Bear hunt—Smoking him out.
Bear hunt—Smoking him out.
On the whole, then, when a bear is shot it is a day worth remembering, and all involved congratulate themselves on being incomparable hunters. There are plenty to listen to and envy them. Few men cansay that they have not been concerned in a hunt. But in all last year head-money was only paid on seven bears in the whole of the Enare district, and that covers some 150,000 square miles. So, whatever can be said against the Lapp as looking on hunting as a business, it must be granted that it comes to him as sport and enjoyment as well, or he would not embark in a trade which brings in such extremely frail dividends for so large a percentage of outlay in risk and exertion. If further proof were needed, it was there plain in Enare Town. The majority of the Lapps lived in snug wooden houses, tilled the ground, tended cattle, lived prosperous lives. The professional hunters were like the hunters of the States, practically outcasts—men of the outer air, it is true, and rare fellows, but in the riches of this life they were un-acquisitive. When one of the rare windfalls came they were generous, and it quickly went; and between whiles they and theirs knew the grip of an empty belly. In Enare Town they lived in peatgammer, eyesores amongst the comely houses. Their wives were slatterns, their children ragged, their homes ringed round by squalor and poverty. They lived the free life of the forests, which is the best life of all, but they had to pay its price.
VikingBoats on Enare See
VikingBoats on Enare See
It was manifestly absurd to drag the Marlin and its cartridges any farther. In the first case there was absolutely no probability of finding big game for it to shoot; in the second it was more than likely that carriers would be unprocurable farther inside the country, and we should have to hump all necessaries on our own backs, and the rifle would have to be jettisoned. In mid-Lapland it was unlikely also that we should find a purchaser, and here in Enare one offered. Who does not know the delights of doing a trade? We sold the Marlin for the price it had cost in London town, and threw in the cartridges as ballast to the bargain. It was the postmaster who bought; and in the joy of his purchase he put the Marlin to his shoulder, aimed at a hut some fifty yards away, and pulled trigger. The result was surprising. The bullet went in at one side of the hut and out at the other, and as the inhabitants happened to be within at the time, they came outhurriedly, and looking distinctly worried. The postmaster was only acquainted up to then with the penetrative power of the local weapon. So this performance of the Marlin made him dance with delight.
His thirst was whetted. He had tasted the delights of owning one good weapon, and he wanted another, and he cast his eyes upon it with frank longing. Now our 12-bore shot-gun would not have been classed in England as excellent; indeed it would barely have toed the mark at tolerable. It was an old friend certainly; it had done good service in many climes, and it had seen so many things that its owner was devoutly thankful it could not talk. But it showed the batterings of travel. Its stock was scored and scarred; its barrel was browned more by oil and tallow rubbed on bright-red rust than by the more scientific method of the gunsmith’s shop. It had been spoken of by a whisky miller in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee (who used shot-guns in the defence of his business) as homely; it had been described in more than one stately home of England as “that qualified old blunderbuss”; and its owner always started out across the seas from his native island with the advice, “Now, don’t bring that rotten old tin spout back this time.”
Still it had its points, that much-abused old gun. Held straight, it was deadly enough. It had manya time carried a ball in its right barrel with sound effect; and once, in Africa, when in a moment of stress and panic the ball cartridge was slipped into the left barrel, which was alleged to be “full choke,” it eased itself of the charge without bursting, although it nearly did dislocate the firer’s shoulder in the recoil by way of remonstrance. And at the same time it performed most thoroughly the requisite business with the bullet.
It was one of those guns which was probably always second-hand, and it had never been a high-class weapon even in its palmy days. Even its builder had sent it out into the cold, suspicious world without the testimonial of his name. Yet the man who carried it so many miles through so many scenes, and slept by its side before camp-fires, and nursed it in his lap through many a weary hour when—well, when things were not exactly so smooth as they might have been, and grumbled at its weight under tropical suns, and swore when he missed his supper with it, and got hot when jeerers made sport of its battered ugliness,—that man, I say, would give more than one crisp note to-day if he might have it stored away at home in some dark corner near at hand, from where he could take it out at times and abuse it with rough, friendly words, as one old chum abuses another. He would like to lift it in his fingers again, and put his chin against that piece of spun yarn which was served round the stock where—pah! what nonsenseis this? The gun was not fit to carry. It was absurd to go about with such a weapon, when better guns were so handy. And if (as a matter of accurate fact) it was rather more serviceable than any of the other guns in Enare, why, of course, the people up there were little better than rank barbarians, and what could be expected of their artillery?
And so at Enare the old gun remained, and forty marks exchanged hands over the transaction. We travelled thereafter the lighter by several pounds of dead weight, and we did not miss the weapon’s usefulness. Even had we condescended to the murder of nursing mothers, we could barely have filled a decent game-bag with birds from one end of the country to the other. So one wished the postmaster good luck with his purchase; but many a thought went backwards after the old gun’s welfare, and many a sighing hope was registered that the new owner would entreat it tenderly.
The postmaster was the active spirit of Enare Town, and we made a good move in securing his vote and influence. He could not give us any information about much of our journey, it is true, because, as he explained before, all his experience of passage in and out of the country had been by the Sodankya route; but at least he could put us in the way of negotiating the first stage. He sent round word, and, after a delay, carriers came to our dwelling with thongs ofreindeer harness in their hands ready to strap on their packs. But when they heard what was required, they demurred. They had no taste for wandering away into the distant wilderness. The postmaster delivered to them an hour’s animated lecture in Qfinsk before they would even think of it. Then they replied with more objections, and thus for two more solid hours the argument went on. There were three carriers—two Lapps and a Finn—and they stood in a row with their mouths open, and looked rather limp and dejected whilst the postmaster railed at them and detailed their prospective duties. A decorative background of Lapps arranged itself behind the group and watched proceedings with curiosity and attention. They rather regarded us as villagers elsewhere do a travelling circus.
We impressed upon the postmaster that what we really would like was one reliable carrier who would go through the country with us as far as Kittila, and engage the other carriers and guides as they were needed along the route—you see our demands by this time were getting simpler. We had quite given up the idea of the combined guide-interpreter person; and the postmaster urged this proposition with fluency and noise. He pointed out the easiness with which such a piece of work could be done. He dwelt upon the wealth which would accrue to the happy man who did it. But the three carriers did not warm to the scheme one little bit. They merely lookedfrightened, and shook their heads, and the Finn paid us the compliment of glancing in our direction, and then turning away with a perceptible shudder.
The postmaster gave it up. “Very well,” said he, “then you shall just take them the first stage to Lusaniemi, and then they must get other carriers.”
The faces brightened at once. They were very like children these Lapps and Northern Finns. And they set about making up the packs to their fancy, and getting them strapped to their shoulders with the thongs of reindeer hide. The word went round, and the houses exuded more men, children, and women, all smiling their goodwill, all anxious to wish us God-speed. One wrinkled old crone of a woman, long past walking, was dragged up by her grandchildren in one of the boat-like reindeer sledges that she might not miss the spectacle.
We were all ready to start, when one more request was made for—shall we say, a souvenir. Would we fire one shot with the Marlin at a mark to show how good an aim Englishmen can make with a heavy rifle?
Was there ever a more embarrassing favour asked? We had made a good impression on Enare—there was not a doubt of it; and here was an excellent chance of destroying it in a single moment before the assembled community. But there was no evasion possible, and so one of us shouldered the rifle, took a quick sight on the mark they pointed out (andwhich he could only just see), and pressed delicately on the hair trigger. The bullet sped, and the crowd ran off to see the result. It was a lucky shot; it had blundered in “plum-centre”; and furthermore, it had pierced in through the log wall of the house on which the mark was set, and out again on the opposite side. Whatever else had happened, the reputation of the Marlin rifle for penetration was established in the Lapp capital for good and always. We were so overcome by the warmth of the multitude of the subsequent good-byes, that I regret to say we marched off neglecting to pay a debt of tenpence to the good lady with whom we lodged.
Our escort left us at the last of the dozen houses which formed the town, and from there on, excepting for one or two turfgammeof pariah hunters, we came across no human dwellings for some time. The way lay through a thick and fairly tall forest, mostly of pines and birches, though in places there was a heavy jungle of shrubs and undergrowth. There were no birds, and no sign of larger game. Only insects abounded. For awhile we had a trail to walk on, but this grew more disused, and finally vanished, and more than once we got astray, and had to make sharp turnings to recover the direction.
It was not altogether country that would have suited a bicyclist. There were rivers to plod through, and swamps to clog one, cliffs to scramble up and down, and thickets to disarrange one’s personalappearance, and most effectually to tear a mosquito veil if one had been worn. As a main direction, we were heading east along the flank of a steep valley, with hills on one side and a deep river on the other, which sometimes broke up into noisy rapids. As a general thing the trees closed us in, but now and again we got out on to rising ground, and found a view which it was worth stopping to look at.
The pace of our caravan now, was very different from that detestable slouch we had been forced to put up with at the north of Enare See. We logged off a good steady four miles to the hour, and after the first stop (which always comes early on a march, to get the loads finally adjusted) halts were pleasingly infrequent. The two Lapps were the willingest fellows on earth, and the solitary, high-booted Finn, although he was a poorer creature, was forced to keep up with his better’s lead. The elder Lapp, who headed the advance, was a melancholy-faced man of some personal beauty. He had lost his wife a few months before, had had his house burnt on the top of that, and so found himself, in middle life, changed from a prosperous family man to a homeless widower; and these things do not tend to cheer a man. He was a dull, capable servant, but we could not bring ourselves to like him.
Johann, the younger Lapp, was a very different animal. We took him to be aged eighteen, though he turned out afterwards to be ten years older thanthat estimate. He stood about four feet ten inches high in hislappellinin, and the full curve of his bandy legs was charmingly exhibited by the skin-tight white-flannel garments which covered them. He had a quaintly ugly face, beardless as a girl’s, and thatched above by a fell of coarse, black hair; and with his gaily-pipedmatsoreooff and packed against his load (as he always carried it on the march), and a tight, striped jersey covering his upper man, he was an exact reproduction of the peripatetic acrobat one comes across at English fairs and seaside summer beaches. Indeed one could never quite get over the idea that he was merely playing the part of carrier for a joke, and that some day, quite unexpectedly, he would doff his load, produce a square of threadbare carpet, and go through some entertaining contortions, and afterwards hand round his wooden coffee-bowl for coppers.
He was a fellow of infinite thews and a boundless appetite for hilarity. He always had the heaviest load foisted on him, and received it with a joke and a grimace; and after the most wearisome march he could always tell funny tales, and laugh uproariously at his own excessive wit. In his personal habits he was an irresponsible savage; but in a land where everybody was accustomed to do everything for themselves, he was surprisingly thoughtful and attentive. For instance, after he had been drinking at a stream, he frequently offered his wooden cup to one of usthat we might drink with niceness also, instead of being forced to lap the water up like a dog; and more than once, when our kettle and the carriers’ were heating together on a camp-fire, he has burnt his own fingers that he might take our kettle off and hand it to us. Indeed in these little attentions he distinguished himself above all his countrymen we met, and perhaps it was partly for this reason along with the others that we grew so much to like him.
Two deserted villages did we pass through on this march, with their few mouldering remnants of huts and clearings almost blotted into forest by the second growth. In one of them there was an especially picturesque bit, and we came to a halt, and Hayter sat himself on the wreck of an old reindeer sledge and tried to sketch it. He was prepared for annoyance from the mosquitoes, and he got it. He battled with them bravely for a long time: he smoked like a chimney; he slapped himself with frantic industry; and at last he gave it up in despair. He had covered three pages of his sketch-book with blood—his own blood—and pencil scratches, and dishevelled insect corpses, and he certainly did get three good impressionist sketches of the atmospheric condition, but he carried away no intelligible note of the ruined huts and the clearing.
The carriers shouldered their loads again, and we knocked out our tobacco into the grass; but thecaravan did not start till the two Lapps had come up and carefully stamped out any smoulder which might remain.
All trails which might at one time lead out of that village were long since grown up. The forest is always greedy to take back any territory of which man has robbed it. So we had to make our own path as we progressed, and pressed on through clinging undergrowth. The dim roar of the foss down in the valley rumbled through the air, but no birds lightened the march with their songs. Occasionally the straining ear thought it caught the cry of some feathered creature, but it always turned out (on seeking deeper) to be tree-branches grinding together in imitation of bird sounds.
Ant-hills, built of pine-needles and clay, perched under the trees on the steep hillside, with gallery entrances into them of the bigness of peas, and a marvellous insect busyness pervading all their neighbourhood. They were not so large as those pine-needle ant-hills one meets with in north-western Norway, and of course were dwarfed by the huge ant-mounds of Africa, but they ran to a goodly size here in the Enare district, often reaching to a four-foot height above a seven-foot base.
We had passed the noisy falls by this time, and when we could catch sight of it through the trees, we could make out that the farther side of the valley was moving away from us. We were working downwards all the time, and presently we stepped out from the cover and stood on the sand beaches of Muddusjärvi.
It was necessary to cross this lake before we could get any farther, and the packs were thrown down, and we proceeded to telegraph our need to a tiny farm on the other side. The Finn did not help. He was driven half mad with the mosquitoes, and he lay on the sand, with his head wrapped in his coat, writhing with the irritation of his bites. But we others dragged some dead wood to the extreme water’s edge, and shredded it with our sheath-knives, and set it alight, and coaxed it into a goodly flame. And then we added more fuel, and still more. There is always plenty of dead wood ready to hand in these austere forests, which no one but Nature herself cuts or cares for, and we dragged down whole trees to dedicate them to the flames.
The lake was dim with mist, and a clear signal was imperative; and Johann, the eccentric, must needs climb trees and dance upon dead branches, crooning music to himself, till he and the branch came crashing down to the ground. He was a weird creature. So we made this beacon of ours no niggling flicker. We had got to make our presence known and our needs understood; so we built us a royal blaze which roared, and writhed, and rose high into heaven; and then we ranged ourselves in the valley of smoke which drifted to leeward (to keep outof the mosquitoes’ reach), and one by one stepped out and hailed at the upmost stretch of our voices, that some one, we did not know who, might bring across a boat.
It was a good opportunity to experiment for the best travelling note of sound. The Echoes from their perches on the frowning hillsides across the lake appointed themselves judges, unasked, and we mortals began the contest.
First Johann coughed the wood-smoke from his lungs and ran forward as though he were going to throw a cricket ball, and set back his shoulders, and yelled out a sort of dog-yap on two high notes. He scored, but not heavily.
The other Lapp lifted up his head and emitted a melancholy howl like a wolf’s. We listened. Yes, that certainly carried farther.
The Finn lay on the ground, with head shrouded from the insects with his coat, and would not compete. So we foreigners in our turn cooeed, after the Australian fashion, and the Echoes, fickle ladies that they were, awarded the palm to the newer, stranger, imported sound. They cooeed back that the cooee won by an easy thousand yards.
TheSignalFire.
TheSignalFire.
Water-mists hung in filmy layers above the lake, and thickened as the hours drew on. Patience and more fuel to the beacon were the only things that would help us, and we applied them both assiduously.And when we were not working, we sat where the smoke of the fire could drift solidly over us, and those gentlemen of England who sit at home at ease, and have never seen the mosquito at his worst, do not understand the luxury of it. There are not many insects whose proud boast it is that they can make the monarch man find stinging wood-reek fascinating.
“Illi robur et aes triplexCirca pectus erat, qui fragilem truciCommisit pelago ratemPrimus,”
wrote Horace in the days gone by; but unknown lands, had he known it, can contain far more horrid torments than the unknown sea.
But at last our vigil and beckoning came to an end. Through the gray lake-mists there loomed out a hazy dot of a deeper gray. It grew and blackened, and resolved itself into a canoe, spiritlessly sent along by a single paddler. We watched its approach with warming hearts. And lo! the solitary paddler was a woman, old, bent, and toothless. All her men-kind were away, it seemed, fishing up a farther arm of the lake. It was a year since she had been in a boat, because of her rheumatism. Moreover she had been in bed, and so our beacon had been lost on her, and being rather deaf, our shouts had fallen but dimly upon her notice. She hoped, with fluttering courtesy, that we would forgive her dilatoriness. Poor oldcrone! we shook hands with her all round, and soon let her know where the indebtedness was placed.
But the canoe was small, perilously small, and leaky, and it obviously would not hold the party of us. So the packs were piled in on to the wet floor-boards, and we foreigners paddled off to an appointed place where there was a larger craft, and we took the old lady, enthroned on a brown canvas sack, as an honoured passenger. The carriers tossed the remaining embers of the fire into the lake, carefully extinguishing with water every remaining spark, and then they went round by the beaches to meet us; and we ran the other canoe down into the lake, and made the trans-shipment, and paddled off in triumph. The old woman watched all passively. She was past the age of doing much for herself, or giving directions. She had a strong face, but the days of initiative had passed from her, and it must have been by a marvellous and unaccustomed exercise of will that she roused from her bed, and brought that first canoe across through the dank lake-mists to succour us. We recognised this, and I think we were duly thankful.
We beached the canoe before the little farm, and went up to the hut there and took possession as a matter of course. There is an entire lack of formality about quartering yourself in your neighbour’s house in Arctic Lapland.
The old woman, with her latent housewifely instinctsaroused, pottered about with a burning green branch to drive away the intruding mosquito. There were two rooms to the hut—a general living-room, and a tiny cupboard-like chamber which held two box-beds. There was a pet reindeer calf in the larger room, a frail, stilt-legged creature of the bigness of a greyhound, with a hoarse, dog’s bark. It had an amazing knack of getting into every one’s way, and sucked without invitation every finger that dangled within its reach. Of food about the place there was no single scrap. Milk, fish, bread, were all unprocurable. And so we were reduced to “killing a tin” from our scanty store, and making a sketchy meal off preserved dainties, which seemed to provoke the appetite rather than appease it. Ours was the smaller room, and we lit a fire on the stone hearth, and brewed milkless, sugarless cocoa, and finished up with a dessert of that and cigarettes.
The warmth grew in the little chamber, and there was a dry floor of boards beneath us. The mosquitoes, too, seemed for the moment to have left us. Here seemed an opportunity for taking off our clothes, the first for many days. The scars on the vulnerable parts beneath them were cruel. Hayter’s legs and knees were so swollen with the bites that he could not rid himself of his breeches until he had slit the bands of them with his knife. Our arms were tight in the sleeves of our coats; our hands were the size of boxing-gloves; we were both of us bloodied andblotched all over with the treatment we had undergone.
Personally I got on to one of the beds and fell asleep there in the act of filling a final pipe. But Hayter did not get so far. He was seated on the floor when I saw him last, reeving a new lace in one of his boots; and when I roused in the morning, he was still upon the floor, with the lace in one hand and the boot under his head. I fancy we must have been a trifle worn out when we finally reached the shelter of that little farm on Muddusjärvi.
We were woke by Johann at 5.30 the next morning (after three hours’ sleep), but did not make a start of it much before eight. We were bound up the lake, and as a paddle had been broken in the landing overnight, another had to be hacked out of the solid tree with axe and knife before we could leave. You may use another man’s property if you find it lying about in Lapland, but you are expected to make all damage good. As Johann pointed out, it is sometimes a profitable move to leave an old paddle or a battered pair ofskiwhere the chance, needy stranger can lay hold of them, as by that means he does the breaking, and one gets provided with brand-new implements free of trouble. And there is no fear of being taken in by some one who is incompetent to do the requisite carpentering. Axe and knife, and more rarely a saw, are the only tools in the country, and within all itsmarches one could not find a grown, sound man unable to use all three with deftness.
We paid off our Finn carrier at this point, and gave the old lady of the house two marks, at which she nearly bowed herself in two. And then we embarked in the canoe again, with the two Lapps paddling, one the bows, and one aft, and set off up the lake.
Muddusjärvi is narrow here, and contracts still more farther on, till one could well set it down as a mere currentless river. It sits quietly between its low banks, and is fed from the low, hummocky hills on the northern side, and by the higher hills beyond them. There is thick cover in beyond these banks, but no sign of game anywhere.
Reed grasses which scraped against the canoe’s tarry side were beginning to grow in the shallows, and then, just as the lake was beginning to widen again, we landed before a cluster of three huts, and tried for carriers. Johann and the melancholy Lapp went up to do the negotiation, and we foreigners got out of the canoe and stretched our limbs. A flock of ten diminutive sheep, two of them black, sauntered up and nibbled at my legs. The farm was small, but it seemed fertile and cared-for, and by no means poverty-stricken. There was a grass-field, enclosed by split-rail fence, and manured. And good grass it was, too, well cleared from weeds. But there were no carriers available here, which was what wewere particularly interested in just then, so we went back to the canoe and once more got her under way.
We opened up broad Muddusjärvi after this—a fine sheet of water, bordered by wooded hills; but presently we turned due north again, and paddled up a narrower arm of the lake, and landed at another Lapp farm.
This was certainly the most prosperous place that we had come across since entering the country, and it was marvellous to think that such a spot could exist so far inland and so deep within the Arctic Circle. There were store sheds and outhouses running right up from the lake beach, in all abundance; and the big, log dwelling-house itself, on the top of the rise, was a place of mark. It had yellow window frames and a shingle roof. Its big kitchen living-room measured twenty good feet by five-and-twenty, and it had no less than two separate bedrooms, not to mention the usual combined dairy-bedroom, each with a separate door of its own.
But then this estate was no one-man farm. It doubtless had called one man owner sometime during history; but he had begotten sons, who shared the land between them,more Hibernico, and then in the recent past these amalgamated into a sensible partnership. By dyke and axe they had added a few more acres to the ancestral plot from the forest swamp at the back; but only a very few: mere husbandry is of small account in this far Northern clime. What they did was to increase the numberof nets, and build more fishing canoes, and more drying sheds in which to cure the catch. It was from the lake they got the more important harvest. The milk and the cheese, and the rye and the meat of sheep and oxen, were good, but they could not be depended on. It was the fish that never failed. No Arctic storm, no broken summer, could kill the crop of the lake or deny it leave to ripen.
Still twenty acres of good mowing-grass had this partnership got growing bravely in their rail-enclosed fields, and a potato garden, and a flock of sheep, and some dozen healthy cows; and as wealth goes in Lapland, they were rich men. But the struggle for existence up there in the North does not permit of any idle hands. If a sufficient living is to be got, all must work for it. There was no sitting back to enjoy a life of moneyed ease on the shores of Muddusjärvi.
The place, as we saw it, hummed so briskly with work that we were almost ashamed of our own unattached condition. A big catch of fish had just been brought in from the lake, and they lay gleaming against the grass, sorted out into tubs according to their kind, awaiting their turn for evisceration. All spare hands were hard at this work. One of the partners, a comparatively big man for a Lapp, gave the lead. He took his fish up by the back, cut through three-quarters of the neck down to the backbone, slit up the belly, emptied the guts on to thegrass, and twisted the tail-flukes through a slit in the gills, so as to keep the flattened carcass perpetually open. Two women and a bent old man toiled at the same work, though with less deftness; and two small girls squatted on the grass, and picked with care the fishes’ sounds from amongst the other inconsidered debris, and washed them in water, and stored them in a wooden bowl of birch.
In the shed built for that purpose, these finny spoils, strung on sticks, were put up to dry. There were no salmon or trout there; they were all coarse fish; some, of the bigness of sardines, strung through the eyes; some, of the perch tribes, hooped into circles like those above described; and a few stray pike, half decapitated, each on his own especial withe, hung up like shrivelled criminals with their wicked heads a-cock.
There was a draw-well in front of the house, with a huge, straddling counterpoise-derrick over it in constant use. We stood by this for some time watching the bustling life of the place. Johann came and said that a carrier was available, but he must dine before he set out, and he (Johann) had received an invitation to dine also. We accepted the delay, and when one of the ladies asked us, we went up to the house. She produced stools, and wiped them down with a corner of her skirt before offering them to be sat on. Verily feminine human nature of a certain class is much the same all the world over.
AProsperousLapp Settlement.
AProsperousLapp Settlement.
It was the dairy-bedroom we sat in, the room of state and honour, and as it was comparatively free from mosquitoes—there were some paltry dozen or so to remind us of our immunity—we rolled cigarettes in peace, and Hayter produced a sketch-book. The old woman who had charge of us was shown what was wanted, and took up her position, nothing loath. She stood like a professional model—a rare thing in this fidgety land—and the sketch progressed with speed.
A very happy likeness it was, and the old woman was amazed to see herself for the first time in all a long life on paper. But she was not altogether pleased. On some occasion during her days she had broken a leg, which (according to the primitive method of the country) had been set with a reef in it. When she walked this gave her a prodigious limp. When she stood at rest upon both feet, it naturally skewed her shoulders well out of the horizontal. The sketch faithfully reproduced this trait, and the old lady objected in her top key. She wanted to be drawn straight as she would like to be, and not with rugged face and halting body, as the accident of years and weather had happened to make her. She was very like her sisters in more favoured climes, this middle-aged dame of Lapland.
But she did not stay arguing long. Work could not stop. She left us in the dairy and went awayto the kitchen, and thewhirrof a spinning-wheel told us what was her employment.
Hayter’s pencil, however, was not permitted to rest. Johann had evidently exploited its powers, and presently he came in half-dragging, half-leading, a younger, more comely girl, and whom he explained he was sweet on himself. He backed her up against the wall, arranged her hands and her head-kerchief, and explained that he would like a portrait of her executed in the best style for his own personal use and convenience. Her name he said was Margrete, and he mentioned that she was famed for her skill in milking cows in the summer and making clothes during the long nights of winter. The gaymatsoreowhich he was at that moment wearing himself was the outcome of her clever knife and needle.
In view of the forty-nine mile tramp ahead, Johann had annexed a bundle of the fine, dried grass they use here in the shoes, and whilst the sketch of his sweetheart was progressing—by the way she was only one of his many loves—he dumped himself down acrobat-fashion on the floor and took off his foot-gear, and arranged the packing of grass therein with vast deliberateness and care. A small, solemn child, all bumpy about the head from bites, came in, stark-naked, from the other room, and stayed to stare. A couple of dogs—stout, gray, wire-coated fellows, like the dogs of the Eskimo—added themselves unobtrusively to the audience.
A lover of trimness in the female ankle should not go to Lapland to find his models, as the trouser, strapped on to the boot-top, is fatal to any idea of symmetry. And in fact female personal beauty of any sort is not there brought to any high stage of cultivation. The faces of the women always verge towards plain, and their figures can only be described as dumpy. But if the features of these Lappish women are homely and perhaps rugged, at any rate they are invariably pleasant in expression, and such a thing as a peevish face cannot be found from one side of the country to the other. They wriggle along through life on the lean edge of starvation. They have everlastingly to confront the struggle for the next meal, and the meal after that, and this constant strain marks the forehead and wrinkles the cheek; but at least they are free from those more branding worries of larger communities, which whiten the cheek and draw lines from the mouths of the women we know so well at home.
A cuckoo clock in the great, busy kitchen hooted half hourly. In this land of the midnight sun and of midday night one cannot tell the time by the heavens as the countryman does in England and lower Europe. A timepiece of sorts is a primitive necessity, and many are the varieties which find a use. In the larger coast towns, like Vardö, the watchmakers drive a roaring trade, and dozens of watches with curious tooled brass cases dangle fromthe rods in the windows. Up-country almost every hut sports its clock—some investment from a winter’s marketing trip in the tiny, boat-like, reindeer sledges at Abö or Sodankyla, or even far Helsingfors.
An ordinary solid clock does not take the Laplander’s eye. He likes something flimsy, and if possible novel. At one place, hung on a peg driven into the logs of the wall, we were condemned to gaze hourly upon the exasperating device of a dentifrice advertisement, wherein a smiling young female drew a tooth-brush briskly across a beautiful set of cardboard teeth between every tick. I was half frantic with bites at that halt I remember, and deadly tired, and much wishful for sleep and forgetfulness. But neither would come. Hour after hour I was condemned to remain awake, and stare at the tooth-brush clock, and read the legend (printed in my native tongue) that it was made in Germany, and that the dentifrice was put up into neat packets, priced sixpence, or one shilling, which could be obtained from any chemist with the least presumption to call himself respectable. I argued at the time that the clock had evidently drifted far from the land where the ingenious advertiser destined it, seeing that the letterpress was English, and the Laplanders do not use tooth-powder even if they could have read about its existence. And I savagely hoped that the man who sent it out had gone bankrupt as a penalty for annoying me. But at this peaceful distance of time and space I aminclined to call back that wish. And besides, I could not injure him (by conspicuously refusing to buy his wares) even if I wished, as the name of the ingenious dentrifice has completely passed away from me.
Fortune took it into her fickle head to smile on us at this halt. We got no less than two new carriers, and rare fellows they proved to be. They agreed after about an hour’s palaver to take our packs upon their shoulders, and once more we started down the lake. The whole population were either on the beach, or came there to see us off. The eight ladies who were employed in the dissection of more fish, left off that employment for the moment, and stood up, and took of their head-kerchiefs and waved them diligently. And Margrete came down, and stood where the shingle was wet, and kissed her hand. Johann saw, and so moved was he that he must needs stand up on the top of the pile of packs to wave back, thereby very nearly upsetting the canoe and all of us. We got hold of his bandy legs and pulled him down, and he lay on the wet floor-boards with his head undermost, bawling with laughter, and thinking it the best joke in all the world.
He was hinting to another girl that he would die for her, at our next halt. He was a most fickle swain, this india-rubber Lapp.
We paddled eleven miles to the end of Muddusjärvi—or at least the Lapps paddled; we two foreigners layagainst the packs, basking in the sun, and smoked, and lazed, and admired the colouring on the hills. And at the end of the lake we disembarked and paid off the melancholy Lapp from Enare, who took back the canoe. Poor fellow, he had had his troubles and we should have pitied him. Moreover, he was intelligent, and strong, and willing, and we should have appreciated all these qualities. But as it was, I am afraid our principal sentiment towards him was one of dislike. We had sufficient worries of our own for all practical purposes, and that mournful face hanging between us and the sun did not tend to lighten them.
The caravan limbered up and stepped out down an avenue thirty feet wide, cut from the forest to provide for the winter sleigh traffic. The stumps were stillin situ; rocks and boulders were scattered about everywhere between the grim forest-walls. An unmeddled-with undergrowth lay breast-high all down the clearing. A tiny winding ribband of track gave us just space in which to set our feet as we marched; and even this led into quagmires and morasses, which we were forced to wade through or circumnavigate. But all these obstructions would be blotted out by the winter’s snow, and the sleighs could travel briskly over the hard white crust. Scarcely a soul moved from place to place during the bright, soft, insect-ridden months of summer. Indeed this march was rendered memorable by our meeting another wayfarer. He was a man dressed in the Lapp clothes, but witha purely Tartar physiognomy, and he and we exchanged but the chilliest of salutations. Even the cheery Johann forbore to bestow on him his usual grin of greeting.
As though the mosquitoes were not sufficient plague (and their numbers, if it were possible, increased) we here passed into a belt that was peopled by still more insect horrors. Dragon-flies in millions rustled through the air, though these did not worry us. But they were accompanied by loathly great horse-flies, as thick as a finger, and monstrous blue-bottles, which were maddening in their attentions. The blue-bottle one could hear and avoid; but the attack of the horse-fly was stealthy. The beast would fly up without a sound, and alight like a piece of thistle-down, and one would know nothing of the matter until one was bitten. They could go through a coat as easily as one could push in a pin; even corduroy riding-breeches could not impede them; and on the place of each bite, there arose in the next half hour a great wen, which one wanted to tear out bodily by the finger-nails. That part of Lapland would be a lepidopterist’s heaven; but for any ordinarily constituted man it came very near to being the other place.
It must be remembered, too, that if we two foreigners suffered badly from this plague of flies, our carriers were ten times more tormented. A man with his hands free can thresh about, and to a certain extent beat the insects from him, unless he perisheswith the exertion; but to a carrier impeded with a pack, this form of athleticism is necessarily limited. Our Lapps put calico cowls over their heads, which covered all except their faces, and their faces and hands they smeared with a liberal ointment of tar, and yet they suffered horribly. Still for all that they made no complaint. Johann would give out his great guffaws of laughter when things were at their worst, and the others would chime in merrily enough. They might be miserable, but they saw no reason to make themselves unhappy about it.
They were good fellows these two new carriers of ours. The younger one, Pedr, was a regular Adonis in his way, and certainly the only really handsome man we saw in Lapland. He had rare, fine features, perfect teeth, and a beautiful smile, which he laid on whenever conversation was demanded of him. He did not talk much; he seemed to find the smile much more effective.
The other addition of our force of a surety had stepped straight out of County Galway. It was true he wore a bluematsoreopiped with red and most dandily worked upon the shoulders. It was true he wore the Lapp shoe, and the tight white-flannel Lapp trousers (all of them rather shabby), and carried sheath-knife and tar-bottle dangling from his embroidered belt. It is true he talked only barbarous Qfinsk, but he spoke it with the softest, most insinuating brogue imaginable. His whimsical,humorous face, with its two days’ stubble of hair, was the most truly Irish piece of human furniture one ever put eyes upon.
He had a blue eye and a captivating grin—grin was the only word for it. He was always willing to do the larger share of the work, and—always did the least. He lied to one, and grinned without shame when he was found out. He tried brazenly and without the least concealment to swindle us over his wages, and grinned delightedly when we objected to paying him more than his just due. He provided us with free amusement the whole time we had him, and did it all deliberately. To have called such a delicious person anything else but Pat would have been an insult both to himself and to us.
We had a desperately hard journey of it on this march, and, moreover, passed nothing sufficiently interesting to note. The broad sleigh-cut continued all the way; the forest hedged it in on either side; the path underfoot was never level and seldom dry; and the insect plagues were a torment too horrible even to think back upon. In the end we came upon the swampy margin of a lake—the Menesjärvi we had heard so much about—and there, after some searching, found a canoe pulled up amongst the lake-side rushes.
Now the canoe was thoroughly sun-dried, and when put in the water she leaked after the manner of a basket. Moreover, she was small—unmistakablysmall. It was quite obvious to the naked eye that she would not hold the whole caravan, and equally obvious (when one looked at each member in turn) that no one wanted any more marching. However, for Pedr and Pat to walk farther was out of the question. They were both done to a turn, and fit to drop as it was. So they were put in the canoe with the baggage, and it just held the load, and Pat (wily man) annexed the baler, whilst Pedr took the paddles. They bestowed on us one ample grin, and one of the beautiful smiles, and pushed off.
We three others had to tramp wearily round the margin of the lake to Menesjärvi Town.
We started off across grassy swamp, and put up a pair of ptarmigan in the first two dozen yards. The cock was a lovely fellow, splendid in his summer plumage. He flew off at once; but the hen waited and glared. We beat about a little to find the chickens; but we did not trouble very much. We were wearily tired; and so we stumped on without seeing them.
We got out of the swamp soon, and walked through a dry, straight-stemmed, pine forest, hung with that melancholy, lichenous growth like the Spanish moss of the Gulf States which we had seen on the trees near Ischinlisvuoni. But here it seemed younger, or else was having less deadly effect, for the pines were few of them dead, and for the most part in sturdy health. Crisp ivory-yellow reindeer moss made the carpet onwhich we walked, and at times, through the tree aisles, we caught sight of deer feeding.
It was a weary march that, for weary men, under the shade of those gloomy pines, but we were buoyed up with thoughts of the entertainment we should get at Menesjärvi, which the map marked as a town, or at least a considerable village. And lo! when we did reach it, the place was nothing more than the squalid huts of one small family.
But what they had, they offered with the usual easy courtesy. A couple who were sleeping there turned out of their best room, the dairy, and we were ushered in and invited to take the vacated couch. We did not do this; we had had enough of insects of one kind and another that day; and we thought the floor would be good enough for us. And so on the floor we camped.
We dined first, sketchily. The room we were in was the dairy. Along shelves on one side were a couple of rows of wooden-hooped bowls, eighteen inches in diameter by four deep, in which milk of various dates and various stages of decomposition was set to cream and curdle. From time to time the good-wife came in from the farther room, and took up a horn spoon which lay handy, and skimmed a part of one of the bowls into a birch-wood piggin which she carried, and then licked the spoon clean so as to be ready for next time.
Hayter said he quite granted that the lady of the house was very neat and tidy in her habits, but he would not have any milk. I did. I ate a bowlful of the clammy, sour curd. I was far too ravenous to be nice about what I swallowed. And then we divided the contents of one of those unsatisfactory tins between us. There was not a scrap of anything else to be had for love, money, or blows.
Three times whilst this process was going on had we with torch and fingers cleared the room of mosquitoes; three times had fresh swarms arrived to take possession. The building was full of chinks; it was impossible for us to stop them up; and so with pain (and some profanity) we made up our minds to acceptkismet, and let the enemy do their worst. We crawled into our sleeping-sacks, and tried to doze.
Never was there a greater failure. The stinging little pests settled on us in their hundreds, and sleep was out of the question. It was twelve o’clock at night, and the sun outside, high in the heavens, was beating on the shingle roof till the room within was like an oven. The air reeked with sourness from the milk on the shelves, and we were tormented with an unquenchable thirst as a result of our bites. Hayter, by the way, was in a tidy fever.
We tried pulling the heavy blanket-sacks over our heads and getting off to sleep that way. But the result inside was a choking Turkish bath, and as themosquitoes got in also, we did not get much profit that way. We tried leaving our heads outside the sacks, and protecting them with hats and veils, but that was a more dismal failure still. And finally we were reduced to lying on our backs and keeping our faces in the midst of a halo of pungent, stinging, ship’s tobacco-smoke.
In the meanwhile we had not been left in our lonesomeness. Almost the entire time we had one visitor or another staring as though we had been strange and slightly amusing animals. It is a curioustraitof the Lapps, that although in many simple ways they are a very polite people, they will enter your room at any time without knocking or asking any trace of permission, and will stare complacently at what is going on without uttering so much as a word of comment.
A weird crew they were too, this audience at Menesjärvi, and it was hard at times to persuade ourselves that we had not gone to sleep after all, and that these were merely the people of fever and nightmare. They were most of them deformed. One hump-backed girl, with pigeon breast and a livid face, had a wedding ring on her finger and a couple of puny brats at her heels. Intermarriage does dreadful work amongst some of these isolated communities. Those who have been on Fair Island, that tiny patch of land between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, where once an Armada ship waswrecked, will have seen a grisly instance of this nearer home.
The dogs alone were well-shapen and well-cared for. But then the Lapps always are kind to their dogs, just as the Northern Finns are almost invariably brutal.