the whole lot of it; but through a wish for long quick marches, we had made it up into three light loads. There were two sacks, and a canvas-covered box containing a few tins, some cartridges, and four pounds of cake tobacco.
Now we both knew something about packs and loads in other parts of the world; but the Finn carrier was new to us, and his ways were strange; and it is always dangerous to introduce customs from a distance for consumption in a country whose difficulties you do not understand. So although we madesuggestions, we did not insist on them, and the carriers muddled on with the preparations in their own way.
The neat, rectangular, canvas-covered box was eliminated first. We had looked upon it as an ideal “load”; in Africa there would have been a vigorous scramble for it; but the Finns said it was impossible to tackle anyhow. They scouted all suggestions of slinging, or carrying it hammock fashion, and fetched out another sack and made a re-stowal. Naturally the bundle so contrived was about as impossible to carry on human shoulders as a live porcupine would have been. So a blanket was taken out of one of the sacks and used as a pad. And next the sacks were objected to, and their contents split up, till finally our possessions were made into seven bundles of much fragility.
They worked hard over making this muddle; they took two mortal hours over it, and frequently called upon us for assistance; but finally they limbered up with the help of abundance of thongs of reindeer hide and rope, and we put backs to the river and set off on our march.
The first halt came at the end of the first three hundred yards; a load had very naturally began to shift, and they all sat down to readjust it. The second halt came at the quarter mile, and then the stoppages became more frequent. We came to a standstill eight several times before we had covered the first mile,and expended exactly two hours and a half of time in doing it. And as during all this time the sun was blazing upon us with scorching force and the mosquitoes were biting like dogs, we were not unspeakably happy.
This start up to the fjeld was over sandy river-beds, through streams, swamps, and neck-high scrub. A month earlier the country had been under snow; a week before the tree buds had not burst; and here were dwarf birches and the Arctic willows in full leaf, and barely so much as a patch of white left even in the crannies of the distant hills. The Arctic summer has a great deal of work to get through in a very short space of time, and rushes its climatic effects. But, worst of all, the mosquito season had opened ten days before, and was in full swing. And such mosquitoes! Their cousins of Africa and the Southern States were nothing to them. They came in their milliards, gaunt gray fellows, without one grain of fear for death. They got their trunks inserted in some unlucky pore, and presently their bodies, from the wing-sockets backwards, would grow into transparent scarlet blobs. We were covered with blood splashes from slaying these vampires, and sore with slapping at them; but it was some selfish consolation to see that the men of the place suffered equally. Each of the Finns carried a bottle of brown Stockholm tar, which dangled from the waist-belt against his knife, and with the contents of this he liberallyanointed both face and hands. But this did little more than convert the wearer into an animated fly-trap. We employed tar for the complexion ourselves till we were nearly through to the other side of the country, and then we gave it up and used it for the boots alone, and noted no difference in our discomforts. We had veils each of us, but these were not often available. They got entangled by passing shrubs; the enemy would get inside once every minute or so, however carefully the edges were tucked in, and this entailed a hunt and a blood splash, and, finally, the mesh blurred the view, which was a fatal objection.
There was no vestige of path to guide our caravan, and the man with a squint who led was more than once at a loss, and we had to give him hints from the compass. This ground is never travelled over in summer, and but rarely in winter. The Enare district is entered and left by the Pasvik Elv. The going was very rough. Occasionally we got out on to dry ground and scrambled over tumbled boulders, or groped our way down slippery rock faces; but for the most part we trod quaking marsh, which either swung under our weight, or let us through into brown tarns of slime. At the outset we were inclined to envy the Finns, who, in their national boot, which reaches to mid-thigh, went over a good deal of swamp dry-shod; but when first one and then another got ducked to the middle, we beganto see that there were advantages in less defensive foot-gear.
That first stretch across the fjeld was a typical piece of primeval ground. No one except nature had tampered with it since the beginning of time. Even where the surface was dry there was often a liquid substratum, and little mud volcanoes rose from dessication cracks which were a mile away from the nearest open swamp. But the desolation of the place was cruel. There were no birds, no animals, nothing but the humming insects. Only once during that day did I hear a solitary curlew’s scream, and that seemed wafted to our ears from an infinite distance.
We crossed the Russian frontier in the middle of a lake-pitted moor, and thought with some grim amusement of the foreign office passports with their hieroglyphical visés, lying packed with the tobacco in the middle of the humpback’s load. The marches of Holy Russia are not so carefully patrolled as the stay-at-home blood-and-thunder novelist would have one to suppose. And just about there we halted for perhaps the fiftieth time that day and made a temporary camp.