Sketchesat Menesjärvi
Sketchesat Menesjärvi
We had small appetite for breakfast next morning after that horrible night, and this was a fortunate thing, for there was little enough provender available. We could not buy so much as a crumb of bread or a shred of fish. The wretched people had none to sell. Johann showed a pleasant piece of thoughtfulness. He came into the dairy with a blazing bundle of green twigs in his hand, and filled the room with clean, fresh wood-smoke, so that we might have the early morning in peace. Even the sour-milk smell fled before that billowing wood-reek.
A mark paid our poor night’s lodging, and for another mark we chartered a good canoe to take us down the lake and up the Menesjoki, with a limp, small boy to bring her back. The hump-backed woman and her brood came down to the lake-shore and stared drearily at us as we paddled off.
That morning voyage down the lake lingers in the memory as one of the seven pleasures of life.The sun was bright and glorious in a blue sky overhead; a breeze fanned the fever from our hands and faces; and the canoe carried us as though it were the delightful vessel of a dream. The water tinkled and the paddlescheepedagainst the gunwales. We drank deep of the ease and gentleness of it all.
All around the lake were hills, pine-covered and highish, but, as usual, many patches of the forests were dead, and the tree skeletons stood out gray and naked amongst their feathered comrades. Only one green patch was visible on all the shores, and that was Menesjärvi, where we had come from. The eye should have dwelt on it with pleasure, but the horrors of the night we had spent there were still big in us, and we turned from it with shudders.
We got into the Menesjoki after three times grounding on the shallows, and paddled pleasantly up between its banks. Here indeed was surprising scenery. We might have been rowing by some river-side park on the Thames, the cultivated growth of ages, the daily care of a hundred gardeners. There were graceful foliage trees, and trim, well-favoured shrubs, and clumps of flowers, and lawns of the pleasantest green, all repeated faithfully in the still mirror of the water. It was hard to keep in mind that human foot did not tread these banks once in a dozen years.
Fish rising at flies dappled the water mirror with dainty rings, and now and again the swirlof a foraging pike gashed it with a rippling fan. Even the mosquitoes, those insects of the devil, seemed to respect the sanctity of this paradise, and acknowledged that they were too evil to sully its delights.
The river wound into countless curves, and the Lapps paddled on at a steady gait. A brood of duck appeared in the water ahead of us, black in body, with a white bar across the wings.Leenootwas their country name. There was no drake; he was away from family cares. But Madame was fully alive to the unpleasantness of our neighbourhood. Away the whole crew of them went, splutter and splash, paddling lustily. The old lady led the way and quacked out directions, to which her family were fully obedient. One by one they left her, some diving, some swimming direct to the cover on the banks; and then she herself, with a final quack of defiance, got in the air and flew away through an alley of black pines.
The river-side park ended here, as though we had left one estate and come upon another owned by some churl with no eye to neatness or horticultural beauty. A sandy bluff reared up above the stream, and on it was a dead forest of gaunt, gray, barkless pines, standing up as an eyesore to heaven. It had not been killed by fire; it had not been ring-barked or destroyed by any device of man; but the trees, the old, the young, and the sapling, had simply gottired of life, and so died altogether in rank as they stood. The mosquitoes came back here, and set about their iniquitous work. The stream grew swifter and more hard to paddle against; the sun went in; and we were brought from our brief, pleasant dream, back to some of the more crude realities of Arctic Lapland. I remembered that my ankles were puffed like some old cab-horse’s with the bites, and I got out the bottle and rubbed brown tar on them and on my face as a preventive unguent.
Still more did the river water quicken in speed, till at last we came upon a noisy rapid, and had to put the canoe’s nose upon the bank. We disembarked. The limp boy from Menesjärvi started to paddle her back; the three Lapps shouldered their burdens; and once more we stepped out through the country under the shade of stately pines.
We found ourselves amongst a herd of grazing reindeer—if herd can be used for such a scattered flock. Now we would see one through the palings of the pines, trotting away from us into the deeper quiet of the woods. Now one would stalk out in lordly majesty, and stand, a clear mark against some sky-line, and stare in haughty wonder as to who those intruders could be who dared to bring their taint between the wind and his nobility. And then as we came up, back would go the branching antlers against the straight, strong back, and in a moment the forest would have swallowed him from view.
They were all in velvet, these deer, with the young horn hot and feverish beneath its covering, and with their antlers in many cases only half-grown. They were only just recovering from the leanness of spring. They were still casting their coats, and the old hair hung from them in faded, matted tufts, which made them look dishevelled and woebegone. Six weeks later they would be in their prime, rolling in fat, sleek-coated, and ready for heavy sledge-work, and short commons, and all another winter’s stress. They would be decked, too, with new antlers, clean and unsplintered, and proudly conscious of the two new points which marked the dignity of another year’s growth. But at present their one life-duty was to eat, and eat, and eat; and the crisp ivory-yellow moss which lay thick beneath the pines, and the tender shoots of the birches and the Arctic willows, provided the wherewithal.
It was Pat’s delight to set off these deer into a stretching gallop. “Porro,” he would whisper when his poacher’s blue eye caught sight of one of the brown forms grazing between the tree-stems. And then the Lapps would all creep forward on their silent foot-gear till the reindeer espied them, and Pat would set back his head and let a regular Irish yell out of him till the forest rang again. The deer would start off with the last mouthful of the crisp, yellow moss hanging from its lips, and the perspiring Johann would burst into a great guffaw, and Pedr woulddeliver himself of one of those beautiful smiles which served to express his every emotion. And then Pat would turn to us with his droll grin, and we would have to laugh too, whether we wanted to or not. He was really a most cheery ruffian, this strayed Galwegian.
We came across a great stretch of marsh after this, with logs laid down over the worst parts, and at the farther side we made a midday camp with a fire which would cook the kettles and provide us with a smoke-shelter at one and the same time. And at this camp it was that Johann told us a very curious tale. He was not diffuse in his telling, because he had no long powers of description, and I do not think he lied over it, because he lacked the requisite power of imaginativeness. If Pat, for instance, had told the tale, we should have taken it as a piece of genial fiction, and thought no more about it; but as it was Johann’s tale, told perspiringly, with many awed shrinkings, and mostly in pantomime, it weighed upon us sufficiently to provide us with conversation for the next several days, and then we received a sort of confirmation of it which—but that will be mentioned in its place.
Briefly, and without Johann’s gesticulations, the tale was this:—He was out one day in a canoe on Enare See, fishing—following his usual vocation, in fact. Suddenly in the sky there appeared to him a fish, a huge fish, a green fish, a fish eight times aslong as his canoe. He put up eight fingers, and we counted them. He looked up by chance and saw it, and where it had come from he did not know. It floated quite easily in the air about the height of—of—he pointed out a black pine—about so high above his canoe. It had a tail which could move, and a great ring round its neck which whirred when it went ahead. Finally it left him and flew towards the mountains of the southward, and there was lost to view.
We attempted to get more out of Johann, but that was all he could tell. We gave him pencil and paper and told him to draw the fish; and he tried, certainly, but without any useful result; but then sketching is not a spontaneous art. And in the end we gave up trying to extract any more information on the subject, and talked over what we had got.
“Is this some sort of a legend?” said one of us.
“Not it,” said the other.
“Then what do you think of it?”
“Seems to me to spell air-ship.”
“Looks like it, and a good one at that.’
“Russian?”
“Who’s else?”
“Phe-ew!” said the other. “This may mean something pretty big, if we can only come in touch with it.” And so here we were provided with a topic of talk which involved the fate of navies, the policies of nations, and indeed the government of thewhole wide world. It was a god-send to us. In many a camp, on many a weary march when of ourselves we should not have been able to rise above the depression of circumstances, it was enough to begin: “Touching that air-ship of Johann’s, I’ve been thinking—,” and there would start up a whirl of talk which lifted us clean away from the insects and the domestic worries of Arctic Lapland.
To the stranger accustomed to bivouacs in other lands, it is wonderful to see the care with which the Lapps extinguish every grain of flame before leaving one of their camp-fires. The fire itself is always built close to a stream or pond of water—an ordinary necessity of camping when there is a kettle to be filled—and, if possible, on a flooring of rock. When the camp is struck, all remaining embers are tossed into the water, and then the extinguishing fluid is scooped up and soused over the hearth till not the faintest smoulder remains.
To the stranger, I say, coming raw into the country, all this laborious care seemed excessive; but before we had travelled a hundred miles into Lapland the reason became very apparent. If a breeze gets up, smouldering embers will rise from the place of fire and travel like birds down the wind. In a million cases they do no harm. But in the million-and-first they will drop upon some patch of reindeer moss, and then the mischief begins. Thedry lichenous growth, crisp as cigar-ash, will carry the fire along like a train of gunpowder. Dead resinous branches of pine are licked up by the tongues of flame, and in an hour’s time the whole forest will be blazing, and a mark has been daubed across the country which will endure a hundred years. In Africa or America this would not matter. It would mean so much more ground cleared for the game or cultivation. But in Lapland it implies that valuable acreage of reindeer pasture has been taken entirely away from that generation, and human existence will be correspondingly harder; and so the man who sets the forest ablaze not only injures his neighbours, but he inconveniences that much more important personage, himself.
Even in the ordinary way of Nature, the reindeer moss is a crop requiring delicate management. Deer cannot be set to graze on it indiscriminately year after year. It demands its regular rotation of rest. In some districts four years, in others five, have to be given to a piece of fjeld to recover after a herd has grazed it for a short three weeks. And here, then, is the secret of the migratory life of the herder-Lapp of Northern Europe, which has endured down so many countless hundred years with scarcely a trace of change. To live, his beasts must live; and to find food for them he has constantly to move about over large desolate areas of the country; and so it is the scheme of his life which has divorced himfrom the idea of fixed abode, and not the mere relish for vagabondage. We had not seen him in Arctic Lapland yet, this pastoral wanderer; the fishers and the farmer Lapps we had come across were only his refined descendants; and we were keenly anxious to get into his neighbourhood, and watch him herd his deer, and see the life he led in summer under the conical shelter of hisla-wo. It was this kind of Lapp I had lived with once before on a bleak fjeld of north-western Norway; it was this nomad aboriginal we had both read of in the improving books of childhood; and because we had come so far and gone through so much to renew his acquaintance, and still not met him face to face, we felt that we had been in some vague degree imposed upon. Well, we were to see enough of him very soon; but more about that in its place.
We came across traces of the nomads, however, on this very march. Johann, from the head of the caravan, halted till we came up to him. He pointed with outstretched arm down an aisle of the tree-stems. “La-wo,” said he, and showed us a cone of birch-stems set round the ashes of a hearth. This then was some reindeer-herder’s temporary rest. The vadmal cloth which made the tent-cover was gone, the fire was cold, the deer were driven away to other pastures, the Lapp herders had followed the deer. Only the tent-frame was left amongst the scent of the pines and the juniper, and beside it one humanutensil. It was a “screw” of birch-bark, like those coils of paper in which the country grocer at home puts up sweetmeats for children—a flimsy vessel such as Adam might have used to scoop up his morning drink. It was new, and its edges were unfrayed; a thing made in a minute, and cast away when camp was struck to save the labour of portage. It was typical of the nomads’ménage. They are a people who have reduced the list of “things which one can do without” almost to the vanishing point.
We were skirting now by the side of another ample lake, about one-quarter the size of Menesjärvi, but we did not tramp along its winding beaches. We kept on through the pines, and saw the blue water only now and again through the trim paling of their stems, and the sun sailing high overhead warmed us as though we had been tramping through some wood of the Engadine instead of this grim forest so far within the Arctic Circle. But no birds sang or sent their calls through the trees; the air had been filtered clear of all feathered creatures; the swarming insects peopled it alone, and pestered us with their ravening attentions.
But if we suffered abominably from this plague of flies, it was some slender pleasure to know that they in their turn did not carry on a life of unfettered delight. They had their enemies. At one halt, on a small oasis in the middle of a two-mile-wide morass, I saw a loathly horse-fly, which had marked me forhis next meal, get checked in mid-career as he flew towards my sleeve. He had blundered into a spider’s web, and lay there struggling manfully. The whole net swayed and swung; the juniper twigs on which it hung actually buckled under the strain; but not a mesh gave. And presently the proprietor, a huge, orange-bodied spider, appeared from his private residence, and laid out along a warp, and (so to speak) threw off his coat and got to work.
From a seaman’s point of view that orange-bodied spider was a marvel of dexterity. He threw bowlines over the buzzing wings of the horse-fly, got a purchase on them, hauled them home against its body, and made them fast there with clever hitches. One by one he disentangled the horse-fly’s legs from the mesh, and roped them up too. And then he marled the victim’s body up into one helpless bundle, and carried it off to eat alive under a thatch of the juniper leaves.
Pat, to secure a longer rest at this halt, must needs change the grass in his boots, to do which entailed pulling it out, spreading it abroad to dry, and then packing it back again with one hand whilst he used the other as a last. Inserting the naked foot into the nest thus made was a matter for niceness and accuracy, and it was not usually managed at the first attempt. And then the coarse flannel trouser—which was very much like the trunk-hose of our own ancestors—had to be carefully brought round insidethe mouth of the boot, and snugly made fast there with five feet of red, embroidered, inch-and-a-half-wide bandage, which sported the two orthodox thongs for tying at its outer end.
The other two Lapps filled in time by capturing horse-flies and mosquitoes and “taking it out of them,” after the manner of the story-book naughty child at home. I suppose we ought to have taught them better; but we did not: we felt that a little cruelty was justifiable.
On through more forests of pines we went, and through more swamps, with cloud-berries tantalisingly unripe beside our feet. We had visions of cloud-berries from other days,—plump, yellow, juicy fruit, ice cold, and slightly acid,—and with the fever of the bites constantly upon us, and mouths like dried leather, they were visions which made us sigh. Verily in this world—especially in the Arctic part of it—man cannot get all he wants, even though he offer in exchange much fine gold.
We sheltered under a new kind of roof at the end of that march—a regular Arctic casual ward. It was a rude house of logs twenty feet square, furnished with fixed bunks and a table set against the wall, one movable bench, and a fire-hearth in one corner built of rubble stone. The nearest human habitation was the squalid hut with the hump-backed woman we had left behind us at Menesjärvi. We were in a place of shelter built for the benefit of the sleightraveller should he be caught in one of the whirling storms of winter. It was the distant finger of Holy Russia, showing how even the least-considered of her subjects is not left without some paternal care.
We filled the room with wood-smoke and prepared to enjoy ourselves. The Lapps undressed to their shirts, and squatted on the floor, and dined off reeking fish and strong rye-bread. We also ate from our poor store. And then we had a solemn palaver over the arrangement for the morrow, and then we lay down where we were, and slept.
The wood-smoke died away from the air, and the mosquitoes came back through the chinks; but they browsed upon us undisturbed. We did not wake.
Smoking outMosquitoes
Smoking outMosquitoes
We roused after an uneasy sleep and stepped outside the rest-hut, and looked at the hot, round sun which hung behind a hilltop close at hand. Hayter guessed the hour as 6A.M.I considered it to be six in the evening. We had no watch, and did not in the least know which was right, nor did we remarkably care. We were in a land where the daylight endured for each hour of the twenty-four on end, and we were setting off to visit those to whom the very name of hours was an unknown thing. We were going to seek the nomad herders in the deeper recesses of the fjeld.
We might be a week before we found them, we might be only a day. Their trail grows up after them, and no one but a herder Lapp himself should know his own whereabouts. To come across the deer pack, the only way was to quarter the country in great wide beats, and to do this quickly one musttravel light. So we arranged to reduce ourentourageto the smallest possible limits.
The excellent Johann was to come with us as personal attendant, and for once in his life that cheerful person pouted and looked sad. We might get lost, he pointed out; we should probably find no herder Lapps at all; and even if we did, it was by no means certain that they would entreat us civilly. And finally—well, he did not want to go. He puckered up his face and nearly blubbered over it. He was a bit of a child, this loud-voiced acrobat in disguise. But in the end, when we did start, he had got his usual noisy spirits back again at the end of the first half-mile.
By way of baggage we had each of us a couple of tins of food, and though Hayter and I carried a tooth-brush each in addition, that was the end of our burdens. We were marching light, in the strictest sense of the word, and everything else that we possessed was left to the tender care of the other two carriers at the rest-hut. If we wished to drink, we must lift up fjeld water in the cup of our hands; when we slept, it must beà la belle étoile. No other methods are possible in the heart of Arctic Lapland.
In this irresponsible trim, then, we set off, and travelled for I cannot say exactly how long or how far. We had no watch to mark the time, nothing but the weariness of the legs to check the mileage. We slept when we felt inclined, we ate frugally whenthe emptiness of our insides refused any longer to be humbugged by draughts of water. I fancy we were two days at this game, though it might have lasted three, and if any one insisted on four, I would not stand out very firmly. When one is on the tramp like this, and tumbles off to rest, bone-weary, it is astonishingly hard to calculate how long sleep has endured. At any rate three out of the six tins had been emptied, and we were looking longingly at the survivors.
Then we came across an encampment of the deer-herders. It was the distant bark of a dog which first gave us advertisement of their neighbourhood. We were amongst a tangle of small hills, sparsely wooded, and richly carpeted with the ivory-yellow moss. We stopped and listened, holding our breath.
The deep-toned bark came to us again, carrying over the hills and through the scattered stems of the pines and the birches. Johann stretched out an arm and swept it slowly through a sextant of space. He brought it to a rest, and looked at each of us in turn. We nodded. Then we started off again down the direction he had pointed.
On the top of each rise we stretched out our necks expecting to see the deer-herd close beneath. There was nothing but the aching emptiness of the fjeld, and the dog’s bark was not repeated. Had we——
No, there was a reindeer, and another, and four more. And there were fifty grazing on the yellowside of that ravine, with two bulls fighting in the middle of them. And there was the bivouac down amongst that juniper scrub and those gray tumbled rocks beside the stream.
A watchful hound woke out of sleep, saw us, and gave tongue diligently. Some one out of sight whistled. A stunted woman bobbed up from a sky-line, and then a little bandy-legged man appeared on our flank, and came running up, shouting diligently.
Johann’s face up to this had been doubtful; he was by no means certain that he, a denizen of huts, would get a civil reception from the free nomad of the fjeld. But the sight of the bandy-legged man running, or the words that he shouted, seemed to drive away all unpleasant suspicions. Johann capered to meet him, guffawing with delight; and they shook hands limply and interchanged their views on the situation for at least ten minutes. Then the little bandy-legged man came up and smiled a welcome, shook hands limply with us also, and invited us to his residence.
By this time news had gone round, flying from mouth to mouth across the ridges of the fjeld, and there had arrived at the bivouac two small girls in leather breeches and trimmatsoreosof skin, a wrinkled old woman, a half-grown boy, and Marie, the squat little person who had seen us first from the sky-line. We settled ourselves about upon the rocks and amongstthe scented juniper bushes, and exchanged our news with vigorous pantomime.
A fire smouldered on a small hill of ashes in a handy open space. In the background stood the brown cloth-coveredla-wo, a residence far more like the North American conicaltee-peethan its nearer neighbour the Samoyedechoom; and though it yielded up a thin smoke from the bristling sticks at its apex, to tell that the domestic hearth was lit inside, and all was ready for habitation, it was plainly impossible to pack so large a party under shelter of the sloping walls on a floor space which was only seven feet in diameter. And besides, thela-wois not meant for a parlour; it is merely a shelter. Go all over the rest of the world, and the host will ask his guest to “come inside”; the wandering Arab will invite you to his black tent; even the Congo savage will ask one to enter his hut of reeds; but to the nomad Lapp this idea of a “home” has not yet come. He will offer his hospitality to the chance stranger; he may even be lavish so far as his starveling means admit; but he has no house-pride; the lee of a rock or the sunny side of a brae under Jove’s cold sky is the only snug corner or dining-place which it occurs to him is needed.
However, it was evident we were being pressed to “stay and dine.”
The contents of the larder ran about till they were needed—to wit, small black-and-tan lemmings. Therewere plenty of them around, and the Lapps got up and ranged about to catch the needful supply. We turned to and did our share. They are foolish creatures, these lemmings, in personal appearance something between a guinea-pig and a rat, and with very little notion of self-preservation. After catching your lemming you skin and gut him, and then place him to toast in front of the general fire on the end of a pointed stick, which is jabbed into the ground.
We got these preliminaries settled, and squatted in a ring round the fire watching the roasts—all, that is, except the wrinkled old woman. She, good soul, was engaged upon a much more tedious ceremony. Out of a skin knapsack she had taken a small skin bag. From this she extracted some twelve green coffee-beans, which she proceeded to roast one by one in a small iron spoon, to the accompaniment of vast care and solicitude. When all were cooked to her taste, she bruised them to coarse fragments—and be it well understood she did not grind them—between two stones, and put the result with water into a kettle of copper, which had one lid in the usual place, and another on the end of the spout to keep out smoke and feathery wood-ash.
HerderLapps’ Encampment.
HerderLapps’ Encampment.
In the kettle the whole mixture was boiled up together into a bubbling broth of coffee fragments and coffee extract. She cleared it by an old trick which is known to campers all the world over. She put into the kettle a small splash of cold water, and the coffee-grounds were promptly precipitated to the bottom. Then she poured the clear, brown, steaming liquor into a blackened bowl of birch-root, and handed it to the good-man, her husband.
We had finished our two lemmings apiece by this time—exquisitely nasty they were, too—and here was after-dinnercafé noir. The host took the bowl in his fingers, and the old woman, hunting in the leather knapsack, produced a block of beet-sugar wrapped in a careful fold of skin. The host bit a chunk off this, and lodged it in his teeth; then he lifted the bowl to his lips and drank.
In a more civilised man this would have been rudeness, in a savage it was an act of simple courtesy. It was a plain assurance to all who beheld that the bowl contained no poison. Then he handed it on, and we drank in our turn, and I do not know that I have ever tasted more perfect coffee. The two girls and the half-grown boy went off to attend to their business with the herd, and we others sprawled back where we were, and smoked, and dropped off to sleep when we felt so inclined.
The summer herding of reindeer by these mountain Lapps is more active work than the pastoral life of an English shepherd. A sheep, of course, requires some management, and even a flock of lumbering Southdowns can at times stampede and do themselves considerable damage. But a reindeer herd of (say) 300 head, maddened by mosquito bites, and oncewell on the move, is a force which it requires more than the ordinary bucolic science to deal with. They may easily take a month to recollect after a successful break like this.
As a consequence, the patrol round the herd is constant and strict. Each sentry has a coil of small rope, and at the least sign of a gathering together of the beasts preparatory to a rush, the sentry scampers at speed across the direction in which they are heading, paying out the rope as he (or she) goes, so that it lies like a lean gray snake upon the uneven ground. It is rather wonderful to watch what happens. The deer charge up with growing speed, sight the rope, and pull up with absurd haste, snuffing it and trembling. And then up comes the sentry, a leather-clad imp of perhaps three foot six in total length, and with voice and foot drives back the great antlered brutes in ignominy to their pasturage.
But, at the same time, it is not advisable to let the mosquito-plague torment the beasts too much, and this is why the summer herding is done on the high ground, where these pests are fewer. Still even there they sometimes abound; and, when they grow very bad, the mountain Lapps will (for a treat) light fires to windward of their herd, and let them revel in the sanctuary of smoke. Fancy semi-wild deer, even through the custom of ages, accepting a diet of smoke!
The domesticated reindeer of Arctic Lapland varies much in bigness, according to the age and the breed;but, taking the average, they are smaller than the wild deer of the high fjeld in Southern Norway, and smaller than the domestic reindeer of Siberia. Still they are of no puny size, and a fine red stag of the Scottish Highlands would find many equals in girth and shoulder height amongst the Arctic herds. But the Scotchman would tower above the rest by reason of his carriage of the head and antlers.
There is nothing majestic about a reindeer’s deportment. He is usually cow-hocked. His great splay-feet, with their two lateral hoofs, are excellent, it is true, for getting grip on snow surfaces, but architecturally they are far from beautiful. And the carriage of the head is distinctly bad; whether standing still or on the move, they have their ears on a level with the withers, and the hairy nose stuck out in front.
Amongst all the deer tribes of other lands the females are hornless, but the reindeer, whether she is wild or whether she is domesticated, sports antlers of orthodox shape. They are slightly smaller than her husband’s, but, like his, they begin to appear within a few weeks of birth, which, seeing that most deer do not show a trace of horn till they are at least nine months old, is an abnormally early development. The lady’s head-gear, too, although it is slimmer and has less points than monsieur’s, is worn all through the winter, and is not got rid of till the troubles of maternity begin in the spring. And here she showsher superiority, for the bull reindeer has always cast his antlers by the end of November. This trifling fact is usually overlooked by those artists who at Christmas-time draw such pleasing pictures of impossible Lapps careering in toy-shop sledges towards a genuinely London-madeaurora borealis. It seems a pity to cast comparison on so many pretty drawings, but let us be accurate sometimes, even if we have to forego an artistic effect.
The sledge-deer is not a natural product, but the outcome of severe training. It takes three winters of hard breaking-in before he could sell with the warranty of “Quiet to drive in single harness: has dragged a lady.” He is not a picturesque animal when he is on the move, with a sledge behind him jolting along at the end of its long, hide trace. He gets over the ground quickly, it is true, but he leaves all possible grace out of the performance. His gait is a series of long, striding slides, which make one think he is eternally on the point of coming down, and predict for him wrung withers, sprung hocks, and a necessity for embrocation on every muscle of his body. He overreaches at every step, and rattles his great splay hoofs against one another like some one playing castanets. But, if not over-pressed, he can get over enormous distances at an eight- to ten-mile-an-hour speed (according to the ground), in front of a 200-lb. load, in the worst of Arctic weather, and on a miraculously small supply of forage; and he possesses climbingpowers which would put even a Spanishcontrabandista’smule to the blush.
But the nomad Lapp of this district does not exist merely as a breeder of draught animals, and not two per cent of his flock ever feel the chafe of trace or collar. He is a purveyor of meat: he breeds, rears, and tends his deer for the one sole purpose that in due time they may be driven down to a market, and there be exchanged for the luxuries of life and a balance of current coin. He needs sugar, green coffee-beans, and Russian leaf-tobacco, and the fjeld produces none of these things; but in the places where the reindeer can be sold, there they may be bought from traders.
And at the same time he uses the herd in a measure to support his own life. The thick syrupy milk—almost as dense as the condensed Swiss milk one gets in tins elsewhere—makes part of his daily meal. We came across it not unfrequently. It is carried in grimy bladders, and, after the custom of the country, is usually rather sour. At meal-times it is poured into a large bowl of birch-root, which the host holds between his knees. There is one spoon, a shallow affair of bone, which is handed from one to another, and it is always considered polite to lick the spoon quite clean before passing it on. The milk itself, either by reason of its surroundings, or because it is made that way, has a telling flavour of ancient turpentine, which clingsin the memory. But I do not think that reindeer milk eatenà la laponnewill ever be introduced as a delicacy by Englishgourmets.
Farther westward in Lapland, the ownership of the deer is different. Every Finn farmer must have his six to eighteen deer for winter traffic, and as the country is more thickly settled there, a great many deer are required. In the summer these are handed over to some Lapp, who will graze them and return them when the snow comes again in good condition for the heavy work. The Lapp gets a fee for his trouble, and takes as a perquisite any increase which may occur whilst the beasts are under his charge. He runs all the deer entrusted to him in this way together in one big herd, and separates them (if so be he should forget the individuals) by their respective ear-markings, which are registered property.
The niceties of scientific breeding are beyond the crude wit of this meat farmer of Arctic Lapland, and though he occasionally does a swap, weight for weight, and age for age, to bring new blood from a distant herd into his own, and so prevent continuous in-breeding, this is about the utmost extent of his efforts. He accepts the new-born calves as they appear, and does his best to keep them in fettle and get them fit for market in the smallest possible time. In summer he drives them through the forests of Arctic willow and birch, where they may browse on the young shoots or eat the crisp moss underfoot.And for the benefit of those that have not seen the performance, I may say it is a quaint sight to watch a solemn reindeer reared up on his hind legs, with his great splay fore-hoofs against a birch trunk, trying to grab the tender foliage which dangles so temptingly just above his hairy muzzle. His one regret, then, is that Nature has not given him wings. But in winter the mountain Lapp herds his deer where the snow blanket is thinnest, so that they may most easily delve down to the moss beneath.
It is a curious sight, also, to see a reindeer-herd feeding in the gloom of the Arctic night, when a six-foot layer of snow intervenes between the glowering sky and its food. Each deer digs for itself a pit, hoeing the white mass with its prominent brow-tines, and scratching out the powdery snow with its forefeet, after the manner of a fox terrier delving for rabbits; so that when it is grazing on the succulent moss below it is quite out of sight from the snow surface above. The deer does not enlarge the floor of this pit to any great extent, and it does not understand the art of making a trench. When one patch of the moss is eaten bare, it clambers to the surface again and makes another pit.
When the sleigh traveller, driving along through the dark twilight, comes across one of these places where a deer herd has been digging down to food, he generally has plenty of occupation before he has crossed it safely to the farther side.
The reindeer, by the way, is identical with the cariboo of Northern America, and at one time, though long ago, it certainly existed in these islands of Great Britain and Ireland. It lingered longest in Caithness, and certainly was not extinguished there till the middle of the thirteenth century. But although the American red man, and the trapper, and the pre-historic Scotchman, have all, at one time or another, made their living out of the deer, none of these ever bred them as a domestic animal—that is an occupation parochial to the Lapp alone.
Here is a very interesting proposition. Where has all the money gone to for which, during so many weary centuries, these herds have been exchanged? The Lapp does not spend it upon himself, that is evident; and if he hoards it, where is his strong room? Legend alone deigns to tell: the Lapp himself preserves a massive ignorance.
It was a Norskman of Namsdalen who taught me all I know upon the subject, and what he said was too much like a fairy-tale to be taken very seriously. He was my hunter at the time. We were after elk, and he was moved to speech by the finding of the despoiled carcass of a cow-elk which had been slain by poacher Lapps. It seems he had once been enamoured of a Lappish woman (Fin-ne, he called her) himself, and under pressure she had shown him the hoard of her tribe.
It lay in a narrow glacier which trickled its frozenstream down a bleak pass in the mountain. At one place a spur of the rock had canted away the moraine stones into the centre of the stream, and behind the spur was a little bay of rock filled, as it were, with a backwater of clear green ice. At the edge of this they knelt, and stabbed and dug with their sheath-knives, and as the pit deepened round their feet they heard the muffled groans which poured from the heart of the glacier. These were the ghosts in the ice, the Fin-ne woman told him—clammy, resistless ghosts, who strangled thieves, as they had done through countless thousands of years. And when at last their knives had slashed a way to the lip of the cave, which lay below, my superstitious Norsk hunter almost believed her.
The woman herself would not go inside—she dared not. But the Norskman, though full of shrinkings, slid down over the glittering ice fragments into the cold, black cave beyond. And there, in the half gloom, lit only by the few rays which struggled in through the hole they had dug, and the cold green light from the ice, what a sight it was that met his eyes! He was in the treasure-house of the Lapps, a regular Aladdin’s cave, crammed with the plunder of centuries.
In ordinary sacks of skin were thekronerof recent years, and the national silver coinage which obtained before that. There in heaps were the heterogeneous coins of past ages and every country. Andbeyond was a curious litter of pewter candlesticks, jewelled sword-hilts, a gold Communion chalice, a rusted iron mace, a bone crucifix, bowls, chains, ladles, knives, some of precious metal, some mere valueless relics: and outside, the ghosts of the ice creaked and rustled incessantly.
Here, then, was the tale of how those old sea rovers, who stormed Scarborough, and burned the Humber villages, and ravaged the coasts of England and France, obtained meat to victual their galleys. Here was the plunder they had brought back from their distant piracies, peddled away to buy deer meat for fresh expeditions. But the man who looked on it all did not stop to make more than a hasty catalogue. The whispering ghosts of the ice scared him, the cold darkness of the place chilled his blood, and without, in the daylight, the Fin-ne woman incessantly whimpered and cried out that he should come back to her....
This is the tale as it was told to me beside the relics of that murdered cow-elk in Namsdalen, and this is all I know about the matter. A glow for treasure-hunting warmed in me. I wanted to set off at once and see that cave by the glacier for myself, and finger its contents. But the hunter was not to be persuaded; he said he had forgotten its whereabouts. That, of course, was absurd for a man who knew every tree and every rock on the fjeld. But I rather think the Lapps had scared him into holding his tongue about the matter. He had a very real terror of their powers of sorcery, as I had learned already, and I was inclined to credit his tale about the hoard—he had not got the necessary power of invention to have made it up. Besides, the viking “local colour” which he gave me (and which I have forgotten) was clean beyond him.
Where these herder Lapps, who were our hosts just then in Arctic Lapland, had their strong-room we were not indelicate enough to inquire, but we did push questions, as far as they would go, upon another point—we wanted to witness some practical sorcery. We wished to see the drum brought out, a genuine active curse performed, and then watch it go home to roost. When I had lived with Laplanders before, I had seen nothing of these things, and well-informed friends afterwards had blamed me for not furthering questions and watching realbona fidesorcery in full working action.
Such a thing as witch-, or rather wizard-craft seemed an anachronism, and yet it was undoubtedly done and believed in. Many a Norwegian valley farmer, who has offended his Fin-ne neighbour, has been told that his sheep or his oxen shall in consequence suffer, and has watched the poor brutes pine away and die from no apparent ailment. From a distance one glibly diagnoses poison cunningly administered, but on the spot one seems to graspthat some other influence is at work which is not so easily explained away.
We were keen, then, to see this sorcery process in full working order. We wanted to inspect the oval-headed drum with its curious figuring which is the outward and visible sign, and to watch all the ritual of spell-weaving by a recognised practitioner. We were prepared to supply him with a subject. Hayter and I both agreed that there was a certain large fat man of our acquaintance whom we would gladly sacrifice to the cause of science. Hayter should draw his portrait, we would have him thoroughly cursed, and we would go back to England and note the result for ourselves. If the fat man had dwindled appreciably, then we would credit the powers of Lapland sorcerers; otherwise we would withhold judgment, or perhaps go so far as to disbelieve.
So we broached the matter openly round the camp-fire. Our grimy host grinned and shook his head. Hayter drew the fat man’s portrait and held it out alluringly. Our host sighed; the fat man was certainly a most tempting subject to carry a real good, comprehensive curse. But as he sighed, he shook his head. He said he had thrown up his practice as a sorcerer; he tried to imply he had sold it, and then he denied having ever practised at all. Yes, he quite understood what we wanted; he looked at the portrait hungrily, and rubbed his scrubby chin,and was truly sorry he could not undertake the job. But that sort of thing was past and over now—at any rate, on behalf of foreigners. And yet——He looked at the fat man’s portrait again, and took an imaginary drum between his knees and tapped music from its head. And then he frowned and shrugged his shoulders, and begged some ship’s tobacco, and began ostentatiously to talk about an attack oflaminitisin one of his deer’s hoofs, which we had been prescribing for.
He let us understand very clearly that the subject was a delicate one, and that he did not choose to be drawn on it; and from him—upon sorcery—we heard no more. As it chanced, his daughter Marie took a great fancy to one of us, and we thought we might get news of what we wanted from her. But although the favoured one took many walks with the young lady over the quiet folds of the tundra (always keeping carefully on the windward side of her), he never got any definite information on the subject he had at heart. The damsel was clearly as ignorant as himself, and in the end, when he was “cut out” by the gallant Johann, he bore the pain of being supplanted like a man. Marie was very nice, but—well, one could not always manage to keep to windward of her.
And so there ended our dealing with the matter. It had been one of my aspirations to some time have the power of writing a genuine interview with apractical sorcerer, and the thing plainly could not be done. If witchcraft is still practised in Lapland, it is done with small ostentation, but I am inclined to think the whole business has died out. The degenerate Lapps,—those whose fathers have at one time failed as deer-herders on the fjeld, and who have come down to being vagabond river-fishers, or mere prosperous lake-side farmers,—are moving with the times. Many of them can read, and some can write. Schoolmasters go amongst them during the idle months of winter. And before that practical person—the schoolmaster—the practising warlock has to hide his drum.
Holy Russia is at the schoolmaster’s back, and here is another of the crimes with which that terrible country must be charged: it has elbowed out of Europe the final relics of the cult of sorcery. One could almost turn Nihilist out of sheer regret.