FinnCarriers Crossing Russian Frontier.
FinnCarriers Crossing Russian Frontier.
These halts live in the memory more than any other feature of the country. The sitting down to wait perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps an hour, in a stew of insects, and then repacking the loads and starting off again at a gait which rarely amountedto the pace of two miles an hour, was indescribably wearying. When we had Lapps for carriers all this was changed; they were willing, cheery, and active creatures who always did their best—but more of them later. With these high-booted Finns, however, it was almost always the same. They were weak, unwieldy, unhandy. They could not keep a footing on rock; they were about as helpless as camels on soft ground; and they always made a point of getting as badly bogged as possible in every swamp. They were sullen boors without an ounce of pluck, and if one attempted to hurry them at all they collapsed at once.
Up to this point the ground had been slowly rising all the way, and the air was growing cooler. As we went on, the swamp grew more rare. The water collected in little lakes, and under foot we trod for the most part on rock pavements worn smooth by a thousand centuries of water and weather. There were fewer birches, but here and there an abortive pine twisted and squirmed some five or a dozen feet above the naked stone, to hint at the vast forests of his giant fellows which lay only a few hundred miles to the southward. And underfoot, between the outcrops of rock, were here and there patches of ivory-yellow reindeer moss.
But when we reached the divide, and looked down over the country on the southern side, the reindeer moss had taken full possession. The pale sulphurtint was everywhere, but still the fjeld was deserted. There was not a deer in sight. All that rich lichenous growth was left to run to waste. Only one living animal did we see on the whole day’s march, and that was a tiny black-and-tan lemming, which I caught in my hand and (to his surprise) let go again. The country round here is, however, used largely as a camping-ground by Lapps during the winter, and the yellow moss, though crumbling and dry as sand, feeds the deer till they are rolling with fat. It is a very deep snowfall or a very hard frost which makes these pastures inaccessible. In winter the deer break the snow-crust with their great splayed fore-hoofs, and then dig down like terriers, till they are often browsing at the foot of a pit which completely hides them from any one on the surface.
For cold weather the migrating fjeld-Lapp comes to more permanent moorings, and sets up for himself a domicile more suited to the climate than his flimsy conical tent. We came across one of these on this day’s march, in the forks of a growing river. It was a hut of peat and sods, shaped like a West Greenlander’s igloo, and some dozen feet in diameter. Birch-stems were used inside to support the roof and prop out the walls, but these were falling in. One well-cleaned rib-bone and some charred embers were all that remained of furniture. The herdsman Lapp does not build for futurity; it is a concession to his principles when he builds at all; and when hequits his turf mansion in the spring, he does not look to find it still standing in autumn. He is content to waste a day and build another.
We were fortunate enough to come upon the two-roomed log-hut of a Finnish farmer to sleep in that night, and thought ourselves in luck’s way. We had to wade a river to reach it; rain had commenced to fall in torrents, and we were wet and very weary.
The farmer had but one cow, and she was not in milk; the agricultural part of the farm consisted of a small garden of unenergetic potatoes, set in drills three feet apart; and they could give us nothing whatever to eat for love or money. Presumably when times were good they lived on fish, for there was the disused head of a four-pound pike near the mouth of the draw-well; and at other times they apparently subsisted upon water. The water was good; it was sheathed in ice for more than half-way up the well; and we drank a bucket apiece with gusto. But our appetites demanded something more; so with much grudging we “killed a tin” out of our very scanty store, and then lit a fire and topped up with cocoa by way of dessert. One of us slept that night with his head upon the stone hearth. We were deadly tired, and though the rain dripped on to us through the roof, we neither knew nor cared.
The rain had cleared by morning, and we set out with better hopes. We were getting down towards Enare See, and expected to come across some duck;also we had managed to pick up an extra carrier, and so hoped that the pace would improve. The addition to our strength was a boy of sixteen whose leg had been broken and then set locally, and so had acquired a limp for life. But for a Finn he had a humorous face, and occasionally he did manage to instil some life into the proceedings.
The mosquitoes met us punctually at the door and got to work at once. The man with the hare-lip explained at some length that they would not be so bad now that the rain had passed over; but though we had grown to be connoisseurs, we could not notice any difference in their attentions. And, moreover, as those exasperating halts came with regularity each six hundred yards, we had every opportunity to get thoroughly maddened with their bites. We could watch them settle on us in their millions, waddle along with their ungainly walk one shoulder at a time, and probing with their long clumsy trunks at every chink. And we saw them flying away crimson-bellied with blood which we ourselves had a prior claim to.
There was underground drainage in many parts of the fjeld which we passed over here. Hollows abounded like those one sees on the limestone hills of Yorkshire, where cave-roofs have fallen in. But we found neither pot-holes nor cave-openings. Lakes were many. We frequently had to climb round their sides at the foot of steep, smooth cliffs of sandstone,and then again to scramble over hard outcrops of the same rock on the dry ground beyond. The birches were gone. Instead a forest began to grow of weedy, straggling, dishevelled pines, bare in stalk, and showing but little greenery. And always where stone was not, the ivory-yellow moss covered the ground with its dry, crisp carpet. Occasionally, too, sprouts of mountain-ash appeared, but these were rare, and they never grew thicker than a finger, or taller than a grown man’s waist. And still the birds kept off: we saw old spoor of reindeer here and there in the softer ground; but of four-footed creatures in the flesh and fur, nothing but tiny lemmings.
Meanwhile the lakes were growing larger, and the rivers which linked them more deep and broad. Enare See as it appears on the maps—even on the best map, which is that of Russian survey—is large; but Enare See as it exists in Arctic Lapland is larger by one half. It is no great sheet of open water like Michigan or Ontario; there is barely one stretch of unbroken water twelve miles square in all its hundred and twenty miles of length; and it is hard to say where the lake ends and where it begins. There are islands all over its great expanse, and the mainland round is cut up by lakes and water channels. In fact, just as some one once defined a fishing-net as “a lot of holes tied together with string,” so Enare See might well be described as a collection of land patches made into islands by water.
Our course swung through half the points of the compass as the water channels swerved to this side and that, or the fords lay to our right or left, and those exasperating carriers grew slower in their pace, and more frequent in their halts, and we had resigned ourselves to another fifteen solid hours of torment, when a great streak of luck befell us. Between some bushes at the side of a long narrow lake there lay a canoe.
She was pulled on to the bank and lay bottom upwards, and who she belonged to we did not know—or care. We were in the mood then to have cheerfully annexed the Czar’s own private dinghy even with sure foreknowledge that he wanted it himself during the next half hour. And the carriers seemed to be similarly without scruple. The packs went down to the ground in quick time; the loppy-legged boy said something funny and laughed; even the squint-eyed man smiled. The canoe was rolled on to her keel and shot into the water. The luggage and ourselves went amidships; the Finns distributed themselves forward and aft; and away we went with rather less than an inch of free-board.
Now so long as we were in smooth water, this method of travelling was delightful. The mosquitoes were comparatively absent—we had merely a paltry thousand or two to remind us of the ravening swarms elsewhere. There was a brilliant sun. And the hump-backed man, who was squatting on the floorforward, paddled us on at an excellent pace. But when we got out in broader water, there was a good ripple on, and the lake came over both gunwales merrily. The canoe, moreover, was thoroughly sun-cracked, and leaked like a basket, and nothing but industrious baling kept us afloat at all. There were always two of us at it, watch and watch about; and we worked till our arms ached.
The Finns, being brought up in a country full of rivers and water-ways, naturally could not swim, and if we two foreigners had only had our two selves to think of, I fancy we should have let that canoe swamp. We had suffered many things at the hands of those carriers, and we should much have liked to have seen them—well, inconvenienced. I know this sounds brutal here from a distance, but we were warmed up to it then, and meant what we said, as other people who have met the Northern Finn on his native marsh will possibly understand. But we had the baggage to consider, and the baggage turned the scale. We made them hug the weather shores, and kept the balers going without intermission.
It was not all plain rowing, even then. Twice the lake-chain broke; the rivers which linked the broader water were too shallow to carry a canoe; and we were forced to make a portage. But if the canoe was small on the water, she was small also on land; and many hands made light work; and we had her out, up, over, and launched in almost as quick time as onecould have walked over the intervening necks of land.
But we were not done with the marching yet. The navigable water ended for good, and once more we were put to footing it through the forest, and suffering from the flies. But the scenery had changed. The birches had gone, and so had the Arctic willows, and around us were nothing but tall gaunt pines, for the most part bleached and dead. A parasite had invaded the forest and was killing it by slow inches. The same thing is seen festooning the timber in Florida and Louisiana and the Gulf States generally, where it is called Spanish moss. It is gray there, and looks dreary enough as it hangs in melancholy wisps from its dead or dying victim. But here it was far darker, being in texture like a harsh wool, almost black; and as it swung in the breeze from those blighted boughs, it reminded one of funeral plumes. Here, too, there was no undergrowth of palmetto and saw-grass to tone down the gloom: at the foot of these doomed trunks was one unvarying carpet of sulphur-coloured moss.
As we marched on (with the never-varying series of halts) the outlines of a path appeared, crossed and recrossed by the spoor of deer. The lemmings grew more shy. Against some of the tree trunks the yellow moss was stacked in columns six feet high to fodder cows in winter. The marks of axes appeared on the timber, and there were stumps new-scarred.And then the gleam of water showed through the tree aisles. Our carriers brisked up; even the humpback straightened himself; and the pace quickened—to something close on three miles an hour. We swung round a bluff of sand, and before us lay a log-house painted dragon’s-blood red, with a bay beyond whereon rode a masted boat. That one house made up the town of Ischinlisvuoni, the northernmost port of Enare See.
Now our first thought was to get a boat which would take us over the great lake to Enare town, which was distant some eighty-five miles in crow flight; and here we were in luck’s way. The miniature viking ship riding in the bay had just come up from the very place, and her crew jumped at the chance (and the profit) of taking us back. We had to wait, however, till she was refitted. They had met heavy weather on the way up it appeared, and in one squall their high square-sail had split neatly down the whole of one of its seams, and naturally this had to be mended before she could put to sea again. So we went into the red log-house, and took possession of one of the two rooms, which was furnished principally with a large white-washed rubble stove that reached up to the roof beams.
The population, however, though nominally they had cleared out of their bedchamber for our benefit, had no notion of leaving us to ourselves. The whole lot of them came in to stare at first, and when theruck had gone, there always remained an escort of at least six of both sexes, who loafed in the doorway, and spat, and watched us as though we had been performing animals. Occasionally we drove them out and would be alone for perhaps two minutes, but then again the door would open and others would come into the room, spit thoughtfully at the floor, and then get their eyes deliberately focussed. They did not speak either to themselves or to us; and if they enjoyed the performance, they did not show it in their faces. They remained always the same wooden, unemotional boors, and we found by experience the only way to deal satisfactorily with the Arctic farmer Finns was to take the upper hand, and keep it. Any attempt at civility they construed as weakness, and then took advantage of us as a matter of course.
It is queer how these people can thus isolate themselves. The Norwegian of the North is one of the most civil and obliging fellows on the face of the earth. The Lapp, though he is frequently a savage in his personal habits, is none the less a courteous gentleman in his intercourse with others. And even the Finn fisher has occasionally some rudiments of civilness and hospitality. But these others are past praying for. They can read and write, they are oppressed by no government stress, they could make an easy livelihood if only they had the gumption and the energy to take it, but they prefer to remain the greatest clods within all the marches of Europe.
Happily for ourselves a ceremony was taking place outside which began to draw off the audience. Between the red house and the lake shore was a building of blackened logs, from the doorway of which smoke had been issuing ever since our arrival. It was a Finnish vapour-bath, and when it was heated up, our carriers and the entire population of Ischinlisvuoni went in in squads to enjoy it.
The Finn of the North seldom or never anoints his person with water in the ordinary way. But still, on the whole, as back-block tribes go, one could not call him an uncleanly person. Almost every farm has its bath-house, and it is very rarely that a fortnight passes without this being heated and used. The bath at Ischinlisvuoni was typical of all the lot, for the pattern varies but little. It was a house of logs, twenty feet by fifteen, and some eighteen feet up to the pitch of the roof. Along one side, half-way up to the eaves, there ran a broad shelf of smoothed wood. The floor was of beaten earth, and at one corner beside the door was a large bee-hive-shaped mound of rubble stones, with a fireplace in the middle to admit burning logs. This primitive stove is heated, and the smoke either escapes by the doorway, or remains inside and blackens the roof. Gradually the air of the place warms, and then water is thrown on to the glowing stones to saturate it with steam. The bathers undress at the dwelling-house, and run across the intervening ground in their birthday attire. Bothsexes and all ages bathe together. They douche with cold water first, stand about on the earthen floor for a minute or so, and then climb on to the raised shelf and lie down. Every one has a green birch of sweet-smelling Arctic willow shoots, with which he (or she) switches his neighbour, and so stimulates the circulation. And there they stay for twenty minutes or half an hour. Then out they rush, and if there is snow on the ground they roll on it, or if not, they dip into the coldest water attainable; and then they go back into the house again to cool down.
All through that evening, and till three o’clock the next morning, the bathers in every stage of undress, from the complete to the partial, were sitting about in the kitchen which was next our room. It never seemed to strike any of them that the sight for alien eyes might be a trifle quaint. At the great white Russian stove a woman was cooking circular cakes of rye with a hole in the middle, and threading them on a stick as fast as they were baked. Another woman was roasting coffee, and a man beside her was grinding the beans as they were browned. Half-clad children were sprawling about the floor, and two or three were asleep in a corner. A naked man was contemplatively browsing on tobacco before the stove, and a woman was treading at a spinning-wheel in the middle of the room. By the window our two boatmen squatted on the ground with palm and needle, mending the split sail, and beside them the humpbackwas playing jigs on a cheap accordion. These were all Finns. The only two Lapps in the place were supping in a corner, off curdled milk and flinty rye cakes.
Ethnographically the Lapps and the Finns are not very distinct races, except in the matter of height. The nose of the district is usually turned up at the point, the cheek-bones are high, and the skull is well drawn towards the back. But in the item of clothes they are always different. The Lapp wears on his back in summer the distinctivematsoreo, which is an outer garment of gray, brown, or electric blue, closely woven cloth, that reaches down to the knees. It has a high standing collar more or less profusely embroidered, with other decorations in colour on both back and front. It is belted about the middle by a broad surcingle, from which depends the inevitable knife and tar-bottle, and the more slack there is bunched up forward and aft, the greater dandy is the wearer. The nether limbs are clad in tightsarreof ivory-white flannel; and on the feet arelappellinin, which are short roomy boots peaked up at the toe, stuffed with grass, and drawn up over the ankle and made fast over the ends of thesarreby a narrow red figured bandage, after the fashion of the East Indianputty. The head-gear varies. The orthodox square-topped cap of cloth with its head-band of fur is rare, and usually appears only in winter or on festivals. It is picturesque, hot, and expensive, and for daily use a soft round hat of felt is preferred, or for seawork a sou’-wester. And the outer clothing of the women is very much the same, except that thematsoreois a trifle longer, and the head-gear is merely a simple handkerchief. The winter garments of skins differ a good deal from these, but they will be spoken of in their place.
The Finn, on the other hand, is much more ordinary in his attire and much less picturesque. Take away his high boots and he might be almost anybody. The boots, however, are certainly a feature. They are peaked at the toe like the Lapp’s, heelless, and have soles and sides all in a piece. The leg part is of soft leather, and can be drawn up above mid-thigh if wished; but it is generally worn telescoped, with the baggy top well below the knee-cap, after the fashion of mediæval villains in Surrey-side melodramas. For the rest, he is clothed in a coat, waistcoat, and trousers, scanty of buttons, and with a cut suggestive of a Leeds clothing factory; carries a thin moustache; and more infrequently than not wears some physical deformity. His woman-kind are distinctly his better half, and probably keep him from starvation. They are bustling and active, utterly devoid of any pretence to figure, and as a rule gratuitously ugly. They affect, in the summer, garments of checked cotton, which they weave themselves, and though they also wear the high boots, the tops of these are discreetly hidden by a skirt of decent length.
We smoked complacently deep into that sunlitnight, and thought with pleasure of the sail which was to come amongst the islands of the great lake. But we were not done with our old carriers yet. They wanted payment, and the squint-eyed man came in to say so. We had the money ready for him, counted out, in rouble notes. It lay trimly in a heap. We pointed it out. He inspected, and at once began to object. He desired payment in kroner or marks; and not having either, we could not well give it to him. We pointed out (using the words of the Russian consul at Vardö) that in Russian territory the rouble was legal tender. He seemed partially to grasp this, and suggested exchange at the rate of one rouble (which is worth some two-and-a-penny, English) for the Norwegian krone (which may be valued at thirteen-pence-halfpenny), and became abusive when we declined to fall in with his ideas. He was not a person to whom we owed any gratitude or much consideration, but I think he was surprised at the pace with which he was ejected from the room.
The community here at Ischinlisvuoni had reindeer, which they pastured in the forest, but they did not meddle with these much during the summer months. Indeed they looked upon them much as capital to be drawn upon in time of need during the winter. During the six months of day they lived, to a large extent, on the produce of the cows, the curdled milk, butter, and butter milk, eked out with fish from the lake. But these fish, with some natural perversity,they never ate fresh. The spoils of the nets were always gutted, split open, perfunctorily dried, and then devoured raw in a partly decayed state. There is something in the theory: salmon, boiled or fried, is the most nauseating dish in the world if one has too much of it, as witness the bargain in the old days of the Newcastle apprentices, that they were not to dine off salmon more than twice a week. Salmon, well kippered, and eaten in thin slices, raw, does not cloy one nearly so much. But when the kippering is imperfect, not to say sketchy; or when the fish is not kippered at all, but merely more or less dried, and, moreover, is not salmon or any of his relatives, but some little soft, white fish like a sloppy trout; then the theory falls to the ground.
Their fishing-tackle for the summer was simple. It consisted merely of short small-mesh nets with floats of birch-bark rolls coiled along the head rope, and pebble sinkers to the foot; and the catches were small. It was in the dark months that they were more successful. Then they were able to spear by torchlight, and secured the heavier fish. We saw the apparatus used lying on foreshore. It consisted of an iron cresset (parrila) with four spear-headed prongs and a long curved iron stem, which ended with a fork of wood to make fast to the canoe’s bow. Long pitch-pine splinters are laid lengthwise between the prongs, and lit at the outer end. The wind, or the canoe’s motion through the air, keepsthem blazing. The paddler sits in the stern facing forward. The fisher stands in the bows behind theparrila, watching for the fish as they are attracted upwards by the glare. His weapon is thearrina, which is very like the grains we use here at home for spearing eels. The shaft is of wood, eight feet long, and fitting into a socket at the head. There are six spears to the head, the outer two the heaviest, all barbed inwards, and all converging from the bottom inwards. It is a formidable implement, and once one gets the knack, very deadly. But it is no child’s play to acquire that said knack, as many an energetic British poacher can vouch. I fancy, though, that the average fisherman from these sporting islands would prove himself pretty deadly if he could take his own tools to the lakes and rivers of Arctic Lapland.
We did not go to sleep that night very confident of a peaceful start down-lake on the morrow. The squint-eyed man and his friends had been making irruptions into our room at intervals all through the evening, noisily, and flatly refusing to be satisfied with their lawful wage. We, on the other hand, had quite made up our minds not to pay three shillings for one, and so expected that next morning they would try to put in force the local equivalent of ane exeat regno. In which case there would be trouble. Because come what might we were firmly determined to get under way.
When it came to the point, our Neiden carriers, to use a colloquialism, climbed down abjectly. We roused very early, escorted our baggage (once more made up into three twin sacks) down to the shore, and stowed it in the boat on either side of the mast. The carriers hung about, but we ignored them as though they had been men of glass. At last the squint-eyed headman stated their willingness to accept their just dues, and they were handed the contracted-for number of rouble notes with a few impressive remarks thrown in. The discomforts of the place where thieves eventually frizzle was described to them with a lurid wealth of colour, which, being Lutherans, they thoroughly appreciated. And as we had a few minutes on hand whilst the boat was being ballasted, Hayter sketched on a smoothed board a few spirited recollections from Doré’sDante’s Inferno, so as to ram the matter home. They grew awed and limp, just like so many naughty children, and we left themthoroughly repentant; and I fancy that the next stray English who come in contact with that squint-eyed Finn and his friends will meet with more tender entreatment.
Now our two boatmen were Finns also, but the business on the waters seemed to have lifted them above the ruck of their race. They were civil and willing, and so far as their lights went, attentive. For instance, they had floored their craft amidships with a springy cushion of birch boughs for our special benefit. And moreover, conjointly, they were incomparable boat sailors. In the course of our voyage occasion came more than once when there was need for handiness and quick decision; and South-coast yachtsmen, bred in racers, could not have beaten these inland sailors of the North. The skipper was a little wrinkled man of sixty, grown old in the traffic of the lake. Man and boy he had sailed Enare See whenever it was free from ice for all of a lifetime, and what he did not know about the shoals, and the thousand islands, and the millions of unbuoyed reefs, and the places where the wind eddied, and the other quaintnesses of the place, could have been written large on a thumb-nail and still have been unimportant. He looked out upon his small watery world with a pair of bright bird’s eyes, and knew every mood of it by heart, and neither knew anything beyond nor wanted to.
His mate was a man entirely different—a merecreature of thews, who could shift the tack when ordered, set up a backstay, eat, row, smile, or carry out any of these minor offices of life which do not require the effort of a brain. He had the good humour of a puppy, an ample sufficiency of strength, and the face of a prosperous publican. His name was Olaf.
We set off down narrow waters with a snoring breeze from out of the N.N.W. The red house and the well-derrick and the farm-buildings of Ischinlisvuoni quickly dipped from sight behind a bluff; the axe-marks left the trees on shore; and the black forests grew up untouched out of the carpet of ivory-yellow moss. But we were not in the open lake yet. A run of some dozen miles brought us to shallows where a portage was necessary. We had to unload and unballast and drag the boat painfully across a neck of land on rollers, which for the four of us was a full-weight job, as she was a stout, beamy, 25-foot craft, built to endure heavy lake seas and powdering squalls. But we got her nicely launched again, brought down to trim with boulders forward and aft, and once more under way. There were 3500 square miles of lake and island ahead of us; and the neighbourhood was comparatively unknown to any one except Enare natives; and we were anxious to sample as much of it as possible. Moreover, although the breeding season was on, we promised ourselves to shoot a sufficiency of duck for the pot.
Now I am free to confess at once that Enare See was somewhat of a disappointment. We bore away to the south and east, dodging amongst countless isles and innumerable shoals, and sometimes we landed, but most times we contented ourselves by exploring with the eye alone. The islands were of all sizes, from the come-and-go boulder, the bigness of a hat-box, which ducks under every other wave, up to land patches three miles in radius, with harbours, and mountains, and rivers, and men, and all the appurtenances of a pocket continent. But there was nothing (in actual view) large enough to be impressive. The very hills themselves which bounded the lake were more in the form of rolling uplands than craggy mountains.
Of shootable game we came upon barely a trace. A whole day would pass without our seeing a single fowl either in the air, on the land, or upon the face of the waters. And the reindeer, of course, were like our cattle at home here—the domestic possession of the native. We saw these animals, it is true, in quantities. All the islands of Enare are laid down in deer according to their size, and solitary hermits peered at us from patches of ground smaller than a cricket-field, and I hope we cheered their loneliness. They were not very beautiful creatures to look upon just about then. They were very much out of condition. The snows had only just departed, and they were thin with the hard exertion of delving withtheir forefeet to reach the moss beneath, and worn with hard driving in the sledges. Their antlers were in velvet, and only partly grown, and their coats were very much in a transition state. In fact, they appeared to be clothed in a badly made patchwork of shades, which varied from dirty white to faded brown. These deer get little or no tending in the summer. They are not wanted for traction; they are put out to graze; and they do it industriously. Their owners permeate the neighbourhood in their canoes on fishing intent, and if they manage to cast eyes upon each individual deer once a month, it is a piece of unusual attention.
We came across these lake-fisher Lapps at intervals, and often sat and chatted round their camp fires. I remember well the first of these savage entertainments. Our eyes caught a slim blue drift of wood-smoke rising up from the farther side of an island. We ran down, hauled our wind, and sailed up to it. We were welcomed ashore with easy cordiality. There were three Lapp canoes nuzzling the foot of a black rock, and on the crown of the rock were their crews of four men and three round-faced, good-humoured women. They cleared the place of honour for Hayter and myself, and we sat down in the smoke drift from the fire, where the mosquitoes could only raid us with difficulty, and we listened to the politics of the lake: fishing was good here and bad there; this man had finished eating that lame deer he killedin the early spring; that man’s canoe had been beached in a gale, and smashed like an egg.
One lady indeed wanted to know about the outer world. She was a portly young person, whose globular red face beamed with a healthy animal cheerfulness. She had stubby hands, and a figure which resembled a corn sack, well filled, and stamped down. She carried a neat brass wedding-ring slung to her neck-handkerchief, and had a most educated taste in tobacco. She filled her pipe with shavings from my plug of negro-head, lit it with a brand from the fire, and then absorbed the smoke in an ecstasy. It was enjoyment to watch her pleasure: she puffed that pipe to the uttermost ash, and the vapour circled amongst her smiles. Then the spirit of inquisitiveness, and perhaps of envy, took her, and she wanted to know if this beautiful, this exquisite tobacco was the common smoke of my country.
To weakly avoid an hour’s complicated explanation, I admitted that it was.
And could English ladies have as much of it as they wished?
With distinct truth I answered that no stint was put upon them in the matter.
The patriarch of this group was a travelled man. His reindeer sledge had carried him in winter as far south as Sodankyla, where he had seen tinned anchovies and a Singer’s sewing-machine; and more than once he had boated down the Pasvik Elv to below BorisGleb and caught glimpses of steamers out on the broad Varanger Fjord beyond. As some advertisement of all this experience, his head was capped with a battered yellow sou’-wester; but the rest of him was clothed in orthodox Lapp attire, and his tattered bluematsoreowas a miracle of barbaric ornament. His sardonic old face peered out from a calico mosquito cowl, which covered all the rest of the head, and his attention was very firmly fixed upon his meal.
In these lake-side camps every one cooks for himself. The lumps of meat (when there are any) are impaled on a piece of stick sharpened at both ends, so that the lower point may be pushed into the ground at an angle, and keep the meat in position whilst it is toasted. But the Lapp does not let his meat become over-cooked, and as a general thing he does very little more than take off the chill. It must be remembered, however, that everything is dried, more or less, and that fresh reindeer meat, or fresh fish, are things never used. Indeed I have frequently seen Lapps, and Finns for the matter of that, go home hungry in a boat half full of sweet, fresh fish, and then make their meal off semi-dried relics reeking of decay.
The coffee alone is a common brew, always made in a kettle of copper with a lid on the spout, and always drunk sweetened with cone beet-sugar after the rest of the meal is finished. And when it is strong enough, Laplander’s coffee is the best flavoured in Europe.
A LakesideCampon Enare See.
A LakesideCampon Enare See.
After the meal, the fire is carefully quenched with water, and then comes sleep, and then once more away in the canoes. These lake-fisher Lapps think no more of sleeping in the open than do birds or deer, and perhaps the untemptingness of their headquarters has something to do with this.
In the course of our cruise down Enare See we came upon several of these settlements on the coast and on the islands, but they did not strike us as appetising for a prolonged residence. Thegamme(house) itself, which is usually some dozen yards beyond high lake-mark, has walls of stones and mud, or turf, with a roof more or less flat, made of turf laid on birch rafters. A chimney is a rarity, and in summer a nuisance. In a land which swarms with mosquitoes, it is always pleasant to have a wood-fire on the floor which will fill the atmosphere with “smudge,” after the fashion adopted by the Floridan cracker in his palmetto shack. But the hut is not without luxury. The floor is paved with stone, and round the walls are layers of young birch shoots, which make a springy mattress. In the bettergammerthe front-door opens on to a sort of lobby, which is used as a store, with a room on either side; but in the generality of these dwellings there is a single chamber, where the family, and the fleas, and the dogs, and a reindeer calf or so, and possibly a sheep, all pig it together, much as Noah and his friends did at their famous convocation.
But besides the one or moregammer, there are buildings at these settlements of almost greater importance, and these are the storehouses where the dried fish are stacked for winter sustenance. In nearly all instances these are made solidly of logs (whatever may be the structure of thegamme) roofed with birch-bark shingles, and well raised from the ground on piles, so as to keep the contents as dry as may be. There are racks, too, for drying the fish out of reach of the dogs, and the mortal remains of what were once fishes’ internals lie trodden into the grass in every direction. The lake-fisher Lapp is not a cleanly person in his disposal of items which he has no particular need for.
The pine forests thicken along the shores as one walks south down Enare See, and the lines of the tree-changes are very clearly defined. The shores are for the most part low-lying, and in many places the trees stand up gaunt and dead for miles at a stretch. For a stranger the navigation here would be a thing impossible. The islands twist and turn and crop up in every direction. Reefs spring up from deep water, and stay just awash. We would frequently run down to a line of creaming surf, open up some passage and slip through it, and then haul our wind and stand along between two lines of reefs with not a dozen inches of water under the keel. In places the great lake was a regular stone-yard.
Our boat was wonderfully handy. In build shewas well rockered, with a good beam, but had very fine entrance and a clean run aft. She was of the regular viking build and rig, and from the English ideas of spars and canvas, it was a matter of wonder how she could sail at all anywhere except dead before the wind. A casual onlooker might have classified her as belonging to the lug-sail type, but that emphatically she was not. Her mast was stepped amidships, well set up by forestay, and by a couple of shrouds on either gunwale. When the sail was hoisted, the halliards and the down-haul were brought well aft and made fast to a thwart to serve as backstay. But it was this sail which was the wonderful part of her. It was not a lug at all, but a true square-sail with the halliard bent on to the very centre of the yard, with tack and sheet interchangeable, and with braces to each yard-arm. It was just such a rig as the Northman used when he came to ravage the English coasts. It was the sail which drove the Roman galley. It was the identical sail which the Phœnicians were using when the Londoner went out to dinner in a suit of neat blue paint, and brought his own stone axe to crack the bones.
Going free, and with sheets well-started, this sail had enormous lifting and driving power; and with tack bowsed down to the weather hause-hole, and the sheet flattened aft, our boat would look up to it as close as Norfolk una. The tiller worked with a joint so as to clear the stern-post, and pushed fore and aftafter the manner of a single yoke-line; and every time we went about, this tiller was shifted over to the weather side. The gear, too, was of necessity cumbersome, and on no sort of day could she be called a one-man boat. But she was splendidly dry, and we were not without giving her one or two stiff tests. We carried a breeze with us all the time we were on the lake, and once or twice, on the large patches of open, we met that short, steep sea, common to this class of waters, which for a small boat is the wettest sea on earth. She went over it like a cork—she had magnificent lifting power—and at the same time she did not lose her way.
Once, in a heavy rain-squall, we got blown very nearly out of the water; the reefs were blotted out of sight; and the boat showed her one weak point in declining to lie-to. But in Enare this fault did not matter. The skipper luffed up under the lee of an island, Olof ran down sail, and ten minutes later the kettles were singing over a fire in a sheltered cranny of the rocks. The squall swished and boomed overhead, thunder with it and abundance of rain; the camp-fire sent out darting, twisting snakes of flame, which hissed at the wet; and the two Finns squatted beside the blaze like some queer trolls, each working with knife and teeth at a stringy rib-bone. I remember it was at this camp we came upon a piece of chocolate about as big as twelve sixpences (the last of a very slender store), and made a present of it to the skipper.He took it with a twinkle of thanks, and popped it in his mouth. Then he set his jaws to work, and spat with solemn regularity. He believed the gift to be some new form of chewing tobacco.
The rain had come first, and so the squall did not last. The mists dropped, and the sky showed up blue and white, with the sun hanging in it, round as a coin, and red as a soldier’s coat. The gaunt pines of the island and the ivory-yellow moss were lit with the glow. It was after midnight. We stood up and watched in silence. A stray duck, the only fowl we saw on all Enare, came flying across—a clean black silhouette against the brightness.
Once more we quenched a camp-fire and mastheaded the brown sail, and once more we left the open lake and dived in amongst another maze of its islands. We had seen our fill of the northern and eastern reaches of Enare See, and were heading now so as to reach Enare Town in the quickest reasonable time. The wind hardened as the sun climbed higher into the sky; and the boat flew south and west with a swirl of sound. The lake-floor rose and sank beneath her, and the surf leaped up from a thousand reefs. The pines roared at us as we drove past a wooded point. Here and there a house of logs showed against a clearing on the shores.
The lake was deserted of man and fowl. The canoes of the fisher Lapps had run into shelter, andthe birds were not. The loneliness of the place chilled one like the hour before the dawn.
Then we saw houses of red and gray and ochre standing on a low bluff, and we made for them, ran down sail, and put the boat’s nose on a beach of sand. We had arrived at Enare Town, the chief city of the Lapps, and it was three o’clock in the morning. We were deadly tired. The rest-house lay at the top of the bluff, and we climbed to it with yawns and drooping eyelids. There are no locks in Lapland, and we went inside and announced ourselves. A young Lapp and his wife were asleep in the guest-room bed, under a calico mosquito bar. They rose, silent and blinking, and began to clear away their bedding. In a cradle lay a child with its face all blotched with bites, and this also they took away. But what other preparations they made then for our comfort I do not know. We lay down on the floor in our oilskins as we were, and dropped off on the instant into the deadest of sleep.
Up there in the North, where the day lasts bright all round the clock, they set down no arbitrary hours for work and sleep such as are forced upon us here in England. One may often see children winding up their play at 4A.M., or their elders starting a day’s work at six in the afternoon. In our journey which followed, across this country down towards the Arctic Circle, we marched quite as frequently by night as by day. On that special occasion at Enare we breakfastedat twelve midday, and found most of the town outside to welcome us.
We held a levee inside first, because Olof had advertised the wonders of Hayter’s Marlin rifle, and the bear-hunting section of Enare (which comprised all the males) could not rest till they understood all about the repeating mechanism. And then we went to present a letter to Herr Praest Hinkola. It turned out that he was away, and was not expected home for some days, but Fru Hinkola and her brother, the postmaster, took us in charge, and strangers in a strange land were never more hospitably entreated. We had all our meals at their table, and if we did not sleep under the parsonage roof, it was only through our own refusal to trespass farther on their kindness.
They were not cheering, however, about our chances of getting through across the country to Kittila. It was never done in summer; there were no roads; the mosquitoes and the swamps were almost impassable; horses or reindeer were utterly out of the question; lakes and rivers lay in the way, over which it was very doubtful if we should find ferriage even for ourselves; and, finally, it was distinctly improbable that we could get carriers to pack our goods beyond the first stage or two. In winter the route was practicable enough, for then the river and the lakes were frozen, and the swamps were covered in snow, and a sledge with relays of deer could get overthe ground with ease. But even in winter that way was little traversed. It was from Helsingfors and Uleaborg they got the supplies, and the route to those towns lay through Sodankyla. That was quite practicable even in summer, though of course not for horses or reindeer. We could travel by canoe nearly all the way.
And we should see, what? Well, we should have an excellent view of several hundred miles of river-bank. And we could post onwards with horses either to Kittila or else directly down to the sea, in comparative luxury and comfort.
We had not journeyed that far, however, to exploit future tourist-routes; our business was to visit the Lapland farmer and fisher and herder on his native heath; and we were not going to spare ourselves pains to carry this out. So we announced with a sigh that Sodankyla would not do, and that we were going to worry through the other way somehow; and forthwith the postmaster shook his head, and sent word round the houses that carriers were wanted for the morrow.
In the meantime we looked about us. There are twelve hundred people in Enare, but as the town-limits are some seven miles across, a stranger looking at it from the landing-place might reasonably put down what he saw from there as a small straggling village of new log-houses set down near a spired, red church. The houses were closer once and older, butone of the periodical fires broke out during a gale a few years back and swept the whole place away, so that it had to be entirely rebuilt. Given a sufficient frost to freeze the water, a good breeze, a house afire on the weather side, and one of these Northern wood-built towns will blaze itself to ashes in a dozen hours if it is at all closely built. So the more modern idea is to leave at least a hundred yards between every house, and as the intervening spaces are cultivated, the towns are now going back to the old scheme of being merely clusters of farms. And every building, from the red church down to the smallest fish-barn, has a broad, slanting ladder which leads permanently to its roof, with a great iron hook at the end of a pole, always hung there ready to tear away blazing shingles or smouldering roof-turf.
A few of the Lapps of Enare town keep unostentatious stores, where they sell sewing-cotton, gunpowder, cone-sugar, axes, and coffee-beans, all of which have been brought up by sledges during the winter from Helsingfors, Uleaborg, and the towns without the Arctic Circle. But the import traffic is small, and the reindeer, which form the only export, are driven down alive to the markets. The community is self-supporting: it catches and cures its own fish; produces its own milk, curd, rye-meal, and dried meat; weaves its own woollen cloth and checked cotton wear; builds its own houses, boats, sledges, and churns; makes for itself spoons, casks,bowls, balers, all from the native birch-wood; brings forth its own young, and buries its dead with a roofed-in sledge for a coffin.
The community hinges on the parsonage, the largest house in the place, the only house which has an upper story, which is weather-boarded without, and which has the nakedness of its logs covered by a ceiling within. Here are the brains of the place, the Law of the place, the post-office, the only library. At the parsonage they had two hundred books; and English literature was not neglected. There were translations of Messrs. Stanley Weyman, Fergus Hume, and W. Le Queux, in sumptuous pictured covers. It was there we got our Russian roubles changed to Finnish marks. It was outside the parsonage that a flag flew from the head of a tall, white-painted mast to show that Holy Russia held the land. At the parsonage dwelt the cooper who made the shallow tubs in which milk is set to cream in the dairies, and there also was the Herr Praest, who married every one of the Lutheran Church who wished for marriage within a circle of 200 weary miles; who baptized all those who were admitted to the faith; and who buried all those who were brought in the nailed-down sledges in their own private plot of Christian ground. And if the time was winter, and mother-earth was fast locked in frost, the Herr Praest would see the sledge put into the common grave which was always open, there to lie snugly iced tillspring brought a thaw, and let the spades delve out its more proper niche.
One of our great notions in wandering through so dismal a place as Arctic Lapland was to revel in sport which was unattainable elsewhere, and for a good many miles we had seen no living thing except mosquitoes and frogs. We had more or less given up the idea of fishing, but we still held on to the theory that there was game to be found, and, in fact, calculated on it for food to see us across the country. And with these theories still strong within us we began to push inquiries about the shooting, in deadly earnest.
The account was dismal enough. There was no rigorous close-time here, as in Norway, and game was very scarce. Probably there never was much, but by vigorous hunting all the year round there has come to be less. Now, it is not worth one’s while to carry a gun in summer. There are rype, willow grouse, and capercailzie, which are fairly in evidence during the courting season, but as soon as family cares begin, they keep well to cover; and since the capercailzie cock has no taste for chickens, and bolts offsolusso soon as ever the honeymoon is done, his haunts are in such far depths of the forests that man seldom gets so much as a glimpse of his wonderful plumage. Bird-shooting as an industry is not worth following in Lapland till the leaves have gone, and the snow makes everywhere a staring background.
And big game? Well, of course, the reindeer areall tame, or nominally so; and as for wolves and lynxes, these are mostly legendary. They have been shot—frequently shot—but for the most part round camp-fires, after the fishing yarns have come on. And their skins are rare: these have a way of getting lost, as is explained in the tale. But foxes there are, both white and red, in tolerable numbers, and, of course, the occasional bear. These, again, are for the winter shooting, as it is only their winter coats which have a value. The fox is plentiful. A man who understands the work may put onskifor six consecutive days, and travel 300 miles over the snow, and at the end of the week be owner of three average hides.
But a bear-hunt is a far more troublesome affair. When a track is found, the bear is promptly ringed. That is, the track is not followed up, but a man onskileaves it at right angles, and working in slightly all the time towards the direction in which the bear was travelling, finally hits the spoor again where he had left it. If he has not seen the spoor in the meanwhile, the bear is somewhere within that ring.
There is no immediate hurry for the next move. Bears only shift their quarters two or three times during the course of the winter, and if undisturbed they will doze for a considerable while when once they have settled down. So if there is no immediate danger of a heavy fall of snow to obliterate the spoor, the finder goes back and organises the hunt at his leisure.
The number of hunters depends upon the twoitems of pluck and skill, but not more than four go as a general thing, as there is a distinctly commercial side to the business, and the fewer the guns the more there is to every share. The Government gives head-money; the merchant will pay anything between £4 and £10 English for the cleaned skins; and the beef, too, is an asset of value. A third share in a good bear is enough for a Lapp to marry on and set up a tidy farm, if he happen to be economical.
The winter light may be gray and small, but the snow looms white, and the spoor reads like a book. A bear breaks through any crust, and plunges elbow-deep at every stride. His belly trails along the snow and ploughs a great furrow. It takes the drifts of a gale to cover that track. But withal his highness is a scary person, and though he may sleep with shut eyes, he keeps open ears and an active nose. So the callers have to tread with niceness and delicacy if they wish to make sure of an interview; and even supposing that they carry the spoor with them up to the pile of tumbled rocks where it ends, and the absence of back tracks show his bearship is at home, the hunt is by no means over even then. The bear will know quite well that enemies are at hand, but he will not rush them. He is no fool. On the contrary, he is an animal of infinite cunning and resource; and he quite knows that in his stone redoubt there is at least one chance to three of brazening out the situation and wearing his own hide for another season.
It takes a man of much more recklessness, or ignorance of the consequences, than the average Lapp hunter to go into a cave of the rocks and deliberately invite a rough-and-tumble with a live brown-bear.
But the hunters do their best to irritate him from a distance. They fire single shots into the darkness in the hope of riling him sufficiently to make a rush, so that the other guns which remain loaded may drop him when he comes into the open. They do this from every direction on which the cave mouth opens, so as to give him every chance of feeling a shot. And finally, if this method fails, they light a bonfire on his front-door step and stand round on theirskito await results.
It is by no means certain that the smoke will reach him, for there may be quite possibly an outward air-current, and the Lapps have produced their Rembrandtesque effect for no practical return. But if they have luck, and the stinging reek is too strong to be endured, then they have to stand by for quick shooting. The bear bolts like a rabbit, out of the firelight into the gloom, and in a matter of seconds he will be absorbed amongst the tree-stems of the forest. There is something uncanny, something almost devilish in the way a Northern bear can adopt invisibility.