TheSorcererand the Portrait
TheSorcererand the Portrait
That grimy little person, Marie, guided us back to our other men, and whether she did it out of sheer good-nature, or for the sake of the one of us she was pleased to admire, or for Johann’s sake, it was hard to discover. It seemed that the untutored child of the fjeld could be as arrant a flirt as any young woman with the advantage of half a dozen milliners and a London season’s education. But for all that, if there was a breeze blowing, and one did not come too close to her, she really was in her way a pleasant little companion. One could hardly call her good-looking; she was too weather-beaten for that. And she followed the fashion of the fjeld in being more easy than trim in her apparel. Moreover, she was as irresponsible as a cat in her personal habits, which was atraitone did not get used to all at once. But, as I say, she had her attractions, and though one was inclined to smile at her waddling run at the beginning of a march, one regarded it withmore respect at the end of the fortieth mile, when it was no more clumsy and no more waddling than it had been at the outset.
Marie led us through river and swamps, through forest and ravine, through all the naked loneliness of the fjeld, with never a scrap of hesitation, never more than a brief glance round when we headed a rise. She knew the wilderness as a hunting-man may know a country here at home. And she led us to the rest-hut which Johann had described, with never a deviation from the bee-line except where the corrugation of the country made curves a necessity.
Pat, with more stubble and more grin, and Pedr, with a smile if possible more beautiful than ever, were at the door to welcome us. Inside, our solid goods were laid out in an orderly row; the brown canvas sacks and the chronically sodden blankets were hung up on the drying-beam above the fire; and the room was filled with a delicious mosquito-proof smoke. It felt quite like a home-coming.
We inducted Marie to a seat on a pile of springy birch-boughs, which the excellent Pat had brought in to form his own bed, and we set before her of our best, which did not amount to much. I think it was the first time she had ever tasted larks in aspic, and unless I am much mistaken she will not greatly regret if it was the last. One thing she did appreciate though, and that was theWindward’sslop-chest tobacco. She saw the black cake pass from hand tohand; she drew her knife from its sheath and held out eager fingers; and when she had shredded up a sufficiency and got her iron-lined wooden pipe in full blast, it was a pleasant sight to see her. The smoke exuded from her lips and nostrils in sleek, gray clouds, and the wrinkles in her grimy, weather-beaten little face wreathed themselves into a smile of ecstatic contentment.
The question of sleeping-quarters obtruded itself. We had an acquaintance with the Lapp’s casual way of regarding such matters, but we still had (from the conventions of our upbringing) some small spasm of hesitation in offering a spinster guest a shake-down on the floor of a hut containing five full-grown men. We discussed the advisability of turning out ourselves and camping elsewhere with the carriers, and leaving Marie in the orthodox virgin seclusion. But she took the matter out of our hands very simply. She said she must be getting back to her endless work with the deer-pack. She had sat down for an hour on Pat’s couch of birch-shoots, and this seemed all the rest she cared for after her gentle forty-mile stroll. She shook hands with us limply all round, and then went into the sunny midnight outside. Hayter and I instinctively took off our caps, but I am afraid she did not know it was intended as a piece of courtesy, because she doubled up in a fit of merriment by way of response. And then Johann went out and walked by her side till they came tothe edge of the scrub willows, and I think she appreciated Johann’s attentions best, because she understood them more. They stopped there and made their further adieux, and then the squat little figure waved its hand for the last time, and disappeared in the cover, and Johann stood stupidly staring at the place where she had vanished.
We went back into the hut and sat down on the benches. The aroma of the little woman’s presence clung to the place, and we could not help thinking of the endless round which had made up her life and would make up her future. Her ancestry dazzled one. Her forefathers were old at a date when the Romans laid down the first legend as a foundation for their history. They came of a fine, crusted, Ural-Altaic stock, who were accustomed to look upon the Adam-and-Eve family as vulgar parvenus. And yet they were people without observable pride or ostentation. They had no monuments, no books, no sculptured or written history. They could look back on neither a nobility nor kings. They had always been hunters and herders, and by reason of this had never acquired the gregarious idea. They were a people of camp-communities, living on their deer, and the camps were always small, because many deer cannot find pasturage in one locality. By reason of this it has never occurred to them to be patriotic, and, as a consequence, when oppression came in their way, they have always beenoppressed. In a nation of warriors the small men get weeded out by the chances of battle. In a community which has never fought, the stature of the race deteriorates. The Lapps have never been warriors. They have never even been a nation.
As the world increased in the easy lands of the South, so have the Lapps through the centuries been ever squeezed at its verge towards the bleak, unknown North. It is but rarely they have consented to band together and raise objection. The Norwegians made them serfs by proclamation in the ninth century, and serfs they remained, contentedly enough, so long as the ill-usage dealt out to them was not over-brutal. When they could stand it no longer, they took refuge in the savage forest-dingles, and made expeditions for houghing their enemies’ cattle and burning down their wooden homesteads. By this means they regained a wandering independence; but in the fourteenth century the Norskmen again coveted a subject race, and made systematic raids on the nomads, and again wrote them down as serfs in their census. And in the sixteenth century the Swedes followed suit. But only a few of the Lapps were caught. The great majority were still free wanderers on the fjeld and the tundras.
The only Lapps who really suffered were those who were held by the Birkarlians—a band of Swedish adventurers who flourished from the thirteenth century right away down to the year 1700; and in the handsof these hard men they endured what was little better than slavery. They had no redress. They had no trades unions amongst themselves; they did not belong to that larger trades union which is known as a nation; and if the Birkarlians in the course of progress could have endured to this day, it is probable that they would still be holding stunted Laplanders as their unpaid menials.
But time sweeps on, and the sentiment of the world alters. The peculiar institution of slavery has for one reason and another dropped through into mere history; and governments which at one time thought the only self-respecting thing to do was to either shoot the aboriginal or shackle him into servitude, now look upon him as an amiable curiosity, and write out laws for his preservation, much in the same spirit as they appoint close seasons for the elk and the ptarmigan and the aurochs.
Under this fostering care the total Lapp population has risen to some 32,000 as near as it can be reckoned; of which 18,500 wander within the marches of Norway, 7500 are in Sweden, and the balance own as over-lords the Archduke of Finland, and his master the Great White Czar; and each government has its own preservation rules.
The fundamental note of the Russianrégimeis “No Vodki,” and it is easy to create a Prohibition State where distances are big, transport difficult, and the inducements to smuggle small. Norway verywisely does not worry about the liquor question, as in practice there, by reason of the settlement of the country, it would be quite impossible to restrain the aboriginal from purchasingaquavitif he intended to do it. So the Norskman lets the Fin-ne, as he calls the Lapp, diet himself entirely according to taste; and as a consequence, at an occasional wedding, or an annual meat-selling, the little man spends one afternoon in getting blind drunk. He has all the rest of the year to get the aniseed flavour entirely out of his system, so, physically speaking, not much harm is done. Sweden, too, follows the same policy, but provides a slightly less noxious brand of drink.
The Scandinavian farmer, however, who has the Lapp reindeer-herder for an occasional neighbour, does not agree with the enthusiastic theorists who in Stockholm and Christiania make the laws for his preservation. Socially he regards the Lapp as though he were some noxious kind of ape, the which is quite understandable, because the spirit which fosters Aborigines’ Protection Societies can only exist at a considerable distance from the aboriginal. He sees the Lapp and his doings personally, and (being somewhat unread) does not regard him from the point of view of an interesting relic of the past. He merely looks upon him in the light of the present, and finds him a thorn in the flesh.
In the old viking days the Scandinavian wouldyield to no one in his appetite for thieving; but with advancing civilisation he has grown to be a staunch anti-pilferer. He has had game-laws set up above his head, and he respects them. He is allowed to shoot one elk on his own estate, and only one elk, per annum, and he must shoot it in a certain fixed month; and it is not pleasant for him to see the Lapp (who knows no law except the rule of appetite) gaily slaying the great deer whenever they come within range of a rifle-bullet. It annoys him, too, to have his cows milked on the mountains, and his rivers and lakes poached with system and industry. Moreover, it is his custom to leave all his worldly goods unlocked and unguarded, and he expects that no one will steal them; so that when the mountain Lapp comes out of the forest like a quiet ghost, and annexes any trifle, from a sheep to a parcel of smoked salmon which may strike his fancy, the farmer rages, and makes no allowance for the neglect of education. It is tolerably useless to apply to the Government for redress, because governments move slowly, and a Lapp moving on the fjeld, if not tackled at once, is hard to catch; and so he takes the law (and a Remington rifle) into his own most capable hands.
Then begins the trouble. The mountain Lapp, according to his instincts, has stolen; and although under pressure he might peaceably give up the transferred goods, he has a strong dislike to indiscriminate retaliation—when applied to himself. Sowhen he comes across the rotting carcasses of first one, then another, then a dozen, then a score of his cherished deer, ruthlessly shot down and left in their wallows, he accepts thevendetta, and prepares to carry it into bloody effect. He owns a rifle, this nomad herder of to-day, who rears therensdyramongst the rugged mountains of the Scandinavian peninsula; and though it is an early breech-loader, cast from the army in the early seventies, it is a deadly enough weapon when the butt is cuddled by a vengeful shoulder. And he goes down to the valley-farms and puts lead into beast or man, whichever comes in his way. Upon which the farmers, still saying no word to the Government, arm and organise a Lapp-hunt; and the mountains swallow the tale of what is done; and those who come back to the farms sit down assured that at least some of the aborigines will pester them no more.
This then is the state of things which obtains in this year of grace amongst the fjelds and forests of Northern Norway and Sweden, and as a consequence the Lapps are slow of increase. Over the border, however, in Lapland proper, and in Russian Lapland, their numbers rise appreciably every decade, though it is perhaps hard to decide which are genuine Lapps and which belong to a mixed race. In the extreme east of their territory they are apt to intermarry with the Samoyedes; and I think it is a significant fact that the outer garments of the two races—theLappmatsoreo, and the Samoyedemilitza—are both fashioned on the same cut. In Russian Lapland there is an obvious intermixture with the Russianmoujik, and in Lapland proper they naturally marry largely with the all-pervading Finn.
The inhabitant of Lapland is not so light-fingered as his more western brother, perhaps because there is less opportunity of pilfering. And he does not make himself so unpopular, because there are fewer aliens for him to get unpopular with, and no one goes out regularly to shoot him as a domestic nuisance. In fact the Lapps we were in contact with (and the Finns, too, for that matter) never stole any of our particular properties; though at the same time it should be confessed that we had remarkably little worth stealing, as the whole of our outfit after Enare (including the clothes on our backs) was not worth a couple of sovereigns, and we did keep a remarkably sharp eye on even the few trifles we had.
The life these aboriginal people lead in Arctic Lapland is undoubtedly hard, and at times they rub shoulders very closely with starvation. But they have got constitutions, built up through countless centuries to endure the privations and (what to a more delicately nurtured race would be) the hardships of their life; and from the number of very old people we saw everywhere through the country, it was plain that the orthodox threescore years and ten was by no means the average limit for the life of an ArcticLapp. Children there were, too, in all abundance. It was a notable fact that scarcely a woman did we see of child-bearing age without a babe at breast; and though a large percentage of this progeny did not endure the chills of a second or a third winter, enough pulled through to keep the race on the steady increase in numbers. This weeding-out process also obviously did much to counteract the evils of consanguineous marriages, and so maintain the standard of physique. It was one of Nature’s balances. Without it the Arctic Lapps would increase for a while abnormally, and then they would dwindle, and in a few centuries they would be gone.
We should have liked much to stay on in that Arctic casual ward, to which Marie guided us, for a day or two to recruit. We were both of us getting very hollow-eyed, and not a little fagged. The mosquito-plague had something to do with this state of things, because when a man has got a constant fever about him, he can scarcely be called healthy. And the want of food was telling on us. We had barely had a decent meal since leaving theWindward, and many of our meals were as much like the Barmecide’s as a diet of plain water could make them. But it was this very scarcity of food which drove us remorselessly forward. Our own store of those miserable tinned dainties was dwindling, and the carriers’ provisions had already been dragged outbeyond their calculated time. We had no help for it but to press on to Ivalomati, which was the nearest human habitation.
So we started, and promptly there arrived another difficulty: we lost the way.
In a populated country this is a hard thing to do. Given the general direction, one can always there hit upon a town or a village if one takes sufficient time about the search. But in a land where the town consists of five houses, and a village can earn a name on the map with one roof and a haystack, it is very easy to wander on day after day and never sight anything but sheer wilderness.
In this particular instance it was Johann who failed us. The excellent Johann had never before journeyed West beyond the squalid hut which figured geographically as Menesjärvi; but as at that place we had been unable to get either fresh guides or carriers, we had induced the three who had brought us to come on farther, and Johann had guaranteed (for a consideration) to find the way. He had laid under contribution the entire topographical knowledge of Menesjärvi (which perhaps did not amount to much), and had imbibed it noisily for three solid hours. He had started off with confidence and brought us to the first rest-house in style. Pat and Pedr had found their way from there to the second shelter, where we, with Marie’s help, joined them. But before we had been travelling a mile on the final stage, it wasclear that the loud-voiced Johann was completely “bushed.”
He would not own it at first. We were tramping through a burnt-out forest with gaunt gray-and-black skeleton trees hedging us in impenetrably on every side. Growth and decay is slower up there, deep inside the Arctic Circle, than it is in the Tropics. In a hot, moist country a fallen tree may be blotted out of sight by vegetation in a week, and crumbled into primitive dust in less than a year. But up in the cold North, Nature does not strain herself to work with such fevered speed. A tree dies; and, erect or prone, it may survive for years as a gaunt, dry corpse. There is no jungle to hide it from the air; there are no creepers to bore into its bones and leave openings for the tearing fingers of the weather; there is only the short, crisp moss underfoot, and that rather helps than hinders its preservation. And so for years upon years these dead forests endure, as eyesores to heaven.
Mile after mile we tramped through the winding aisles of these dead trees, the acrobatic Johann waddling stolidly on in the lead. From time to time we looked at the compass, and more than once we had doubts about the direction. But we did not interfere. Johann under the stress of advice was apt to get flustered, and Johann flustered would be a very useless guide indeed. He was all we had got, and so we agreed to let him have his own way.
But at last when he calmly led us back over our own tracks which we had made not half an hour before, and still would have gone complacently on waddling through the wilderness, we called a halt and made him face the situation. He owned up at once to having wandered, which was a confession he could not very well avoid, seeing that our old tracks were by no means microscopic; and after a little more pressure, admitted that he had not the vaguest notion of where he was.
This was unsatisfactory. We had come to see Arctic Lapland, certainly, but it looked as if we were going to inspect a good deal more than we had bargained for. A real solid hunger made us appreciate this very thoroughly.
We asked Johann if he had any suggestion to make. He scratched himself thoroughly for ten minutes and gave the matter his due consideration. Finally he said he thought he could lead us back successfully to the places from which we had come.
We did not see the force of this at all. We intended to get through to the other side of the country, and we stated the proposition with brevity and decision.
But Johann’s suggestion found other ready hearers. Pat and Pedr both woke into animation. It appeared that Pat had a sore heel, and possessed a wife (or somebody else’s wife) he wanted to return to, and also remembered some important business on Mattosjärvi which ought to be attended to at once. AndPedr, the beautiful Pedr, but without the beautiful smile, stated tersely that he was sick of the whole thing, and intended to go back home there and then.
It was mutiny. They leaned back each against his pack, and began making fast the thongs against their breasts and shoulders. They were frightened, and they were tired, and they were going back to the place from which they had come whether we liked it or whether we did not. It was glaring, flagrant mutiny, and there was only one way to deal with it, and we chose that way.
It was a primitive style of persuasion, and it involved the use of the heavy British hand and the heavy British boot, but it served its purpose then, as it has done thousands of times before; and after the proceedings were over, we stood still a minute to collect breath, and contemplated three very sulky, subdued carriers, squatted on the ground and waiting for orders.
The outlook was not cheerful. The only thing apparently left was to make for Ivalomati on a compass course, which sounds simple enough on paper, but was likely to prove a very different matter in practice. We had carefully checked all our travel up to this on the map, and so far we had never detected the map’s accuracy in any one single point. It was a map somewhat reminiscent of those made by boys at school, where one filled in any invitingly bare space with an imaginary river, or a fancy lake, or adecorative range of caterpillar mountains. From an artistic point of view this kind of fiction is very pleasant to look upon and to create, and indeed exercises a wonderful fascination over some people. One remembers the joy poor Stevenson confessed to over the making of that delicious map inTreasure Island. But when you are depending on a geographer to lead you out of famine, and when a fictitious scratch of his pen may hustle you into actual starvation, why then you come upon very different views, and cordially agree that any one who writes or draws anything but the bare and naked truth should be led out to suffer a lingering death.
In addition to all this, we could only guess at our “point of departure,” and so getting the true magnetic bearing of this problematical Ivalomati was a matter of the airiest uncertainty. However, it was Hobson’s choice, and so putting on cheerful, confident faces for the benefit of the frightened, sulky carriers, off we set.
Now this sort of quandary no doubt sounds funny enough from the distance; but viewed at first hand, we failed to catch its humour. We had hunger nipping us in the ribs all the time; we were heavy-footed with weariness; the infernal insect-plague was going on all the time; and there was nothing to tell us whether we were steering right, or wandering completely away into the savage depths of the wilderness.
We met swamps, and plunged across them in curves and zigzags. We tramped through forests ofgraceful birches, and forests of dreary pines; we clambered over rocks, and waded streams. The land was not entirely desolate of life. Sometimes we saw tiny lemmings before our feet, and once we heard the cry of a cuckoo from far away amongst the trees. At one halt in the middle of a two-mile-wide tremulous morass, we sat beside a pond of clear water, and tried to divert ourselves by overlooking the business of three black-and-gray frogs who dwelt in its depths. We were thankful to those speckled frogs during that halt: they almost interested us. But the greater part of the way was dreary enough. And so we expended an entire day’s journey.
Finally, after wallowing painfully through another quagmire of still more horrible wetness and filth, we came upon a river, deep, swift-flowing, and two hundred feet from bank to bank. And this, unless the map was crowning its petty perjuries by the most cruel, colossal lie ever scratched upon paper, was the Repojoki.
Ivalomati, if it existed at all, was obviously on the farther side, and it behoved us to cross with as little delay as might be. But here came another difficulty. We proposed to build a raft to carry our goods piecemeal, and swim it across to the other side. But the Lapps, with the usual contrariness of those who live in a country of water-ways, could not swim a stroke, and refused flatly to be towed over, floated by a log. So there was nothing for it but to build a raft whichwould carry passengers, and to this pleasing business we set our hands without further talk.
It had been my fortune to make a whole armada of rafts before. I built one in the days of youth to navigate a local duck-pond. I made another in more mature years for the easier fishing of red char in a certain lake of Northern Norway, and another in North Carolina as a lazy way of travelling down the French Broad River; and in the course of writing story-books for the young I must have turned out quite a respectable fleet of rafts—paper rafts—under every conceivable circumstance of theoretical difficulty, with glibness and ease.
But building that raft to cross the Repojoki was very different from all these previous excursions into carpentry. They had been amusement; this was a horrible nightmare. Because we wanted wood, no wood was near the river. The handiest tree lay at the farther side of the last swamp we had waded through, and quite half a mile from the bank. We had to wallow painfully back through this slough, haggle down our trees, lop them into portable lengths, and drag them back through the quaking ooze. We were hungry, we were weary, we were bitten half mad by the hateful insects, and our one utensil for cutting was a small American axe, more fitted to split kindling wood than to swing against a tree.
Two logs we laid upon the bank of the Repojoki, seven feet apart; five others we laid upon these;and then, putting two more parallel to the first two, we made withes from the shoots of Arctic willow, and bound the whole into place. And all the time that we worked, the sun beat upon us, and the mosquitoes covered us in dense, biting clouds. We were like men toiling in a delirium.
We hacked out something that would serve as a paddle, and slid the raft into the swift water. As a vehicle it did not look encouraging. It floated deep, and each log wobbled independently. But we were in no mood for niceness then. The packs were piled on and laboriously paddled over, following a diagonal course in the grip of the racing current. The raft was brought back again, and made the bank some two hundred yards farther down-stream. With a passenger on board besides the paddler, it sank very nearly out of sight, and between each trip it had to be docked for repairs. It was a moist method of making the passage, but it seemed effective.
On the last trip, the ninth, Pedr was passenger with an Englishman for his Charon; and in mid-stream the beautiful Pedr objected to the water swirling round his waist, and began to get nervous. Worse still, he commenced to wriggle, and promptly the raft began to wriggle too. The withes with which it was lashed together untwisted gaily. The paddler paddled for dear life, and Pedr, now solidly scared, embraced him from behind. A log detached itself from the raft and bobbed off in apas seuldown-stream, andon the farther bank Johann and Pat held out branches alluringly over the stream, whilst the other Englishman with them laughed. But still the paddler paddled on.
Then the logs of the raft opened out like the sticks of a fan, and reared up on end, and “Rari nantes in gurgite vasto” chuckled the foreigner on the bank, who knew something about his countryman’s capabilities in the water. He had not calculated upon the clinging nature of Pedr, however, and when the pair of them vanished below the swirling surface of the Repojoki—and stayed there—he began to get a little scared himself and to strip off his coat.
However, there is a recognised course of treatment to follow under these circumstances, and the swimming Englishman took it with vigour, and some hundred yards lower down-stream came to bank with his charge. The beautiful Pedr had a big red lump over one eye, which probably explained to him then, and will make him remember in the future, that it is inadvisable to wrestle with a swimmer who is wishing for free use of his limbs in deep, rapid water. I fancy we had, on the whole, a good educational effect upon our Lappish carriers.
RaftWrecked on the Repojoki.
RaftWrecked on the Repojoki.
Of course we all were as wet as water could make us, and our chattels were sodden, and the exertion of making the raft and navigating her had been great;but the incident of crossing the Repojoki had on the whole distinctly cheered us. On every there-and-back crossing, the raft had been swept some two hundred odd yards down-stream; and so by the time the whole train was across, we had perforce gained knowledge of some thousand yards of the farther bank, and at one place came upon indications of a track. There were no footmarks, certainly; but some bushes had been axed away as though to assist a landing, and we set out from these with renewed hopes of finding Ivalomati.
The country, too, tried to cheer us. It was true there were more swamps, and they were even wetter and wider than those we had crossed before, but their bosky pools were gilded with sunshine, and here and there clumps of pink flowers, and white flowers, and blue flowers, caught the eye and tried to gladden it. On some of the marshes, too, there were curlew; and life, after the dead regions we had passed through, is always pleasant to look upon and hear. At one halt, a pair of these curlew got up, screaming, and went through the same pantomime one had seen them in so many times in the foot-hills at home during breeding season. Hayter must needs stroll off to look for their young. But after he had been gone a dozen minutes, I chanced to look down, and saw the chicken he was searching for squatted stolidly on the ground not four inches from my foot. In tint and shape it harmonised wonderfully with its surroundings, and had evidently received instructions to “lie close” whatever befel. Indeed it withstood a good two minutes’ proguing with a grass blade before it deigned to stir; and when the little stilt-legged oddity did get up and run, in three turns it was absorbed into the landscape again beyond human sight. And in the meanwhile its parents were getting more daring. They were making such determined swoops at our heads that we actually had to drive them off. They were as fierce in their respect as nesting Richardson’s skuas on the outlying islets of the Shetlands.
Cloud-berries grew on these swamps, but though we looked thirstily for fruit, we could see none even approaching ripeness. Most of the berries were green, or half formed; only a few were scarlet; none had got the amber tint which one has learned to love so well on a Norwegian shooting. And once, too, on a scrap of stony, rising ground, we saw a woodpecker at work, digging grubs from the trunk of a gaunt, dead pine.
We came into another forest, where the air was heavy with mosquitoes, and the weary carriers could hardly drag one foot up to the other, and still on we plodded. And then through the trees we caught a gleam of broad water.
No word was said, but instinctively the pace quickened. A breeze was blowing towards us, and down it came the faint scent of wood-smoke. Itseemed the most delicious smell that had ever met our nostrils.
We came out of the cover and stood on the bank of a broad, sluggish river. On the farther bank was a canoe drawn up, and beyond it stood a rude hut of logs. It was Ivalomati, and we did not forget to congratulate ourselves. Johann exploded into roar after roar of laughter, and became the genial acrobat again, as though he had never been anything else; Pedr turned on the beautiful smile to its most beautiful pitch; and Pat forgot his tiredness, and his sore heel, and danced a jig of triumph, and let out of him a regular string of Irish yells for some one to bring across the canoe.
Marie, the Sorcerer’s Daughter
Marie, the Sorcerer’s Daughter
Here then was Ivalomati, the village we had looked for so long, a place made up of one small house of logs, one squalid barn with yawning sides, and an adult population of three souls—a woman and two men. The adult population was away fishing, or rather attempting to fish, for, as it turned out, the toil of twenty-four hours brought forth no catch. A swarm of children of every age, from the crawler upwards, was left in charge. It was the eldest girl, a shy, wild creature, almost pretty, who took the canoe and brought us across the river; and she it was who offered us all the poor house could afford—a small, bare room.
There was more evidence of real poverty open to the public view in Ivalomati than at any other place we visited in Arctic Lapland. The children had not got summer clothes—the first we had seen lacking them. They wore the tattered rags of some winter furs, exposing three-quarters of their wretched skinsto the intolerable bitings of the mosquitoes. We made a half-hearted attempt to buy food, and learned definitely what we had guessed, that they had no food even for themselves.
Life there might be hard, but the adults of Ivalomati were not the sort to make it most endurable. The two men were Finns, slack, doltish, and indolent. The woman was a Lapp, worn out with much child-bearing. The large-skulled, hybrid children seemed to have no occupation except to play about on a mud heap and try and stay their bellies by chewing the sappy river-grass.
A tattered, ancient net with birch-bark floats fluttered from the rotten drying-posts, a plantation of weeds flourished inside a broken-down fence, and these were the only indications of how a livelihood was made. Judging from the fly-blown, grass-covered midden outside the crumbling barn, there once had been a cow in Ivalomati, and a cracked iron cauldron, still holding the traces of a stew of reed grass and fish offal, gave indications that the cow had been fed according to the orthodox fashion of the country; but when we saw the place the cow was not, and all that stood between the wretched bipeds and starvation were the few small fish they could manage to dredge out of the Ivalojoki.
We “killed a tin” that night, and washed it down with a dose of weak cocoa; and after dinner the door opened and our three carriers came in with a peace-offering. Each had an armful of mouldy hay, which he deposited on the floor, and Johann gleefully waved a foul brown-calico sheet, which he pointed out would make us a most luxurious mosquito-bar. It seemed as though we were really going to get a comfortable night’s sleep, and we wanted it.
The hay smelt of mustiness, and the sheet smelt of something worse, but we were in no mood for niceties. The room was alive with mosquitoes. Once, twice, and three times did we make raids upon them, and burn thousands with flaring torches, and for a moment the place would be clear. But only for a moment. Through the innumerable chinks of the walls of the roof there flew in constantly fresh thousands, who would drum theirpas de chargeand set to work on our suffering bodies with heroic disregard of consequences. Desperately weary though we might be, there was no sleep to be got whilst one lay exposed to that horrible, relentless biting.
So we ranged the hay diagonally across the room into one long bed, and took the dirty sheet, and with strings to form the ridge, and thorns to pin the ends, and stones to hold down the sides, built us a tent some four feet long, on which we placed high hopes. To be sure it would only hold a head and shoulders of each of us, but the sleeping-sacks would sufficiently protect all parts which projected.
It required skill to get inside. We rolled our coats and put them in the middle of the tent to serveas pillows, and then we got into our sodden blanket-sacks, lay down on the hay, and cautiously wriggled our heads in under the opposite ends of the tent. There were three lusty mosquitoes inside when we arrived, and as these objected to being slaughtered without a chase, we had managed completely to disarrange the tent before they had met their due reward. This entailed a reconstruction of the entire edifice, and as Hayter said he was the least clumsy of the two of us, he crawled outside, replaced the stones on the sides, and jabbed in fresh thorns where they were needed. Inside I had plenty of work killing the mosquitoes which he let in during the process. Finally he crawled in again, and after the slaying of two others of the little pests which had managed to secrete themselves up till then, we lay still in the ecstatic hope that we were going to taste again of that almost forgotten luxury, easy sleep.
But did we so much as get into a doze? I fancy not. We lay there motionless on the hay, with our lower extremities hidden from the insects by the wet blankets, and our heads roof to roof beneath the odorous tent; and the sweat dripped out of us at every pore. A midnight sun was blazing high above the hut, and the air in the room was like that of an oven. The heat under the tent was stifling. Ever and again first one mosquito, and then another, and then a third, would get inside our defences, and wewould have to bestir ourselves to slay them. The hay, too, was full of ticks, which added to our torments. When we lay down, our faces were puffed and blotched with the bites till we could scarcely see from our eyes; our hands were puffed out like boxing-gloves; and our arms were swollen till they fitted tight inside a coat-sleeve. And each of the million bites was a centre of irritation. Yet every minute this state of torture was being added to.
We passed that night in a condition bordering on frenzy, and let not those who merely know the mosquito in Africa, in India, and the Americas, judge us too hardly when I say that at times we wished most heartily we had never set foot in so detestable a country. Cold, we could have endured; privation, we were prepared for; but this horrible stew of flies ground upon the nerves till we were scarcely responsible for our actions.
In that plan of route we originally laid down at Enare, we had expected to find Ivalomati to be a village of tolerable size, and hoped to get carriers there who would take us on across the country to Pokka, and possibly to Scurujarvi. This idea was of course exploded, and so we set to work to try the power of blarney upon Pedr, Pat, and Johann, and persuade them to come farther on.
They did not see it one little bit. They said they had come much too far from home as it was, andhad not the least wish to go farther. They were quite pleasant over their refusal, and quite determined. Johann mimicked the pair of us carrying the loads ourselves, tramping through the country, getting bogged in swamps, and losing the way, and finally dying of hunger and being covered up (like the babes in the wood) with a drift of grass and branches; and he roared with laughter at his own witty pantomime. Pedr glanced towards the direction in which Pokka lay, turned his back on it with decision, and smiled beautifully. And Pat, the unshaven Pat, looked so obsequious and so sly, and referred to his imaginary sore heel with such a roguish eye, that one really expected him to throw away disguise, and address us as “yer honours,” and beg for John Jamieson’s whisky there and then on the spot.
It was funny, but it was not business. Was our tramp across the country going to be broken after we had got so far and gone through so much, so very much? We rubbed our aching bites, and reasoned with the carriers still more earnestly. We besought them almostin formâ pauperis(seeing that we had not got the power to command), and gradually their mood changed. It is humiliating now to remember how our spirits rose as they began to yield. And at last they consented to go with us as far as Pokka; but no farther. Be it well understood, they pointed out, they would only escort us to Pokka—only. Well, sufficient for the march (we told ourselves)were the carriers thereof. Subsequent marches must be left to provide for themselves.
Once they had agreed to go, there was no more delay. We borrowed a canoe, a very rotten canoe, got on board, and set off up the Ivalojoki.
We had trouble at first, because the river, which was almost as wide as a lake, was full of weeds, which clung to the canoe and clogged the paddles. But these cleared as the river narrowed, and we worked up between low banks where scrub birches grew amongst angular blocks of gray, lichened stone.
The banks came closer together as we paddled on, and the river increased in pace, and the way of the canoe grew less. Johann, with his mouth open and the sweat dripping from his chin, tugged manfully at the sculls in the bows. Pedr, who was squatted aft with the steering paddle, had his work cut out to keep clear of rocks round which the water swirled noisily, and occasionally there was abump-bump-bumpas we dragged over some submerged boulder which he had not seen.
The little old canoe strained and shivered in the stress of the stream, and leaked so abundantly that Hayter, who was labouring mid-ships with the baler, could barely keep the water under; and presently, as she showed a disposition to swamp altogether, we had to run into the bank and lighten her burden. Pat, much to his disgust, was ousted from his rest amongthe baggage, and made to force his way through the tangle of shrub and swamp and grasses which made the river-bank; and we two foreigners went ashore with him. The two Lapps unshipped their paddles, and punted cannily up the rapids with eight-foot poles. They had hard work, but we on shore did not exactly find it easy going. Back-washes branched off the stream, sown with yellow lilies, and some we jumped across, and some we jumped into; and when the rapids came to an end some half mile higher up, and we were able to get on board again, liquid mud oozed from us into little black pools.
Half a mile of smooth brought us to another set of rapids, and once more a land party of three had to press its way through scrub and morass. Johann and Pedr punted the light canoe cleverly. One took the stern, the other perched in the bow. They stood up to put the pole in, and dropped it vertically. Then came a violent shove, and a sudden sit down at the end of the thrust. The canoe danced about like a twig in the rapids, and the waves slopped bountifully over her sides, and every now and again she had to be brought to the bank to be baled clear and ship a fresh crew. And finally the rapids got too bad for poling at all, and we made fast thongs of reindeer hide to the canoe at bow and stern and towed her empty up-stream with these, pressing through the scrub on the bank when we could, wading in the river-edge when it was too thick. It was the only way we could gether along. The river-banks were too swampy and overgrown to make a portage possible.
As a reward for labour we got some mile of easy water to finish up with, and then we left the flimsy little canoe finally, and set off once more on the solid tramp.
Again we came across the winter sleigh-track, a broad swathe cut from the forest, and left for the snows to smooth down into a road, and in a couple of miles this led us to a vast, quaking swamp set with a line of white, bleached crosses to make the trail. But till the frosts of winter came to harden it, the swamp here was quite impassable; it was a mere floating quagmire, and we had to skirt it tediously. Acres of cloud-berries, still unripe, lay upon its surface. The air was musical with the cries of curlew and other marsh fowl. And from above, the sun beat upon us with brazen power. Take away the Lapps, take away our sure knowledge that we were still far within the Arctic Circle, and we might have been tramping across some primæval land at the back of the Gold Coast or the Congo.
The ground rose as we toiled on, and for once the mosquitoes were almost entirely absent. It was bliss to be alive. There was a fine country all around, and we lazed off for an hour, and made a temporary camp to enjoy it. Beside us was a pool swarming with tadpoles, and we lay over the edge and searched and searched in hopes of finding a juvenile frog in the intermediate stage. But as usual we could not do it.
It was a subject which interested me. At an early age I was taught that from frog-spawn grew tadpoles, and from these grew frogs. Being of an inquiring, or a sceptical turn of mind, whichever way one likes to look at it, I used to catch the little black tadpoles, incarcerate them in pickle-bottles, and inspect them diligently; but never did the wished-for result arrive. It may be that a watched tadpole never changes; and certainly tadpoles do seem to suffer from nerves, because if one disturbs the surface of a pond where they are occupying themselves, away go the whole crowd like a lot of animated commas. But I am inclined to think that nervousness is not the reason of their coy refusal to do their advertised change-act in public view. It is beginning to grow on me that they cannot do it. Of course science says flatly that they do change; but when it wishes, science can lie like photography or a newspaper; and for the future the tadpole metamorphosis is eliminated from my private creed. If I am wronging tadpoles as a nation, I am sorry.
By this stage our Lapp carriers were all very foot-sore, though we ourselves were quite sound, which does not say much for the theory that it is always advisable to adopt the foot-gear of the country you are travelling over. At every halt one or other of them would take off his boots, extract the grass, spread it out to dry, and add more grass from the storeeach carried in his personal knapsack. It was the same grass which is used for the same purpose in Norway—crisp, dry, green, fine stuff, without knots, and without seeding tips. It has to be twisted up and kneaded between the hands to break the fibre; but once so prepared, it is much like a pad of soft horse-hair in texture. However, as I say, it chafed badly, and for summer work the bare foot inside the shoe would probably have been better. That was the way I was going myself; as the lower extremities of my stockings had long before worn away, and my feet had grown as hard as a nigger’s.
We seemed to be passing away from the birdless region which lay inland from the Arctic coast. But still there was no great abundance of feathered creatures. On the swamps one could usually see a pair of curlew, but seldom more; from behind the forest trees one sometimes heard the cuckoo’s hoot, though from one side of the country to the other we never saw the bird itself in the actual flesh and feather; and once, a little ringed dotterel came out into an open space before us and went through its pitiful pantomime of being wounded, just as one may see it on the shingle of a Shetland tarn. It was the breeding season for all of them of course, and even if we had possessed a gun, and from sheer stress of hunger been willing to slay nursing parents, we should have got little for our pains; certainly not enough to live on.
It was during a halt on this march, I remember, that Hayter suddenly exploded into a fit of (apparently) causeless merriment. I asked him what was the matter. He chuckled and said, “If only it would not cost so much,” and stopped and laughed again.
I did not understand, and asked him to explain further.
He pointed to Johann, who was going through one of his quaint, domestic exercises, and said, “I wish we could get that beauty to London, and dump him down in (say) Willis’s rooms, and bribe a waiter to put a smart luncheon in front of him, and then watch from a distance to see the result.”
It was a luscious theme, and we enlarged on it with infinite enjoyment.
We pictured the result of taking Johann back to our native Islands and launching him upon Society. It would be a thing quite easily done, and as it happened I knew a parallel case where it was carried out, and many who read this will probably recollect (perhaps with some discomfiture) the hero of it. The matter happened quite recently.
Now, who remembers it? There arrived at Liverpool by a B. and A. steamer not four years ago a jet-black negro from the West Coast of Africa. He had a little money and more self-confidence than any white man on earth ever possessed. He wanted to have a good time in England, and he had it. He had come up from the Coast on the B. and A. boatin the ordinary second-hand clothes of civilisation, because, of course, plenty of people on board knew him for what he was. But once ashore in a London hotel (which is a very long way from a Liverpool quay or the West Coast of Africa), he took off his shoes and socks and started sandals and bare legs, he doffed his trousers and coat and shipped long embroidered robes of green and white, clapped a Haûsa hat on his head in place of the brown billy-cock, and announced that he was Prince H’umaduya, of some unpronounceable place behind the British Gold Coast.
Did any one doubt his statement? Not a soul who cared to speak. Childish, snobbish London took him at his own valuation, and competed for the honour of fêting him. He went everywhere, did everything, was fawned upon by everybody. White women waited on him—because he was a prince. The Lord Mayor gave him a dinner—because he was a prince. And he accepted it all with the self-assurance he had learned professionally, and asked for more.
But before his vogue was done, he wisely took himself off, and departed for Liverpoolen routefor home and business. I saw him six months later, in the principal town on the Gold Coast, engaged in his professional avocation. He was selling a consignment of black, second-hand, wearing apparel, with noise and industry. Of course he had gone back to the ordinary boots and trousers and shirt of pseudo-civilisation, andwas in fact very like any other third-rate auctioneer with a pitch in a back street. His name, as it appeared on his license and on his signboard down there on the Coast, was John Henry Brown, and he was reputed to be making money hand over fist, and saving it. He had tasted the sweets of being an imported prince in London once, and (as a year or two has passed since then) he is about due to turn up again and once more offer himself to the lionising public.
Now what we have got in mind is to do the same with Johann. The only thing necessary will be to teach him a working knowledge of English. We shall leave his personal habits severely alone; there is a surprisingness about them which is bound to be appreciated. And to alter his clothes (for general wear) would be to paint the lily.
John Henry Brown must have been at considerable pains to invent so picturesque a name as H’umaduya, but a name for our man comes glibly to hand.Prince Johann of Laplandcould not well be improved on for such a purpose. Get him to London, spend a guinea on aMorning Postannouncement of his arrival, and the thing would be done. Cards would rain in upon him, and people would scuffle with one another for the honour of getting him to their houses.
It is appetising to picture his behaviour. He would not be bashful in the very least: there is no shyness about Johann. And he would not be conventional: no, one could safely swear he wouldbe quite the reverse of conventional. He might start a dinner seated on an orthodox chair, but if by any chance a bone came in his way, I am sure he would promptly retire to the hearth-rug and squat there cross-legged and gnaw it at his ease. Johann has a peculiar affection for bones. And after that he has fed, he will take a little tar from the bottle at his belt and anoint his face luxuriously, in view of a possible inroad of mosquitoes. Later on, if many people are admiring him excessively, and he feels very friendly disposed towards them, he will take off his boots and change the grass in them with care and deliberation. I can imagine the audience clasping their hands and saying, “How charmingly original it is of the dear prince to do such a thing!” I wonder, though, how they will stand it when he begins to scratch himself?
Afterwards I think we shall ship him across to Boston and New York. They love a prince there too, but they will not have him coloured. H’umaduya of the Gold Coast would not have gone down at any price in the States. The Americans have too many niggers at home to tolerate thebouquet d’Afriqueotherwise than in the appartments specially appointed to contain its assertive flavour; but Prince Johann of Lapland would be a very different matter. Every paper in New York would publish a personal interview illustrated with his photographs six hours before he landed. His political relations with “Czar Nicholas”would be dished up spicily; and the “barbaric splendours of his princely court” would be written of with vivid (and a slightly indecent) realism by gentlemen of the press, who know to a headline what their public want.
But unless there is absolutely no other competition on the carpet, I am afraid that he would not have so long a reign in the States as he had in England. In my own, my native land, we like curiosities; in the States they prefer culture. Curiosities are a drug in the States, and a slightly impertinent drug at that. Culture is rare, and so they imitate and talk about it all day long.
Except for the absence of game, the country we were travelling through was much the same as the Thames valley must have appeared to those hairy, naked savages who first looked out upon the levels where London now stands. Here was a forest of fire-slain pines, still reared up gaunt and gray, defying heaven. Young birches and hazels were growing up round them. And then would come mile after mile, and mile after mile, of spongy morass, seamed by rivulets, and smeared by stagnant ponds. The Thames valley became of use to man, so man drained it, and penned all the streamlets into one orderly river, and created dry land out of the swamps. But it is hard to fancy that these great wildernesses so far within the Arctic Circle will everbe reclaimed by the ditcher for his master, the factory builder.
We met, though, with some traces of man’s handiwork, and man’s toil for his own convenience, as we journeyed on. We came upon a great circular morass, four miles in diameter. It was ringed in by a jagged paling of pines, and in the exact centre was a hummocky oasis of gray, lichened stone. Years before logs had been laid down over the worst parts of the swamp; they were crumbling and insecure, but they showed a distinct attempt at road-making; and over these we picked our way in easy peril of sprained ankles. But still there were many places where the logs had melted, and through these we had to wallow in the fashion which we had learned so very thoroughly. I think that this frail path accentuated the general desolation.
A few miles farther on we met with some more advanced engineering. We had seen the Tokkaharo River on the map, and had wondered much whether we could find a ford, or whether we should be forced once more to go through the operation of rafting. And here before us was a bridge, a veritable bridge. It was primitive, certainly, and it was not above suspicion of being rotten. It had two piers of crossed logs, and the roadway was formed by single trunks, over which one progressed with the dainty step of the rope-dancer.
It was on this bridge, I regret to say, that Johannbelied the reputation we had made for him, and proved to be not so perfect an acrobat in practice as he was in personal appearance. He stopped before the airy structure and looked at it with a puckered face, and it was evident that he stepped out on it with a failing heart. He travelled along the first log all right till it began to sway under him, and then he got demoralised, and landed on the first pier spread-eagle fashion, being grabbed in the nick of time by Pat and Hayter. The middle span he did not attempt to walk, but sat a-cock-stride of it, and worked himself over with his hands. He suffered severely from splintersen route, and the workings of his face were so utterly funny that I regret to say the entire audience of four shouted with laughter during the whole of his passage. However he gained the second pier safely, picked a few of the more obvious splinters out of his person, and contemplated the farther bank. It was temptingly close. He stepped on to the end of the log, where it rested on the pier, and stood there for a full minute. He found the process quite easy; so he set out to walk along it. At the third step he stretched out his arms, balancing with them. The log was beginning to sway and buckle under his weight. At the fourth step he lost his head and his nerve, and made a rush for it. And then he lost his footing altogether, cannoned against the log with his haunch, grabbed at it with eager hands, missed, and went souse into ten feet of icy water in the Takkaharo below. A swirlof the stream put him on the bank, and he clambered out, and rolled on the green in an ecstasy of merriment over his own clumsiness.
The log bridge had looked neglected enough, but its reason of being soon began to get apparent. We came upon a clearing full of old-cut stumps; wood had been taken from here for building. Then we passed some quarter-acre patches of rye growing amongst unkempt weeds, enclosed by rail fences. Then came more patches of clearing and more stumps, sprawling over two miles of ground. And then, from the top of a knoll, a high well-derrick rose into view, and directly afterwards we saw beneath us the scattered settlement of houses which made up the village of Pokka. Three houses were in sight, sprawling over a square mile of ground, and each house had its attendant barns and cowsheds. A streamlet ran between them, broadening out here and there into sedgy lagoons. And beside the lagoons were nets, with birch-bark floats and pebble sinkers, hung out to dry upon weather-bleached rails.
We marched up wearily enough to the front of the nearest house, and then arose a difficulty which was new to us. Our Lapps did not march straight inside. They did not even knock at the door. They dumped their packs on to the ground, and hung about near them, three perfect images of bashfulness.