Johann’sAcrobaticFailure.
Johann’sAcrobaticFailure.
Presently the mystery was explained: the house belonged to Finns, an alien race. We two foreigners,however, were not troubled with any qualms of inferiority. The wandering Britisher seldom is worried that way. He is a very complacent animal over questions of nationality, and is rather apt to thank God in his prayers that he is not as other men are, “even as this German, or this Chinaman, or this Finn,” or whoever he may have had brought under his lordly notice last. So we knocked at the door of the house, and presently a man came out. He shook hands limply with us; he even shook hands with the three Lapps. He was a long, slack-jointed Finn, with one ear missing and a face as unemotional as a slab of board. He gave us one of the two rooms his house contained, the sour-smelling dairy-bedroom; and better still, on pressure, he sold us food.
A woman brought it in—rye-cake and a double handful of small pieces of raw fish, semi-dried, and a tub of thick, sour milk. As an after-thought she produced a wooden spoon, which she thoughtfully licked clean, and set beside the repast.
With regard to that brown rye-cake of Lapland, I brought a piece home to England, which my dog saw and annexed. He is a fox-terrier of lusty appetite, and he tried to eat it. He tried for a whole afternoon, and finally left the cake alone on a lawn, very little the worse for the experience. His master, at Pokka, did better. He was sick with hunger, and devoured two great slabs of the cake, and with it a handful of the stinking fish.
Looked back at from a distance, those rye-cakes of Lapland do not carry pleasant memories. The grain from which they are baked grows with little tending. It is sown; and it is suffered to come up as the weather and the weeds permit. When it is as near ripe as it chooses to get, it is reaped, and with the husks, the bran, a larger part of the stalk, and a fair percentage of the companionable weed, it is chopped into meal. It is not ground; it is more hay and bran than anything else. Baking days come seldom, and a large supply is made at once. The dough is pawed out into discs a foot in diameter and some five-eighths to three-quarters of an inch thick. Each disc has a hole in the middle, and when they are baked, the cakes are strung on a stick and hung up on the rafters for use as required. Age neither softens nor hardens their texture; years could not deteriorate them.
There are two varieties of these delectable cakes. One sort was like india-rubber, and on this we could make no impression whatever. But with the other kind, which was of the consistency of concrete, we could, as a rule, get on quite well, if we were given time. It was more or less flavourless, unless it had been packed with stale fish, and it was not stuff to hurry over. It was not strengthening either, as the system could assimilate but very little of it. In fact, of all the foods that ever got past my teeth (and in rambling about the back corners of this world I have come across some uncanny morsels) the bread ofArctic Lapland carries the palm for general unsatisfactoriness. But still there is no denying that the cakes did fill the stomach, and for this purpose we employed them ravenously whenever they came in our way. There is no ache so bitter as that of empty belly.
In that sour-smelling dairy-bedroom however at Pokka, Hayter was in small temper for food. The bites of the preceding night were giving him the most abominable pain. From scalp to heels he had no sound square inch on all of his skin. The whole of his body was puffed and reddened, and each bite was its own centre of irritation. When he scratched himself he bled, and he had to scratch. He faced the poor meal with visible shrinkings; he was tormented with a furious thirst, but he could not eat; and finally, out of sheer weariness, he slid from his stool on to the floor and dropped off into some sort of sleep.
For the morrow, trouble loomed. Our host, the expressionless man who lacked an ear, came in and said flatly that no carriers were to be had. But for myself I heard the news without much stir. I had eaten; and with food inside him, a man is apt to let the morrow take care of itself.
It seemed good to me to go outside for a whiff of sweet air before turning in. I strolled across the short-grassed green in front of the house, and sat me on the well-platform, and stared sleepily at what was around. From the mistal behind my shoulder camethe breathing and chewing of a couple of cows; from the little two-roomed house at the other side of the clearing there droned out the snores of the tired Lapps.
In front of me, the stream widened out into a lagoon, smooth as a sheet of gleaming metal. Just outside the weeds a fish was rising accurately in the same spot. The sun lit the forest trees on the opposite shore with a lurid glow. Mist, like miasma, was rising in gray billows from some of the farther creeks. I watched it drowsily, and imagined that somehow or another I was looking upon a sunrise in the Tropics, and that I had earned a touch of fever. And then I pulled myself together, and remembered that this was Arctic Lapland, and that it was midnight by the cuckoo clock in the Finns house, and that the insects were biting me to pieces. So I got heavily up from the well-cover, and went again to the sour-smelling dairy, and forgot all things in deep, unconscious sleep.
One of the ladies of the house, a tall person with a vague squint, aroused us next morning by coming into the sour-smelling dairy to deposit the morning produce of the cows. We woke with evil-tasting mouths and went outside. In the kitchen, across the narrow lobby, the man with one ear was making a bowl out of a knob of birch, and as he seemed the person of most consideration available, we demanded from him that three carriers should be ready for us in a couple of hours’ time to convoy us and our chattels to Scurujärvi or Küstula. We did not request; we demanded. We understood the Arctic Finn by this time, and were quite aware that he only construes civility as weakness.
At first the one-eared man refused to understand what we needed. He went on with his work upon the birch-root. He had a long-handled felling axe, and his sheath-knife, and he used them both, and was rapidly evolving a shapely bowl out of chaos. But we had no special wish just then to watch himcarpenter, so we gently but firmly took the utensils away from him, and backed him up against a wall, and spoke to him in a language which he could understand.
He admitted that he knew of our needs, but protested his inability to supply them. He said that all available males were far away from Pokka on one errand and another, and he alone was left as protection of the women and children. We pointed out that failing other carriers, we should impress him into our service himself, whether he liked it or whether he did not. And upon that he remembered where there was one man, and set out there and then to find him.
We accompanied him into the lobby. Pat was there with the squinting lady, making a purchase of butter. The butter-store was pressed down into a tub without salt, and emitted a fine rancid scent. The lady with the squint gouged it out with her delicate fingers and packed it in a birch-bark box, which she afterwards weighed on a steelyard. Pat in the meanwhile was helping himself from an ancient cask of evil-smelling buttermilk, in which the grimy dipper hung ready for all who chose to thirst.
It is curious to note how the Lapp and the Northern Finn contrives to make his food unappetising. Of course a constant diet of fresh milk would entail constant biliousness; milk curdled, or slightly acid buttermilk, is much more wholesome. But theygo to the far extremes of decomposition. They never eat fresh fish: they split, gut, and partly dry the produce of the river, and then allow it to go half rotten, and then they eat it. They prepare their reindeer meat and their cow meat in the same way. A French peasant, even if he were as slack and lazy as the Finn, would out of the Finn’s provisions live deliciously. But this slouching fisher-farmer of the North prefers to feed on carrion, and any luckless foreigners who come into his country must accept his diet (if indeed they can persuade him to sell them food) or else they must starve.
We took a turn outside to sketch an iron cresset for winter fishing, like the one we had seen at the upper end of Enare See; and then we went back to the dairy and did a little tailoring at the more important rents in our garments. The children of Pokka were brought in to stare; it was an education for them to see strangers; and at intervals an unattached female with soft, cows’ eyes came and loafed in the doorway. She had rather pretty feet, and Hayter set to work sketching her with one hand whilst he beat off the flies with the other. But as soon as she saw that portraiture was in the wind, she brisked up. She bade him wait a minute, and trotted away. And presently she came clumping back again, in a pair of brand-new, light brown top-boots with turn-up toes all complete, and posed against the log wall with her skirts drawn tightlyback so as to show as much leather as possible. She was very proud of those boots.
Whilst this portrait was progressing, the master of the house came back, bringing with him a tall, gaunt Finn with a black chin-beard, a haggard face, and sunken eyes. He wore his trousers stuffed into high boots, and his upper man was decorated with a red striped shirt. A huge sheath-knife dangled from his broad-buckled belt, and at intervals he delivered himself of a most dramatically racking cough. As the imitation of a stage pirate struck with illness and remorse he was very fine, but as a carrier he was obviously useless.
We pointed this out, and the man with one ear admitted it. He mentioned that he had told us so already. He said it was a solemn fact that Pokka had no men in residence who could come with us as carriers, and suggested that we should take on the three Lapps who had brought us so far. The pirate took a keen interest in the proceedings. He went out and fetched the Lapps, and they stood against the doorway with expectant smiles. They thought they were going to be paid off.
The proposition was put to them that they should take us on farther through the country, and promptly their faces grew gloomy. They pointed out their sore feet and galled shoulders, and explained volubly that they had already come a great deal farther from home than they had originally intended. They were verylike children in their changes of facial expression. Johann, in particular, who came into the room on the full, broad grin, looked for all the world as though he were on the verge of blubbering.
What a weary argument it was! First Hayter spoke, then the one-eared Finn lifted up his voice, and then I chimed in; and between each separate piece of talk the pirate expostulated and coughed and explained till he was breathless. The three Lapps did not reply in words. They merely stood in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, and looking sulky and frightened and sullen. Only one thing kept them from being complete masters of the situation: their earned wages were still in our pockets.
The beauty of acquiring a still further store of marks did not appeal to them in the least; what was owing already was a fortune to each; and from time to time they besought us to pay up honestly and let them begone, and we as steadily refused. There were no new arguments to bring forward, no new objections to raise, and we, and the pirate, and the one-eared Finn with the expressionless face, talked on for four mortal hours, before the delectable three saw fit to give way. I believe they enjoyed the harangue; I am sure the pirate did; and I am equally sure that we two foreigners did not.
The three Lapps were certainly foot-sore andshoulder-galled, and when at last they did start with us, one could not but be sorry for them, and they were undeniably sorry for themselves. But they soon made the best of the inevitable. We started off in a narrow canoe up a shallow creek between beds of tiny reeds and horsetails, and as soon as the paddles began to get into swing, their sulkiness passed from them like clouds from a summer sun. Pat grinned, and began negotiations for securing the lightest load; Pedr smiled beautifully over the steering paddle; and Johann broke out into a series of yells and roars which I think he intended as a boating song.
We landed by the other third of Pokka, a new house with two glass windows and a chimney of rubble stone. It seemed silent and deserted. The Lapps swung on past it at a limping gait, making the best of their ailments now that we were really on the road; and in three or four miles we found ourselves coming into a new phase of scenery. The trees of a great forest were round us, but they were older and finer trees than those we had come across heretofore. Reindeer moss carpeted the ground, and little black and tan lemmings ran about amongst the moss. As usual there were frequent swamps. But even these had changed in character. In the distance—and before we got to them to discover their wetness—they looked like lawns. It was hard to realise we were still deep within the cold, black Arctic Circle. In fact thewhole country had that “park-like” appearance which is the great feature that always strikes every one about certain parts of Central Africa.
If all Arctic Lapland were like this slip of territory between Pokka and Scurujärvi, it would be worth the visits of lovers of beauty. The long tree-aisles bedecked with every shade from banana green to black, and peopled with the moving forms of deer, the green and silver of the birches with the living lace-work shadows, the glorious heaven above, and the ivory-yellow moss beneath, made up a marvel of colour and form which we told ourselves it would be hard to equal in a more Southern land. But it must be confessed that such oases of comeliness were rare; and perhaps from contrast with the aching wildernesses in which they were set, we were slightly apt to over-estimate their beauty.
There was some indication of a trail, too, nearly all the way. We would come upon a swamp, and see a broken path of logs winding across it like some long, gray snake, which disappeared here and there in the grass. Very good ankle-traps these log-tracks were too, for they were all shockingly rotten, and would turn sometimes almost before one trod on them. Nobody was interested in keeping them up, and one wondered why they had ever been put down. There is no summer traffic between the scattered farms of Arctic Lapland.
At one place we sat down for a halt in a broadsavanna of grass, which must have been a dozen miles in circumference. There was not a bird to be seen, and, for once, there were comparatively few mosquitoes. But instead there were millions of dragon-flies, artificial-looking insects, which irresistibly reminded one of tin and clockwork mechanisms from the Lowther Arcade.
It was here, I remember, that the Lapps gave us a fine example of their fastidiousness about drink. The prairie was pitted with ponds and seamed with rivulets, and Hayter and I quenched our thirst from the stream which was nearest to our bivouac. Johann went and sampled it carefully, and then spat the water from his lips. It was not sufficiently cold for his taste. He went on farther and tried again, and farther and tried again, and still farther and farther, sampling and spitting. He was very tired, very foot-sore, and very thirsty; he was absolutely without the most elementary niceness in his food requirements, but in this matter of drink he did not mind how much trouble he spent so that he got his water icily cold. He spent an hour searching for a suitable tap, and when he had got it, consumed just one half-pint. And then Pat, who had been to much engaged in scratching himself to take part in the hunt, went off to share in its fruits.
Hills rose up ahead of us as we marched on, the highest we had seen since Enare, and our way lay through an alley fenced in by silvery birch-stems.The Lapps waddled wearily with their burdens; the Arctic sun beat fiercely on us from overhead; and the mosquitoes came out again to remind us that the flesh indeed was weak. The miles rolled themselves up most tediously.
One soon loses count of time under these conditions of tiredness, and insufficient food, and fever from bites; and marching becomes mechanical after the first few miles, and even the joy at seeing new country is staled. Only one thing puts spirit into the pace, and that is the sight of axe-work, which heralds the neighbourhood of man. Scurujärvi as usual advertised itself in this way. We topped a ridge and found ourselves amongst the stumps of a clearing. Unconsciously we all straightened ourselves. There was nothing in sight yet, but the next bridge showed us the town—of one house—and the long, narrow sliver of lake from which it took its name. The carriers’ limping waddle quickened into almost a run. We swung down the slopes, threw open the slip-rails of a fence—veritable slip-rails!—and brought up before the front of the house in quite dashing style. A sloping-way of planks led up to the door. A hard-visaged, capable madame beckoned us up, and with business-like promptitude showed us into the inevitable dairy-bedroom.
It really looked as though we had stumbled into decent quarters at last. The room was clean, andheld a high, white, stone stove garnished with bunches of juniper. The milk-tubs stood orderly on rows of shelves, and their sourness was not obtrusive. And on one of the shelves was actually a book—a large, heavily-bound, religious book, with metal clasps and dull-red edges. The sight of it cheered us; it was the first time for many a weary mile we had come across folk human enough to possess a book. But as we got to know the people of Scurujärvi better, doubts assailed us on this point; and we looked inside the book, and found it was printed in the black letter; and we were driven to the conclusion that it was there more as a fetish than a thing of use.
The family lived in the big kitchen, and consisted of a long, feckless Finn, who was the owner of Scurujärvi; his limp, sickly wife, who was a new-made mother; a swarm of tow-headed, bare-legged brats; and two older boys who had grown to the stage of high boots and private tar-bottles. These two boys we were destined to see more of. The elder came into our room first to inspect us. He wore his ragged trousers tucked into the high boots aforesaid, and suspended by one brace over a gratuitously red shirt. His face and his whole get-up was one which we knew—one which a great many thousand other people know also.
“By Jove!” said Hayter, when the boy came into the room first. “Look there. ‘Huckleberry Finn!’”
“No other,” said I.
And then the younger brother came in, and we stared in wonder upon “Tom Sawyer.” It seemed as if the pair of them had stepped direct from Mr. Mark Twain’s book and merely forgotten the soft, drawling mother-tongue of the Mississippi Valley in transit.
But they were not permitted to enjoy the luxury of staring at the foreigner, and posturing before him for long. The bustling, hard-visaged madame came in and sent them off about some farm business, and then she brought us in a couple of armfuls of hay to make up beds on the floor. But we knew the ways of Lapland hay, and with the naked eye we could see the live-stock pervading the hay she brought. So we thanked her profusely, and said we preferred to sleep on the boards of the floor. She did not seem inclined to give way at first. She was a masterful woman, accustomed to having her own wishes carried out to the letter, and she had all the rest of that slack, Finnish household (with the possible exception of Huckleberry and Tom) under her large and most capable thumb. In fact, to be precise, she was a travelling midwife, and she had come to the house professionally, and at a time when her wishes would be obeyed. But sleep on that tick-pervaded hay we would not, and so finally after a lot of loud-voiced expostulations—she always spoke in a shout—she took it out and left us in peace.
Then the Lapp carriers came in to be paid off, and as they took such pains to assure us that the way down to Küstula was now easy, and that we should have not the smallest difficulty in finding transport on the morrow, we began to have distinct visions of a further block in the journey. However, carriers or no carriers, it was a certain thing that we could get no more work out of these three Lapps, and we were rather ashamed of ourselves for having pressed willing men too hard already. It was a fact that they were terribly foot-sore and knocked up. So we gave them their hard-earned wages, and a trifle beyond, which they did not expect; and presented them with a black cake ofWindward’stobacco apiece, and our united blessings; all of which luxuries they accepted with delighted noise and laughter. As a fitting climax to all his other pleasing eccentricities, Johann tried to sell us the little brass finger-ring which he wore tied in the end of his neck-handkerchief. He said it was his betrothal ring and was made of gold, and he would sacrifice it to us for the absurdly small sum of twenty marks. But as he had become engaged, according to his own account, to every marriageable woman we had met along the road, we thought that others would have a better claim on it than we, and so forbore to present him with a further sovereign. At which he nearly lifted the roof off with his great shouts of laughter: it was all the same to Johannwhether he swindled us successfully or whether he got caught in the act; he was equally amused with either occurrence.
The Lapps were to sleep in one of the barns, and as it was the last time we should probably meet on this earth, we escorted them across to their bedchamber. We passed through a tiny field of growing barley, the first we had seen in this northern latitude, and then we came upon the wooden outbuilding of the farm. Half was hay-chamber, half mistal, and set between the stalls for the cows was a great square stove of rubble stone to give the beasts heat during the perishing cold of winter. And there we said our last good-byes to the men who had served us so well, and went back towards our own sleeping-place.
The lake below the house lay like glass, and the narrow cones of the pines on the opposite shore were mirrored exactly in its surface. Pink clouds swam below them. On the lake-shore was a bath-house with its empty doorway blackened by smoke, and in the eaves a couple of martins had built a nest in a coil of birch-bark. From the dwelling-house came the voice of the midwife, scolding.
Now, to give a full account of the exasperations of Scurujärvi would be quite impossible in this place, because some of the remarks which we felt compelled to make to that lanky, feckless Finn who owned the place were intended for his private ear alone. Wehad to tell him exactly what we thought of him many many weary times.
In the first instance, further progress by carriers was obviously out of the question, because, except for the feckless one himself, there was not a man about the place. But there were sledges. There were no horses or reindeer available, but something in the cow line would serve our purpose, and we demanded therefore a sledge and a cow. Upon which there fell an avalanche of talk. The limp woman with the new-born baby stood in the doorway of the dairy-bedroom to listen, and the gaunt midwife came inside and added her clatter to the rest. It seemed that for a thousand reasons a cow and a sledge were unavailable.
We ceded the point; we had an alternative plan. Our romancing map depicted a lake before this town of Scurujärvi, and our eyes showed us that the lake was there. This propped up the map’s credit. It also showed a stream running out of this lake and joining the main river at Küstula, which drained into the Gulf of Bothnia. So by way of discovering whether this linking stream did really exist, we boldly demanded a canoe, which should take us down to Küstula by water.
The feckless Finn seemed struck with the idea; it had not occurred to him before. He said we should start immediately, and after the trifling delay of three more hours, and by dint of unremitting exertions on our part, we did start. There were fourof us in the canoe: ourselves and our baggage amidships, Huckleberry forward with the paddles, and Tom Sawyer aft, with solemn importance on his face, and the steering paddle under his arm. The two boys had provisioned the canoe with a pyramidal keg of buttermilk, and evidently looked forward to the perils of this expedition through the unknown with keen and gloomy pleasure. Huckleberry wore a sheath-knife two feet long dangling from his belt, and Tom by way of armament had by his side the most enormous wood-axe I ever put eyes upon. The accuracy of their get-up would have delighted Mr. Mark Twain wonderfully.
We started in style, and a mob of tow-headed children came down to the edge of the shallows as we pushed off. Huckleberry paddled us across a small bay of the lake, and then Tom, with set teeth, steered the canoe into the mouth of the six-foot-wide stream which drained it. The water was too narrow for paddles here, and so they stood up and punted, insisting on our keeping our places; and really the sight of those two boys solemnly playing at being explorers, was one of the funniest things we had seen for many a long day. If it pleased them to do the work, we did not mind. We had gone through enough toil recently to make us glad of the rest, and later, when they got tired, and the stream grew wider and swifter, we could take over the canoe from their charge.
In fact we formed a quite appetising dream of what the voyage would be down the Scurujoki to Küstula, and so it came all the more unpleasantly to us when we found that this river-passage was impracticable. First we arrived at a tree fallen squarely across the stream, and we got out and lifted the canoe across this by main force. Then the Scurujoki widened into mere trickling shallows, and we waded and lifted till we were tired. And then, lo! the stream vanished altogether, being absorbed into a vast green quagmire which filled all the valley-floor. So we sat down on the baggage and stated exactly to one another what we thought of the feckless Finn who owned Scurujärvi farm, and then with toil and weariness set about to work the canoe back to the place from which she had come.
We were tolerably savage at being let in for thisfiasco, and should probably have explained to the feckless one with energy how remiss it was of him not to know the country five hundred yards away from his own front-door; but when we set foot again on the lake-shore below the house, these thoughts of war were swept from us by a feeling of wonder and surprise. Another caravan had arrived from the direction in which we were going, and the principals of it were walking in even then to take possession of the dairy-bedroom. Their carriers sat outside the house-door on the sloping-way of planks. There were three of them: two sturdy down-country Finns,and a weird Lapp with lank, black hair, and yellow, pock-marked face, and a square Lapp’s cap of dead-black cloth.
These were the first travellers of any sort we had met in all Arctic Lapland, and we marvelled at what could be their business. Presently the two principals came out of the dairy-bedroom and talked with us. The elder was a huge man, deep-bearded and heavy-paunched, with a frown on his face and few words to spare. The younger was aged perhaps thirty, had a cut-away chin, and brimmed with words. We tried one another in a whole continent of languages, and finally pitched upon Latin as the only one we had any working knowledge of in common. It was on both sides schoolboy dog-Latin of the most canine variety, and because of the difficulties of pronunciation we could not interchange ideas even through this medium by word of mouth. So every syllable of our chat was scrawled with a stub of pencil upon the rough-hewn door of Scurujärvi farm.
“Potesne nobis dicere,” we wrote, “si possibile est invenire equum nos portare de Kittila ad mare?”
And the man with the cut-away chin replied; “Currus est in Kittila.”
“Estne via bona?” we asked.
“Est via, sed non bona. Sed via est.”
It was quite a delightful exercise conversing through the rags of this dimly-remembered tongue. But we did not talk for long, and we only learnedsome vague facts about our future course. Theirs was only a temporary halt. They were soon on the march again, and our curiosity concerning them grew high. The two principals started off first, the carriers following them; but when these last were just on the move, one of them, a Finn, turned back to us and pointed to his Lappish companion. We looked, and for the first time saw strapped outside the Lapp’s pack a pair of leg-shackles, bright and ferociously heavy. The Finn laughed and pointed to the big man with the heavy beard ahead, and then he turned away from us and set off on the march.
Whether he meant that the bracelets were destined for the big man’s ankles, or whether the big man was going to put them on some one else, we never discovered. None of the party wore the least vestige of official garb, and yet heavy leg-shackles are not usually part of the travelling kit of private individuals. Was the big man a political offender, doomed to exile in fetters amongst Lapland swamps? Or was he an officer of justice on the road to capture some sinning Lapp? Or was he some invalid, suffering from occasional fits of madness, and taking heavy curative exercise under the care of an attendant who had repressive measures handy? We never found out.
An American would have solved the problem by bluntly asking; but we somehow lacked that simple directness of questioning which is the birthright of the great nation across the water. Besides, the manwith the cut-away chin had said that they had come up through Küstula and Kittila, and we promised ourselves satisfaction for our curiosity at these places. And lo! when we did reach them, and pushed inquiries, it was plain that we had been fubbed off with a lie, for the other caravan had passed through neither spot. And so out of what part of the wilderness they did come, or what was their errand, we do not know to this day, though later on we certainly did make a conjecture.
Now all the while we had been engaged in these other matters we had not been forgetful of our own business. We took the feckless Finn in hand, turn and turn about, and (to use the beautiful symbolic language of the sea) we twisted his tail. He did not like being roused from his lethargy; he much would have preferred that we should have taken permanent root at his expense in Scurujärvi; but four hours of energetic tail-twisting produced its effect. A reindeer sledge, carvel-built and boat-shape, was dragged out from beneath the flooring of the house; a single-tree was made and lashed to the drawing thong under the sledge’s bow; a pair of shafts were cut and made fast to the single-tree; and then Huckleberry was despatched to find a suitable animal for traction amongst the grazing grounds of the forest. He was not long away; he came back towing a steer, a little liver-and-white fellow with an inquiring eye, andbacked it in between the shafts. A collar with wooden hames was put on the steer’s neck, and the ends of the shafts were made fast to these, and then a half-hoop of wood was put over the steer’s withers and lashed to the shafts,à la Russe, to keep them from chafing. The feckless one roused sufficiently to make a grummet of withes to put round the steer’s nose, and Tom Sawyer made a head-stall out of string, and bent on a check-rope to the grummet. We put our bundles into the sledge, and lashed them there, and turned to give a final curse to the feckless Finn. But he had dropped into contemplation again, and so he missed our words, and we had to set off without the satisfaction of leaving him stung.
The two boys were our escort, and the way at first was rough enough. Thick forest was on the outskirts of the farm, and under the forest trees were stones uncovered by moss or lichen. The little steer picked his way over these cannily enough, but the sledge would only follow if assisted, and so one or other of us had constantly to tail on behind to keep it in the paths of rectitude. And then we had to pass across the swampy valley. Logs had been laid down here to make some sort of a footway, but it was more than the steer could do to make the passage across these with the sledge bumping and sheering in his wake. So we had to unyoke, and drag the sledge over ourselves; and when we got to the other side, we found that the vehicle showed distinct signsof disintegration. It was pinned together by wooden pegs, and these had got dry and were falling out; and so there was nothing for it but to unload, and sink the sledge in a pool of water till it swelled and tightened, and in the meanwhile rest as philosophically as we could in the worst stew of mosquitoes we had yet met in the Arctic Lapland. It was one of the heaviest hours of torment I ever lived through.
Still at last the sledge swelled sufficiently, and we got limbered up again, and this time the procession set off in more real earnest.
First came Tom Sawyer, high-booted, one-braced, preternaturally solemn and important. He marched with knapsack on back, axe over shoulder, and coat slung to knapsack, though of course he might just as well have put these impedimenta on the sledge. He “blazed” unnecessary trees, and peered into every thicket. He was evidently on the look-out for the local story-book equivalent for “Injuns.” He was inexpressibly funny. Then came the little liver-and-white steer, half maddened by the mosquitoes, rushing under every foliage tree on the way to brush off the intolerable insects. At its heels the sledge bumped and swerved, and beside the sledge stalked Huckleberry Finn, with the check-rope in his hand and words of direction on his lips. And behind the tail-board of the sledge came us two foreigners, ready to lend a hand when the sledge threatened to capsize, which it did some four times every three minutes.
The pace was not exhilarating. When everything went well, we covered some four thousand yards to the hour. But every mile or so the steer would get tired and flop down to rest, and on these occasions Huckleberry would groom down its back with a sponge of moist pink moss, and anoint its nose and eye-sockets with tar out of his private bottle; whilst Tom Sawyer, in full panoply, stood afar off on watch and guard; and the mosquitoes bit all of us still more terribly.
During one of these halts a figure showed itself amongst the tree aisles which we had left, and presently who should come up but the grim-visaged midwife we had left in Scurujärvi. She trudged on sturdily with a pack on her back and her head well up, and she was soon out of sight amongst the zigzags of the trees ahead. She had done her work at Scurujärvi, and was going on to take up her next piece of employment fifty miles away.
There was nothing new in the country we passed through: forest alternated with swamp, and swamp with forest, and the mosquitoes would have done justice to the worst corner in hell. The journeying was infinitely tedious. In one of the morasses it seemed as though we should get stuck permanently. Only the sledge floated on the treacherous surface. The steer was stuck in to the shoulders, and we four were sunk to the breasts in trying to pull it out. There was no piece of sound ground within a mile toget a purchase from, and how we ever did get clear I do not know. That march is bad even to look back at. It seems like the torment of some ghastly dream.
About half-way (I should think it must have been) we came upon men again. They were builders, and they were making a house. For temporary shelter they had run up a rough lean-to of slabs, and when we came up they were eating, and the midwife, who had joined camp with them, was eating also. Huckleberry and Tom joined in at the meal, producing their own provision.
There was a good deal of difference between these builders of the Arctic Zone and the sturdy British workman at home. The artificers here get their orders, take provisions, a pair of axes, a grindstone, and a couple of cross-cut saws, and start off to the site of their work. The forest provides materials, which they cut as they want them; and from these materials, and with their simple utensils, they evolve the whole house and all the furniture thereof. How they live in the meanwhile I have shown; and when they were not asleep they were at work. Remarkably well they looked, too, under the experience.
We got into talk with one of these builders, and he told us a strange thing. He said that a week before he had chanced to look up from his work, and saw something “like an enormous bird without wings”move quickly across the clearing far above his head. It was coloured green, and he guessed it to be some sixty feet in length. Round its neck was a big projecting ring, which made a whirring noise. He had never seen anything of the like before, and did not know what to make of it. Could we give an explanation?
Well we had ideas on the subject—distinct ideas—but we did not let them out just then. This seemed very much the same thing that Johann had talked about, describing it as a green fish, and which we had discussed together over so many marches afterwards; and now we wanted to know more about it. But that was all the builder could tell. He was a man of fair intelligence, but he had only seen the thing for a very few seconds, and had not gathered anything but a general impression. We asked him if it was an air-ship, but that was a conception he could not understand. He was certain, however, that he had seen no men on the concern, though there was plenty of room for men inside—for twenty men for the matter of that; and he was equally certain the whole thing was not an illusion of the senses. He had seen what he said, neither more nor less, and he stuck to it doggedly. And having said his say, he got up, and took an axe and set it on the grindstone preparatory to work.
We got our caravan under way again after that, and perfunctorily tried to talk on what we had heard;but the labours of the journey and the horrible mosquito-plague were too heavy to give mere empty speculation much of a chance. And when later on we discerned that the travellers with the leg-shackles we had met at Scurujärvi had not been at either Küstula or Kittila, as they asserted, then the subject got a new interest. We connected them, somehow or other, with this mysterious air-ship—we had convinced ourselves it was an air-ship by then—and formed a thousand theories as to what might be their business. I wonder if at any time we guessed anywhere near the truth?
A drenching dew came down as the night wore on, and the mosquitoes lessened somewhat in their maddening attentions, and we marched a trifle more easily. But we carried the marks of their work written on us in ugly letters. Our arms were swollen from wrist to elbow, so that they fitted tight in the gloves; we were bitten, bitten, bitten all over, through corduroy, under boot-laces, under hair. The scraps of paper in my pocket, on which I had been scribbling notes, were splodged with blood till they were unreadable, and in this torment we had been marching for ten consecutive hours before the dew came and brought relief.
At last we came to an unmistakable track, which grew with use till it became a real muddy lane running between two walls of forest. It was made by thefeet of men and cattle, and never had we been so pleased to see mud before. It led us to a lake, which we skirted; and then we came to another lane, and then another lake with fishing canoes drawn up and nets hung out to dry. And there on the flank of a gently sloping hill we saw a fine settlement of quite a dozen farms, well built and prosperous. It was Küstula, and we had got there at last.
But the houses lay at the farther side, and to reach them we passed between potato gardens, and a water-cress pond, and rye and barley fields all fenced in and well tilled.
The steer was very nearly done, and so were we; but ahead of our caravan there still marched the indomitable Tom, with the axe across his shoulder and the knapsack dangling from his back. We drove up to the biggest house and came to a halt in the courtyard, formed by the farm buildings at its back.
There was a well in the courtyard, with the column of water sheathed in white transparent ice. We rushed to it, lowered the bucket on the end of the derrick, and hoisted again and again. I think we must have drunk a bucketful apiece of that ice-cold water before the fever of our throats was satisfied. It was six o’clock in the morning, and our clothes hung on us dank with perspiration. The sun had never ceased beating upon us and our hurts all the way from Scurujärvi.
Huckleberry Finn announced our coming, and after we had taken toll of the ice-well, we went into the house. Inside the door was a huge room strewn with sleeping men and women. At one side was a stove with cooking-places; at the other stood a hand-loom with a piece of chequered blue-cotton fabric in the course of manufacture. Beside it there straddled a couple of spinning-wheels.
The room we were given for ourselves, after what we were used to, seemed an actual palace. It had two windows, a table, a white stone-stove, and hung on one of the walls was the picture of a gorgeous young lady working a Singer’s sewing-machine. There were two box-beds in the room, and one of them possessed a mosquito-bar. Ye gods! think of the luxury of it! Beds and a real mosquito-bar!
The man who received us was the Squire of Küstula, and a great man indeed. He was a Finn, and yet he was civil and kindly. He set before us for our entertainment a great bowl of curdled milk,and trotted about bare-footed beside us, and besought us to eat. But we were a bit too knocked up to have much appetite then, and we got on to the beds; whereupon he produced a second mosquito-bar, rigged it, and left us. Imagine the unspeakable luxury of it! sleep! on a real bed made of boards and mattressed with hay; and without either fleas or ticks or mosquitoes to bite one into wakefulness. We revelled there in sleep for three solid hours.
The noise of the housework roused us, and we got up, very swollen and stiff from the bites. The tub of curdled milk was on the table, and we ate it thirstily. The Squire heard us moving, and paddled in on his bare feet, and grinned affably. His name by the way was Johann Sanmelli Myal, but we called him Squire from the first, as that name seemed to suit him best.
We mentioned that we wanted a canoe and men to take us to Kittila, and he said he had guessed it already, and we could set off whenever we chose. Here was thoughtfulness and civility! It seemed marvellous to find such qualities and such a house within a day’s march of that dreadful, listless savage at Scurujärvi.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry were hanging about waiting to be paid, and we gave them what we had bargained for with the feckless one, and adouceurover for themselves, and then we went out and strolled about in the open air.
The settlement was very different from any we had seen before, and I only hope for the sake of the civil people who live there, that it was as prosperous as it looked. Viewed from a distance, so that one could not tell whether the green crops were rye and barley, or lanky maize, it might have been a settlement in North Carolina or the Western States, except for one thing—there was no litter about. There were none of those heaps of disused meat, and yeast, and tomato tins, so inseparable from new American civilisation. All was trim.
There were a few Lapps about the place it is true, but they were merely in Küstula as dependants. Not one owned a farm. The people of Küstula, however, had dealings with the aboriginal in another way. For all winter traction and transport they used reindeer, but when we visited the village there was not a single one within its boundaries. Each farmer had an agreement with a Lapp, and sent away his ear-marked deer to be pastured under the Lapp’s charge on the distant uplands of the fjeld and tundra.
We made no long stay in Küstula. For the first time since we had set foot in the country, transport was made ready for us without a weary haggle of words; and the unaccustomed easiness of it was too delightful not to be taken advantage of. We limped stiffly down through the slip-rails of the fields, a bevy of men and children and women all accompanying us,and we came upon the river some half mile away from the house where we had slept. The map names it the Loukinenjoki, but the Finns of Küstula, knowing nothing of imaginative maps, and being taught on these matters merely by the tradition of their forefathers, preferred to call it the Loosnen.
The river here was young, being born of rills in the blue mountains only a few miles away, amongst their swamps and pines and comely birches; and it ran round bends and curves innumerable. Sometimes it widened into lagoons, sometimes the banks hemmed it in to narrows, and the waters spouted with waterfalls and rapids.
On the short grass of the bank lay a new canoe, bottom upwards. I sat down on her, and discovered also that she was newly tarred. She was eighteen feet long, and built in the usual way, with two stakes aside, coming to highest points forward and aft. The Squire himself came with us as skipper; we ourselves and our baggage were stowed amidships on a green cushion of springy birch-shoots; and in the bows was Nilas Petrie Karahoola, a tall, clean-made young Finn, who owned a bottle of smuggled cognac and a natty little liqueur-glass. When we were all on board, the canoe showed just seven inches of free-board.
We shoved off, and the population of Küstula on the high bank above, waved their head-gear and wished us God-speed. But we ourselves could notlinger long over the farewell. A dozen strokes brought the canoe into the swirl of rapids, where the brown water raced over and between a tangle of jagged rocks, which the Squire, crouching in the stern with the steering paddle, had all his work cut out to negotiate. A dozen times he bumped on some unseen boulder; and once the canoe grounded amidships, was caught by a swirl on her stern, and was within an ace of broaching-to and being swamped. But a lusty effort set us free again, and on we raced; and then after a final dive over a churning three-foot fall, we reached the deep and placid stream again, and were a mile below the last field of Küstula. It was quick travelling.
The Squire wiped the perspiration from his face and sat down; Nilas brought out his cognac-bottle and handed a nip all round; and then the pair of them settled themselves to steady paddling. We ourselves were glad enough of the opportunity forfar niente. We had come through a surfeit of ill-usage, over-exertion, over-biting, and under-feeding, and as regards personal appearance we were a couple of gaunt, blotched, hollow-eyed wrecks. So we lay on the baggage and the springy green boughs, and watched the banks go by in luxurious idleness.
Comely banks they were too, laid out by Nature with grasses, and planted with birches, hazels, and pines. They were like bits of the Thames at Mortlake, or the Dee above Chester. It was hard to realisethat in winter all this was a place of howling gales and tangled snow-drifts.
Now and again we passed a fisher’s camp by the water-side—just a fire, some drying nets, and a piece of cotton cloth which served more as mosquito-bar than tent; and now and again we met a woman paddling a boat whilst a man in the stern fished. Some were Lapps, but most were Finns.
We would pass mile after mile of river-bank which had never been touched by man since the river carved its channel, and mile after mile of forest which had never felt the axe; but still there was not wanting occasional evidences that we were getting into a country less sparsely populated than the aching wilderness we had so wearily tramped through, and the idea made us think back at some of the halts where we had stayed. Those at the farther end were already growing faint and hazy: we seemed to have gone through so much since we had left them.
“I can dimly recall,” said one of us, “that years ago we came up to the Polar Sea in a canoe called theWindward. But where was it from? I forget.”
“A settlement called ‘London,’ wasn’t it?” said the other.
“Which was that? I’m getting mixed.”
“The place where we got something to eat.”
“Ah, I remember, sour milk, wasn’t it, and that dog-biscuit stuff? And the natives came to see us off.”...
We were talking half seriously too. All those early stages of our expedition seemed so distant and nebulous. We had lived a good many years in those last few weeks.
From all that toil and starvation and strain this river-journey came as a delightful revel. The paddlescheepedagainst the gunwales, and the water trickled musically. Cuckoos called to us from behind the woods. We took our eyes from one beautiful picture on the shore, only to drink in the pleasures of the next. And then the Finns would take their paddles out of the water altogether, and we would drift down the stream and bask in the sweet, warm silence.
The river would widen out into a still lagoon, walled in by mysterious pines, a dancing-place for dragon-flies, and we would drowse off almost into forgetfulness. And then of a sudden the lagoon would empty over a fall into a narrow gut, and the canoe would leap upon the backs of sleek brown waves, and frisk through spray, and grate over shoals, and shave black-fanged rocks by a hand’s-breadth. It was work which required the skilful navigator. Once, after we had gone ashore to boil up the kettles for a meal, the Finns changed about when we got on board again, and Nilas at the steering paddle took us down the next rapids and half filled the canoe with water before she reached their foot. We had to pull ashore again to bale after this, not because our own sodden properties would have hurt in thewater, but because of some goods of the Squire’s which he was taking as cargo. He, canny man, had a bale of hides which he wanted to exchange for money in Kittila, and by getting them down in our hired canoe he was saving a journey.
Other streams joined us as the canoe paddled on, and the river grew in bigness and use. Hay barns became quite frequent on the banks, on spots where some distant farmer came to cut the rich grasses, and dry them on wooden racks and rails, Norwegian fashion, till they turned into scented hay. This would be sheltered in the rude houses of logs against autumn rains, and in the winter months, when the river was ice, he could come with sledge and reindeer and drag the hay home to his farm across the frozen surface.
Nilas paddled and the Squire steered. There was high ground ahead, and always on our left-hand side was a great wooded bulk of mountain. The river scenery changed like the setting of a play: we shot down noisy rapids with the speed of a running fish; we paddled across leisurely lagoons; we saved journeys round wide bends by forcing the canoe through narrow “cut-offs,” like those one meets with on the Mississippi; but always close above us the mountain remained, grand and vast and immovable. On the hills ahead there were snow patches. On our mountain there were none. From the waters where its feet were bathed, to the billowy clouds whichcooled its head, trees covered it like a rentless garment, and nowhere was its naked side exposed.
Nilas put leather gloves over his fingers and paddled on, and the Squire steered tirelessly. The scenery grew wilder as we drew nearer to Kittila, and flights of small duck whirred past us down the stream. The grass was gone from the banks, and the river was hemmed in by arid bluffs, and walls of rock, and lines of tumbled boulders. The trees were sterner in shape and colour, and grew into thicker and more gloomy forests.
Then abruptly it changed again. The forests disappeared. A natural clearing began, and man had taken advantage of the gap to set up a farm.
The Squire ran the canoe ashore, and we got out and climbed a steep forty-foot bank. The farm lay before us, trim, orderly, and prosperous, and the usual fishing implements lay spread about on the bank. The Finn farmer came out and invited us inside his dwelling. It was probably an accidental resemblance, but in personal appearance he might have passed for twin-brother of the estimable President Krüger, of African ill-fame, in clothes, beard, and everything, with the trifling detail of steel-rimmed spectacles added. He accepted us first of all as a joke; but when he heard we had come across from the Arctic Sea, he looked upon us as a pair of barefaced liars, and regarded us with more respect. He gave us milk, and then brought all available members of his household into the farmkitchen, and preached them an improving sermon with us as text. To the casual observer then we certainly must have looked a pair of “awful warnings.”
In the kitchen a woman was working a hand-loom, and except when a thread broke in the warp, and demanded repair, the machine clacked away industriously during the whole of the excellent Krüger’s sermon. She was weaving a checked blue-cotton cloth, and beside her a couple of old crones span yarn industriously from humming-wheels. Hayter, callous to the sermon, sat down to sketch the hand-loom weaver. Ever and again a small fluffy-headed girl edged across into his line of vision, and was ruthlessly dragged away again by the farmer. She was rather pretty in a scared sort of way, and at last she got her desire, and was faithfully depicted in black and white on a page of the sketch-book. Her name was Edla Dahlgren.
We left the farm at eleven o’clock by the timepiece in the kitchen, and put out once more into the river. We were in the broad Ounasjoki now, a river as wide as the Thames at Richmond, but vastly swifter.