On the way toKittila.
On the way toKittila.
The canoe ran away down past the shores, and once more forests hedged us in above the high banks. The river was all swirls and grinding pools, and oily overfalls, and noisy rapids. At the foot of the banks were camp-fires sending up trails of thin blue smoke from tiny crumbs of flame. Filmy mist rose from the tangle of waters, and amongst it here and there weremen and women in canoes, fishing. From behind the pines on the western bank the sun sent a glow like new-tapped blood.
We passed close to one of the canoes. A woman was in the bow, poling. Five rods were trolling from the stern, and a man with a calico mosquito-cowl about his head tended them. The rush of the river drove us past, and the canoe faded into a black dot amongst the mist. It was the likeliest looking fishing-water I ever saw.
More fires came up on the banks, winked redly, and disappeared. From bank to bank the rapids shouted, and the yellow waves spurned us on to pools of black, sliding water, and the oily rocks sucked us towards them as we tore past. The dew came down more heavily and the mists closed in; the river slacked in speed again, and the canoe rode with an easier motion; and when we looked back, the fishers and their fires were blotted out against the black background of the pines.
It was midnight. Astern, wrapped in thin blue mist, there loomed up the great wooded mountains we had voyaged round so long. Ahead, the river widened out into a still lake, and reflected into it was a cluster of red and ochre houses above a bright green bank, which made up the outskirts of straggling Kittila. Well-derricks sprawled amongst the houses, and the smell of farms and agriculture hung on theair. The sun was coming up egg-shaped and blood-red from out of the mists and the pines. It was midnight, and all Kittila slept.
We had been carried three-and-sixty miles from Küstula by the tireless fingers of the river. We got out of the canoe and turned our backs on it. Beyond us lay fields gleaming with dew-diamonds. Beyond again, lay the dwellings of Kittila.
The Squire led us up to a house and woke the inmates. We were given a room with walls actually papered—with newspapers. A sleepy woman shuffled off her bedclothes and put on a second garment; but she brisked up when she saw the strangers were curious people from a far country. And in a while supper was set before us: the dog-biscuit of the country, the shell of a Dutch cheese, and thirteen bay-leaf anchovies in a tin. And then we were given beds with sheets. Here was refinement: we actually undressed to do justice to it.
A road fit for wheeled vehicles runs through Kittila, and another road, though a bad one, intersects it lower down and leads to Sodankyla. The houses of the little town are scattered picturesquely on either side of this road, and are for the most part stained dragon’s-blood red, or turmeric yellow, with white window-sashes. They have a fine taste for colour in Kittila. All the better houses are enclosed within their own neat fences, and of its sort it would be hardto find a more comely townlet. Even the shops are no disfigurement, and they are more than twenty in number—quite one-third of all the houses. They display no sign-boards, and they do not exhibit goods in the windows to give possible buyers cheap views from the public thoroughfares.
Every house has its well or wells, straddled over by a huge hoisting-derrick, of the same construction one may see in Spain, or Southern France, or elsewhere. No house is very large. The risk of fire is always in the air, and a man as he grows richer, or as his family increases, does not add anannexeto his original home, but builds a second house a few yards away, and then others, following a rectangular plan, till at length he has made himself a courtyard, walled round with barns and dwellings.
A marvellous tidiness pervades everything. All is kept in good repair. Not a shingle is displaced from the neat brown roofs, not a scrap of the farm middens is allowed to straggle. There is no litter anywhere. And yet these people are Finns of the same race as those squalid, listless savages we had been living amongst only a few days before. The country Finn and his long boot are inseparable; even the Squire and Nilas wore them, although they had telescoped the tops almost down to their ankles; but in Kittila the high boot was no longerde rigeur. Lace boots were the ordinary wear. Even shoes were not uncommon.
The two largest buildings in Kittila were a big, square schoolhouse with a high, red stockade, and a large, high-spired church. The school was having holiday when we were there, and does its business during the bleak, black months of winter.
The church, in magpie black and white, was hideous. But it was an elaborate building for all that, with granite foundations, an interior of grim massiveness, and shutters in the belfry of its wooden tower, opening and closing like a swell-box of an organ. At the back of the church was a cemetery, grass-grown and neglected, with wooden and cast-iron crosses and devices at the grave heads, most with all inscription quite obliterated. One, over a new grave had the formalhic jacetscrawled in pencil. Another, which was practically a log-built mausoleum, had crumbled in places and fallen in, till the dry bones of the dead shivered at the draught from the crevices. It seemed as though the Finn once out of life dropped out of memory also, and all care for his resting-place ceased. It was a utilitarian trait, perhaps, but it was not quite an amiable one.
There is a chemist in Kittila with whom we foregathered and drank lemonade, and I do not think it is maligning him to say that he had a greater liking for winter sledge-exercise than for the mere compounding of drugs and prescribing for human ailments. He owned six driving-deer, did this Arctic chemist, which of course, when we were there, were runningout on the fjeld and getting into fettle. He had his private earmark, drawn on parchment, and stored in an envelope. It was a mere outline of two bows—thus, divided vertically down the middle to separate the two ears, with the distinctive markings traced in with pen and ink. A copy of this was posted with others in a public place, so that all men might know that deer marked so were the chemist’s property.
When the snows fall, and the time comes for driving, then the little chemist begins to find life worth living. With pride he showed us his gear: the smartest outfit imaginable. First, there was a pulling collar for the deer with two wooden hames bound with iron. Then there was a saddle of leather, most elaborately worked and embroidered with red. For the middle of the deer’s long neck was another red collar, decorated with a fine brass bell. The trace was of raw hide, plaited square. There was one single-tree of bent wood, with a looped thong made fast to its middle. This thong was passed through a hole under the forefoot of the sledge, and the loop was slipped over the bit on the stem-head, so that the deer could always be cast adrift from the sledge at a moment’s notice.
The boat-shaped sledge itself was a miracle of light-blue paint, but a cranky thing for a beginner to sit. It would roll forty-five degrees without capsizing, but it was apt to exceed the forty-five. There is a poleto guide with, and the pole is a thing of use; for riding at speed in these sledges over an uneven snow-field is distinctly a matter of balance.
We saw that the little chemist was a man of taste from the trimness of this turn-out; but when he showed us his own personal attire for winter journeys, we saw that he was a man of luxury also. Everything was cut after the mode of the Lapps, and cost was a neglected detail.
He put on his winter rig for our gratification, and we admired him from head to foot. On the top of him came thelapinlakki, the heavy, square-topped Lappish cap, with the crown made of bright scarlet cloth, and the band round the head, of otter’s fur. Round his neck was thesieppura, a collaret of bear’s fur, with the bear’s mask hanging over his breast. Thematsoreo(orpeski) which covered his trunk was of soft gray-brown reindeer skin, with the hair exquisitely dressed and finished. The fingerless gloves (kinteaat) on his hands were of white reindeer skin, with the hair outside. He had short, hairless, leather breeches underneath, but these were joined in mid-thigh by thesӑpӑkkeet, which were reindeer-skin leggings that reached down to the ankles, where they were made fast to the leather boots, thekallakkoat, by narrow, red clothpaulat, which may be defined as bandages.
The day happened to be blazing hot, and the little chemist almost melted under the weight of his furs,which plimmed him out to nearly double his normal size; but he told us that in winter there were days of bitter frost and driving gale, when it was dangerous to venture out of doors even in that Arctic panoply. Here in the interior of Lapland, out of all distant influence of the Gulf Stream, far greater extremes of temperature prevail than in more northern spots like, say, Vardö.
The little chemist was a fisherman at times during the summer months, and being somewhat of a naturalist besides, he had collected on paper the names of his possible catch. He had not succeeded in finding a specimen of each in the Ounasjoki so far, but the fish were undoubtedly in the country, and some day he hoped to complete his basket. I give the list here, in case somebody may find them interesting:—
He warmed up when the talk got on fish, and took us across to the house of a neighbour who made his living out of fish-catching as an industry. The neighbour gave us spruce beer, a flat decoction, which we found somewhat insipid, and then he started to talk. We warmed as we heard him; it was quite like being at home again. I have only met one manto equal him, and he was a Lincolnshire pike-fisherman who never seemed to catch anything less than a yard in length, or the size of a man’s thigh in girth. This fisherman of Kittila was not quite so artistic in his yarns as the man of Lincolnshire. He rushed his statements too much, and did not wait till they were dragged out of him; but he never flinched at anything. He illustrated his conversation by diagrams with a piece of charcoal on the floor as he went on; and when his imagination failed him, one or other of us foreigners would start on a fish story, and he would take the words out of our mouths and go on again at redoubled speed.
Verily fishermen are quaintly alike all the world over. There must be some sort of bacteria in fish which infect the catcher and impel him to expand facts whether he will or not. I knew an eminent bishop once—but perhaps he does not count. He was an Irishman as well as a votary of the fly-rod.
Drinkingcups
Drinkingcups
ArcticLapland Types.
ArcticLapland Types.
The river Ounasjoki is navigable the larger part of the way from Kittila down to its outfall in the Gulf of Bothnia; but prices run high for the hire of canoes, as they have to be poled back tediously up against the current, not to mention suffering damage from the several spots where bad rapids compel lengthy portages. Transport down to the coast is done by wheeled vehicle, and for this purpose a road has been built.
The local vehicle for human transport is thekarre, which spells post-cart in Qfinsk. It is a word which covers a multitude of shapes. The bestkarreis like the Norwegianstolkjarre, and has two bodies set one behind the other on one pair of shafts, with remarkably little room for the legs in either. The two wheels are small and sturdy, and have long projecting hubs which remind one of the ancient British scythe-chariot. The bodies of the vehicle may be made of wicker, leather and iron, cane and iron, or eke plaindeal board, and it is rare to see akarrewhich is not approaching the last stage of decrepitude. The horse draws from the fore-end of the shafts, to which his collar is made fast by a six-inch trace and a toggle. The passenger usually drives himself—always if he will so consent—and the man, or boy, or top-booted girl in charge, sits on the back seat on the top of the baggage, and smokes and contemplates.
We set off posting seawards from Kittila on a day which happened to be set apart for some Lutheran celebration, and the little town was taking holiday. We took our last look upon the gaudy oleograph of the Czar and Czarina hung up in the post-house to inculcate loyalty amongst the lukewarm Finns, and then thekarrewas brought out, and we drove away in style. A swarm of bare-footed, tow-headed, mud-complexioned children saw us off, who would have passed very well for the progeny of tar-heelers amongst the Alleghany Mountains.
There were few men in evidence, but the women were all out in the street dressed in their smartest, with white kerchief on head, blue print gown, and white cotton apron. They were clean, all of them, and not unpicturesque; but it would have been hard to find a neat figure or a comely face in the whole of Kittila.
It might be described as a cluster of farms, this trim Arctic town, and gates are swung across the road every few hundred yards. Between the houseslay fields of barley, breaking into silky waves beneath the sun, and fields of rye with stems higher than a Laplander’s head. Beside each house was a pile of sledges with the runners new-tarred, ready for the winter. Beside the roadway, herds of liver and white cows grazed under the care of bare-legged urchins.
The road, after what we had been through, seemed delightful to us, though it was little better than a sandbed in places. At orderly intervals, sturdy red kilometre posts stood sentinel along its flank, with black figures on their squared white heads saying how far it was from the last station, and how far to the next. Red bridges of log and trestle crossed the streams. Red wooden parapets guarded the awkward corners when the road climbed round a hillside. The Great White Czar was taking care for the necks of his subjects, and red was the sign of his official hand.
It is fashionable to speak of Russia and her dependencies as being the worst police-ridden lands amongst all the wide acres of earth; and what they may be in other districts I do not know—I have not been there—but of Lapland and Northern Finland I can speak with authority. We went into the country prejudiced against the Government; we left it prejudiced in its favour. We expected to meet a harassing police; we never even saw a uniform. We were prepared for official delays, and were ready to give bribes to get on; there were no officials either tomake the one or to take the other. Our British Foreign Office passports with their hieroglyphical visés never emerged from the envelopes in which they were originally packed. We went through the country with as little interference as we might have met with in a trip through Yorkshire or Vermont.
But though the Government does not obtrude itself to the passing eye with a bristle of uniforms and weapons, as it does in luckless countries like Germany and France, it makes its comforting presence felt through all the populated parts of the country. Without some one to look after him, and be competent if necessary to twist his tail, a slack and slovenly person like the Northern Finn would never have produced a high road for his traffic, he would never have built substantial bridges, and most of all he would never have organised the post-cart system.
It is on the usual Russian model, this posting system, but it is a triumph of quiet routine for all that. The stations vary in distance from ten to twenty kilometres apart. You drive up, go into the house, and sign a requisition for as many horses andkarresas you want. The horses are passable on the whole, for the most part roans, chestnuts, or bright bays, standing about fourteen hands to fourteen-three, and cobby about the neck. ThekarresI have described. With wonderfully little loss of time, the new vehicle with horse and man appears ready in the courtyard, and you pay off your old one accordingto the tariff in the post-book, and start off again on the next stage of your journey. The pace as a usual thing is tolerable. The horse walks uphill, trots on level, and gallops on the down-grades as fast as he can put feet to the ground. You may have your own theories about the advisability of these paces, but they are the custom of the country, and you cannot change them. You drive with a loose rein, and when you want increased pace you make a Zulu-like noise something likepop-pop, and if that does not have the desired effect you cut a stick and use it with vigour. The horse shrugs his shoulders and quickens; it is all in the day’s work. When you want him to stop, you saypr-r-r-mph!just as you do in Denmark.
The horse of the post-road is not accustomed to atmospheric warmth, and sweats on small provocation. Under these circumstances he must not be pressed. On our first stage out of Kittila—it was one of the longest, by the way, being twenty-two kilometres to the change-house—the sun above us blazed with true Arctic heat and fervour, and the pace could not be pushed beyond the steadiest of jogs. When we pulled up in the grassy courtyard of Rantatalo at the end of this first stage, the man in attendance drew bucket after bucket of icy water from the well, and sluiced it over the horse’s loins. It seemed a crude sort of proceeding, but one supposed they knew their business; and, besides, it was their horse.
In this same courtyard at Rantatalo the score of people who made the village were collected to amuse themselves with one of their number who had contrived to get drunk. How he had procured the liquor in this Prohibition State was a mystery apparently to them as much as it was to us. But drunk he was, and as specimens in that condition were rare, they made the most of him before he was sober again.
From out of this jeering crowd round the drunkard there came to us a battered, shaggy, half-naked, wreck of a man, who spoke “leetle Anglish.†He had been born in Rantatalo, and had tired of it; he had tramped to the coast, and had worked across the ocean; he had drifted on to a railroad somewhere in America, though he did not know whether it was in California or the Carolinas, and had there worked in a line-gang till home-sickness and body-sickness drove him back to Finland again. Poor wretch, it did not require much skill to diagnose consumption as his ailment. He said he was “mighty glad to see us.†It evidently gave him much pleasure to be thoroughly profane in English again.
The Ounas River runs in a tolerably straight course north and south from Kittila to the sea; but being a river it has some curves, and the road to cut these off has to make crossings at intervals. We came upon our first ferry, a flat and shallow boat, just outside this post-house at Rantatalo, and the wreck from America, and an ugly young woman witha pipe rowed us and our new horse andkarreacross.
We were out of the sphere of cultivation again in half a kilometre, and then the road led through a big burn-out of forest, which made a huge, unsightly scar across the country. In the first third, some of the trees were merely charred and left dead and standing; from the next third, the furnace of fire had mopped them up entirely, and the charred ashes had been swept away by wind and rain; and over the balance of ground which the flames had mowed, the stumps of the old trees were left, and young shoots were beginning to show beside them. A house had stood by the roadside in the middle of that ruined forest, but only the rubble foundations were left. The fire had driven the farmers away, and licked up their crops, and destroyed their woodwork, and they had no heart left either to rebuild or to recultivate. They had fled before the draught of the flames, and had returned no more.
The forest closed in again after this gap, and the road brought us once more in sight of the river, which ran here as a big, strong stream between high pine-covered rocks. A red-shirted Finn was poling himself about the rapids, with rods trolling over the stern of his canoe.
There was the post-house of Kakkonaara just beyond this point, and whilst the new horse andkarrewere being got ready, we went and looked at some brick-making in a field beside the house. The work wasprimitive. The clay was ground up in a barrel-shaped churn by a lethargic horse; a besplattered woman worked it with her hands into wooden moulds; a small tow-headed girl carried the bricks away and laid them higgledy-piggledy to dry; and a man with ear-rings, and a woman with a baby strapped up like an Indian papoose, took gentle exercise by standing still and looking on. A small pile of perhaps half a thousand bricks lay near, intermingled with wood ready for burning; and a few specimens, red, soft, twisted and irregular, lay here and there to show the fashion of the finished article. They use these bricks for stoves, and the demand is not large. A thousand would last a family a lifetime. All building and flooring and roofing is, of course, done with wood.
They were bringing new ground into cultivation just beyond this, by cutting dykes across it and throwing the subsoil of sand and clay over the vegetation. It was an old river-bed, thickly grown with heather and juniper, and I cannot say that it gave much promise of being speedily fertile.
At Lahiniva, the little wayside farm which made the headquarters of the next stage, we fell in with bad luck. The only available vehicle was a ramshackle wooden box, horsed by a worn-out chestnut stallion, which was pathetically incapable of dragging us. The road was deep with sand, and whacking the poor old horse (after the custom of the country) was sheer brutality without adequate return. Soin the end we had to turn out and walk; and as the mosquitoes came out for the first time that day in full vigour, we had a pretty dreary time of it, and we did not get into Murtola till 1.30">A.M.We had posted eighty-four kilometres from Kittila that day, and,tout compris, it had cost us M. 14.
We could have managed very comfortably with a solid meal after this drive, but little enough was forthcoming. All the post-houses have a list put up on the wall, beside the oleographs of the Czar and the Czarina, on which there is set forth in Russian, Qfinsk, and Svensk, the lists of viands which are officially procurable, with the official price of each. But few of these were ever actually on sale, and at Murtola a little curdled milk, some adamantine rye-cake, and some scraps of fish so stinking as to be uneatable were all we could collect. So we fared poorly enough.
We started off from Murtola next morning in an even worsekarrethan the one we had driven up in. It did possess springs, it is true, but as they were venerable, and tender with age, and had been reinforced by a pine log, the motion of thekarreon the road was, to use the Chinese phrase, “bumpy, bumpy, all-e-same ridy gee-gee.â€
For the whole of that stage we drove between forests of slim, straight pines, absolutely without undergrowth higher than six-inch grass. All thebig trees had been cut from near the roads, and only the second growth was left. Heavy timber for exportation has to be sought now on the more distant hills, sent down log by log by a specially dammed stream to the main rivers, and there chained and lashed and spiked together in long, sinuous rafts to float down to the winches of the shipping on the coast. Acres of these rafts did we see new-cut in the rivers, huge bristles of logs did we come across stranded in angles of dried-up tributary streams; and yet so small a part did they make of the whole growth of the country that one could look from across a valley at the hillside from which they had come, and never find the spots which the axes had weeded. A fire of a day can do more in the way of forest destruction than the work of a dozen logging camps in a year.
Water is the one and only means of transport on which the woodcutter has to depend upon for bringing his wares to the rim of those seas which carry them to the markets of the outer world. And at one time he only cut trees which would fall directly into deep rivers, which would carry them without further ado; but as the harvest of the river-banks and the accessible parts got reaped, he had to go with his axe farther back amongst the fastnesses of the mountains, and amplify his methods of transport. The logs have to be floated somehow, and as he has no river ready-made to his hand, hemanufactures one. He picks upon some gully in the wilderness of the hills with a streamlet trickling through its mosses, and throws a dam of logs and turf and stones across its lower end, with a broad gate of logs in its middle. Axe in hand he goes down the hill-flank beyond, notes the direction which a sudden gush of water would take on its journey to the nearest stream, and clears the way of all the larger obstructions. And in the meanwhile the trickling streamlet above is with infinite slowness beginning to fill his dam.
When these preparations have been made, he goes back to his gully in the wilderness, and starts felling in real earnest. The great pines crash before his axe; their heads are lopped of; and they are rolled down the slopes into the tediously-filling dam. For the whole summer this work goes on, till all the trees which can be rolled or dragged there are jostling one another in this artificial lake, and the water of the streamlet no longer collects, but squanders itself over the top of the log sluice-gate. And then comes the moment for the realisation of his labours, and the moment to see whether the engineering of the work has been true. The sluice-gate of logs is knocked away; the water gushes out with a solid flood, carrying with it a prancing, lancing, dancing bristle of trunks, and roaring along with them at galloping speed down the slopes of mountain. It is no little thing which will cause a jam then. Obstructions aresheared away with infinite violence; the ends of the logs splinter themselves into paint-brushes; great trees crack off like reeds; and when the torrent, with its convoy of timber, ends its mad gallop in the river for which it has been aiming, there is a swathe ploughed across the green face of the country unsightly as the new cutting of a railroad.
But if there has been a jam, tedious pains must be expended before the logs can be sent along their journey again; another and a greater artificial freshet has to be created; and it is very often more remunerative to leave one of these knotted tangles of trunks to rot where they have stuck, and to start work againab initio. So that, on the whole, the tapping of one of these mountain dams, and the subsequent half-hour’s voyage of the logs, is a matter of pretty vivid excitement to all those concerned.
Again we had to cross the Ounasjoki, this time in a square ferry-boat rowed by a woman and a man, and steered by a solemn, small boy. Our progress was not swift. One of the wheel tyres of thekarrewas loose, and every few hundred yards some one had to get down to hammer it into place again with a stone. A gray-backed crow showed interest in the proceeding, and followed us for a couple of miles to find out what it was all about. But we came upon a hen capercailzie and her family dusting themselves in the road, and the gray-backed crow foreboreto follow us farther. Still I do not think there was much in his line to be got out of them. Eggs of course were his speciality, but the egg season was long past, and the capercailzie chicks were as big as partridges.
At Juopperi, the next post-house, the only available horse had thrown a shoe, and as we had to wait till it was re-shod, we joined the community in the big farm-kitchen and watched them at work. It was a room twenty feet square with a big white stove that had cooking niches and drying racks and a ladder to reach its top. Strings of rye cakes hung from the rafters. Two pairs of antlers were nailed on the walls for hooks. A woman worked at a clacking hand-loom; a travelling cobbler was putting the finishing touches to a pair of yellow top-boots with a bone pattern-punch; and a couple of men carpentered at a table in the window. These were the workers: there were a dozen drones, flabby women and slack, corn-stalky men, who did nothing, without intelligence, and wearied themselves in the process.
Take the average Finn farmer of the North, and you will find a man who never works if he can help it, a man with an inferior liver and a chronic grievance. He hates his country, hates himself, hates his unobtrusive Government. If he were ruled by a committee of archangels, he would hate them equally. He will never create an insurrection; he could neversummon up the energy. He will never make a Nihilist: he has not sufficient brain to be a plotter. It is only in the days of youth that his discontent ever simmers over. Then it is that he sometimes gets so sick of everything that he scrapes a few marks together, puts them in his high boots, and tramps down to Torneo-Haparanda, and takes steamer for the States or Canada. As a rule, unless he dies, he does not stay there long. In North America they do not appreciate men with a distaste for work, and they are quite willing to let any one starve who does not choose to toil. They are a very practical people over there, and, unlike the English, have no taste for collecting useless human lumber. So unless the Finn manages to die there, which he not infrequently does, his great object from the moment he sets foot in the Land of the Free, is to get away from it again as soon as he can collect a steamer-fare.
Still, unpleasant as he is in his ways and his personal appearance, he does at times contrive to make his homestead outwardly picturesque. He does it by accident, to be sure, but still the result is there. The architecture of his house is not produced by studying after effect: it is the only species of architecture which occurs to him. The red dye with which he colours it is merely daubed on as a preservative. Yet these dark red houses cuddling down in the green landscape make very beautifulpictures, and they seem, moreover, to have an emblematic significance. Red is the official colour. Even the stones at the roadside are red with some queer lichenous growth as if in deference to the huge, invisible power which steers the country.
For the last stage of that day’s sixteen hours’ drive, thekarrewas horsed by a young black stallion, which systematically ran away with us up hill and down ravine, over bridges and through sand-mires. The pace was exhilarating, but as we were bruised all over with the previous jolting, we could have put up with a somewhat slower gait.
On this stage we were due to recross that imaginary boundary, the Arctic Circle, and come once more into that Temperate Zone which was our more native atmosphere, and we were on the keen look-out for some official recognition of its whereabouts. I do not quite know what we expected to see—a cairn or a wooden notice would have satisfied us—but the absence of any mark whatever jarred upon us. That a country which could mark off the kilometres on its roads with fine red posts, should ignore a geographical acquisition like the Arctic Circle, seemed a piece of unappreciative barbarism.
It was after midnight when the galloping stallion brought us into the town of Rovaniemi. It was the most considerable place in the North, and the post-house was almost an hotel. At any rate, after somedilatoriness, it provided us with a meal, which was an item we were severely in need of.
The place was quite awake. In fact all through this land of staring daylight there never seemed to be any hour when some at least of the population were not awake and doing. When we turned into our beds at 2A.M.I noticed a ploughman still at work in the field across the road. It was a curious instrument he was handling—like an overgrown garden-hoe, with a pair of shafts instead of one. A lean horse was between the shafts, and the ploughman held the angle of the hoe and lifted the whole thing bodily round with one hand when he came to the end of a furrow. For a shallow cut in light soil it was rather effective.
Under a scorching sun next day we went out to look at the town. There is one main street of unobtrusive stores in Rovaniemi, with dwelling-houses lying back on one side, and the river swirling along in rapids at the other. At one end of the town was a hospital, each little room with its own white stove; and next it was a curious campanile in the form of a pagoda of brown, white, and yellow, with roofs of dragon-scale shingling, and a lofty, slender vane, whilst the Lutheran church, for which this campanile rang its bells, was a hundred yards away. This church was rather a fine old building, in cruciform, with its yellow walls striped with white, and a white crosshigh above the silver-gray shingling of its roof. On the church door were posted the private earmarks of the reindeer owned in the neighbourhood, which, for the sake of curiosity, we copied.
We went back to the post-house again for a meal—it was fine to be at a place where one could get food for the mere buying—and we saw there a woman swinging an infant in a cradle slung from the ceiling. How it did arouse memories! How often we had seen in a Lapland farm-kitchen a basket dangling from the rafters at the end of reindeer traces, and a youngster packed in it, and the fond mother crooning the Lappish equivalent of “Hush thee, my baby,†and launching the small unfortunate back through fifteen feet of space every time it swung up to her.
A well-dressed cripple hobbled into the room when we were eating, with his knee-cap half cut off by the jamming of a log-raft. He persisted in exhibiting the wound, and then rubbed his sleek, round belly to intimate that he was starving. As he was one of the most prosperous-looking men we had seen in Rovaniemi, it did not occur to us for some time that he was soliciting alms, and it was not till he had put the matter still more forcibly, that we exuded coinage to the extent of three halfpence. He put it in his pocket and shook hands cordially with each of us, and intimated in a few simple and carefully-chosen words that we should receive our reward in due course from on high. In fact he was really sobusiness-like about his begging, that we quite expected that he would bring out a book of printed forms and give us a receipt.
We did not get much privacy at Rovaniemi. The landlord regarded us much in the light of a travelling circus, and brought us in relays of callers whenever we were on the premises. We were not too shy, however, to make use of them. We pumped them on every subject on which they could give information, and amongst other things on how we were to continue our journey down to the coast, and where we should best find shipping for England. We had had a sufficiency of the bumpy-bumpy motion of the Finnish post-cart to prefer other means of transport if it was available, and so we asked with interest about the river route. There seemed a good deal of diversity of opinion. Finally the best steersman in Rovaniemi was brought in, a white-haired old fellow, with a clever, clean-shaven face, and he offered to take us down as far as a series of falls twenty kilometres above Kemi, and no farther. He proposed to take us so far for M.50, a tremendous sum in Northern Finland when one remembers that the rates for posting, all inclusive, varied between M.0·14 and M.0·19 per kilometre, the mark being about tenpence English.
There were a good many opinions, too, as to where we ought to go to find the requisite steamer. Some said Kemi, some insisted on Torneo-Haparanda, whilstsome were equally certain that we ought to push on down the Finnish coast of the Gulf of Bothnia to Uleaborg.
In the meanwhile two or three merchants had been trying to incite us to buy peltries. We were not anxious to burden ourselves with the extra weight, and prices were not very tempting. A good bearskin cost between M.175 and M.200, and though we had one small gray skin offered for M.70, it had been shot almost to pieces, and was not well cured. These skins, of course, are much used in the country for winter wear. Reindeer pelts were cheaper. A fine skin, thick and gray, could be bought for M.8; but then it must be remembered that a whole deer, fat for killing, was only worth between M.25 and M.50.
There was a great store of reindeer antlers in a barn behind one of these stores at Rovaniemi, which we inspected to the accompaniment of giggles from the crowd. They could not see what possible interest lay in a heap of stinking old bone; and when Hayter started to make diagrams of a few of the more curious shapes, they doubled themselves up with laughter. It was funnier than any circus they had ever seen before. We did not mind; it amused them, and the antlers amused us. There must have been five hundred pairs in that barn, and no two pairs could we find anywhere approaching the same pattern. It was the brow-tines which varied most, but the upperbranches were also irregular. Some were palmated almost like an elk’s; and one which I saw had complete twists in every tine like a narwal’s horn.
As a final climax to the entertainment, the landlord chose out a few choice spirits and took them with us down to a hollow on the river-bank out of sight of the town. He had a bottle in his pocket, and with considerable mystery (seeing that it was smuggled) he produced it, and we saw by the label that it was caloric punch. It was half full; and as it had been on tap some time with the cork out, there was a good two inches of black sediment at the bottom, consisting of flies. But nobody stuck at this. It was doled out in a liqueur-glass, and we toasted one another with effusiveness.
Time and again quaint scraps of English had dropped upon our ears from Rovaniemi lips, and here on the river-bank the secret came out as to where they had come from. It seemed that a Britisher had long been resident in Rovaniemi, and we were told his name, and the town in Wales where he came from. He was not “merchant,†he was “touristâ€â€”that is, he was not engaged in business. And as his “tour†had apparently lasted ten years, during which time he had not moved outside Rovaniemi, we wondered what he had done at home to make so long an absence advisable.
Judging from the few scraps of Anglo-Saxon which he had left behind him, this Welshman must havebeen a person of pretty wit, or else a fellow of most blasphemous habits. Each of the Finns who had been his cronies possessed a sentence of English, laboriously taught and remembered; and each, as he tossed off his peg of fly tincture, pridefully repeated his lesson as a toast to our health. Need one add that the time-honoured joke had been repeated, and that each Finn’srepertoireof English consisted of a fantastic soul-curdling oath? Still, as the Welshman had occupied ten years in manufacturing the joke, one cannot do less than record his complete success.
We made many friends in Rovaniemi, and left the town with real regret, but we had to be moving on. The courtyard was crowded with people come to see us off, and I think they were sorry also. Circuses are rare in Rovaniemi.
We drove out past the church, and the white shutters of its pagoda-shaped bell-tower were open, and the bells were ringing out and carrying their message to the scattered farms up and down the valley.
Slowly they dimmed into the distance behind us, and for forty kilometres we travelled through forests of slender pines peopled apparently by noisy, quarrelling magpies alone. And then habitations began again, with fields set before and behind them, though most of these were little better than half-drained swamps, which would grow nothing richer than reeds and rushes.
We were getting very bad horses on these stages, and the crudest possible vehicles. As I have said, the short trace on the horse-collar is joined to the shaft with a toggle, and the backhand of the saddle is fastened to the trace, and so if this toggle falls out, down go the shafts on to the ground, and nothing short of a miracle can save a bad spill. We saw ten such miracles in one day.
We crossed the river by a wire-rope ferry just below a chain of booms set across to intercept log-rafts, and fetched up that night at a farm post-house which was almost luxurious. The sun went below the pines as we sat down to sup, and the after-glow scattered reds and dull yellows and crimsons far and wide over the landscape. The great river below the house looked like a stream of ice, which glittered in its smooth parts, and lay heaped with drifts and whorls of snow where the currents raised their mounds of eddies over the hidden rocks below.
And then there dawned our final day for the road. We zigzagged back and forwards across the river as the road came upon the ferries, and we passed log-booms, and log-rafts innumerable. The air was sweet with the scent of hay. Wild raspberry trees grew by the wayside with the fruit set but not yet ripe.
At one place where the river broke into noisy rapids, we got down to look at some fish-traps. Great trestles built of trunks straddled out over the roaringwater, their lower ends notched in the rocks, their tops ballasted by heavy stones. They were fenced in below by whole birch trees, with here and there gaps in which were placed the wicker traps. There were trestles on either side built to suit all heights of the river, and the catching was brisk, for the fish were many. Silver-bellied salmon jumped by the hundred in the tawny cataracts, and a bevy of pock-marked Finns gathered the harvest from the traps to pack in ice and send down to Stockholm to be kippered.
Once and again did we cross the river by ferries, and changed horses andkarresat the post-houses, and then left the Ounasjoki behind us, and set off across the sandy delta to the other great river on which stand the twin-towns of Torneo-Haparanda, through masses of harebells which made the ground as blue as a sky.
The Torneo River lay before us, broad, solemn, and deep. A great sailing-ferry lay beside a wooden wharf. Thekarrewas unhorsed, and, with two other vehicles, was run on board. The horses followed. Then a mixed company of six nationalities took their places, the sprit-sail was sheeted home, and we drifted off. The twin-towns lay on the opposite bank: Swedish Haparanda trim and red to seaward, Finnish Torneo notable for the minarets of its Russian church farther up-stream, and at the back, the slim blackspire of the Lutheran church. And the sunset bathed it all with an impartial glow.
Slowly the clumsy ferry-boat drifted across the river, amongst firewood, carrying schooners, and rafts, and the boats of fishers, and at last she landed beside a fussy launch which did a passenger traffic with the villages up-stream. We drove off at speed through sandy streets between great blocks of wooden houses, and then we left Torneo and turned inland, circling round the head of a lagoon from which mist wreaths were rising like rolls of cotton wool.
By the wayside there loomed out a square pillar adorned with a split crow, elaborately gilt. It was the boundary of Holy Russia, and it stood there grim and cold and deserted.
Farther on we came upon another pillar bearing the Swedish arms, but this also was solitary and unguarded. We drove on and came to Haparanda. Of our own free-will we pulled up at the house of a custom’s officer to report. He was away. His wife heard the tale and shrugged her shoulder. “Oh, Englanders,†said she. “Go on.†It was the only piece of official formality we met with during all our journeying.
There was a hotel in Haparanda, and we went to it and dinedà la Suède—that is, mostly offhors d’œuvres, and washed down the meal with some alleged Roederer, which was more than half liqueur. We felt that we were indeed getting into civilisationagain, and as we were lucky enough to hear of a steamer leaving for Stockholm in a couple of days, we were prepared to slack about and enjoy ourselves in the interval.
As a first luxury we went and bathed. Moored off the shore were half a dozen little schooners with two large gaff-sails, and the foremast stepped right up in the bows, and no bowsprit. Their crews live aft in a little house, and employ themselves with bringing in cargoes of split birch-logs for fuel from the nearest forests. We swam off to these, and disported ourselves in the water after the manner of porpoises. And then we got into our clothes again, lit up mild, bad cigars, and strolled around without any cares about meal-getting, carrier-engaging, route-finding, or mosquito-slaying.
The town of Haparanda is rectangular in plan, and pretty when viewed from a distance. It is well be-telephoned, and possesses two banks and an ugly church. The town of Torneo, the only piece of Russian territory west of the Torneo River, is reached by foot-passengers over an unpainted wooden bridge, which straddles across the mouth of the lagoon like some monstrous gray-legged centipede. The lagoon divides them, as the Danube does Buda and Pesth.
Torneo, as a town, is less neat. It is liberally planted with gardens containing little creeper-covered arbours, in which it is the height of the Finn’s ambition to sit and smoke, and gloat over the factthat other people are fools enough to work. There is a pretty Lutheran church in black and white outside Torneo, with a tall, slender spire, and away from the church is a quaint bell-tower, also in magpie colours. An enclosure of stone hedges them both in, and inside the enclosure is a coppice of mountain ashes shadowing the graves. The Russian church in Torneo is set at a street corner in the middle of the town. It is an ornate little building in white and two tints of brown, with an elaborate cupola and coloured windows. It was suggestive of a kiosk in an exhibition where one might reasonably expect to buy somebody or other’s cocoa from comely young damsels in uniform.
There is a hospital in Torneo, which held two curious patients. One was a Lapp, the only one in the district. He had come down to Matarangi, which is fifty miles farther up the Torneo River, to sell his deer at the annual fair. He was outside Russian territory there and drink was plentiful, and in that commodity he made heavy investments. During his subsequent adventures he broke both thighs, nobody seemed to know how, and his friends brought him down to hospital, and left him there to return to their eternal deer-herding.
The other patient was a Tartar, and he also was in the accident ward. He was by no means an uncommon person to find so far out of his native latitude. Swarthy Tartar tramps, in face almost as dark as amulatto, permeate the country as beggars and horsedealers. They wear European clothes, and are generally accompanied by their women and children. Very often they have been born in Finland. They are thieves and vagabonds, the horses they sell are poor, and they occupy much the same position as the gipsy did a hundred years ago at home. They are hedge-bottom nomads, and theWanderlustis too strong in them ever to let them settle for long. It is on record that at times they have taken farms and tried to sit down and breed horses; but it is not on record that they have ever succeeded in staying three years in one place. They are quite without shame, morals, or common honesty; their most valued roof is a farmer’s outhouse; their one ambition in life is to keep just beyond starvation. Even the Finns despise them, just as the Swedes despise the Finns.
The Northern Swede is a cheerful,bourgeoiscreature, all belly and laugh, who browses on odds and ends of victual, and nips caloric punch all the day long; and for the short time we were with him in Haparanda, he amused us. But then we were not with him for long. The educated Swede of Stockholm is a very different person: he is a gentleman, and one of the most delightful gentlemen in Europe.
I think we left Haparanda without any keen regret. We drove a couple of miles past reedy lagoons to Salmis, the port, and there got on boarda coaster, which was waiting. She was going to take us down the waters of the Bothnia to Stockholm, the capital of Gustavus Adolphus, of Bernadotte, of Oscar II., the Venice of the North; and afterwards we would get back to England, which of all countries on this terrestrial globe is the most desirable.