Through Arctic Lapland
by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne · English · Gutenberg #45862 · 433,196 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Through Arctic Lapland
Author: C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
Release date: June 2, 2014 [eBook #45862]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH ARCTIC LAPLAND ***
Through Arctic Lapland
_By the same Author._
THE RECIPE FOR DIAMONDS.
HONOUR OF THIEVES.
THE PARADISE COAL-BOAT.
ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN KETTLE.
[Illustration: RINGING A BEAR TRACK _p. 94_]
Through
Arctic Lapland
BY
CUTCLIFFE HYNE
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1898
TO
MRS. ALFRED HARMSWORTH
OUR FRIEND
C. H.
C. J. C. H.
Preface
It seems customary in a book of travel to make frequent
allusions to other voyagers who have journeyed over the same
ground, or at least the same district, and to make constant
references to them, and give copious quotations from their
works. Of course we ought to have gone to the British Museum
before starting on our travel, and there read up all books
which in the least bore upon the country which we were going
to visit. We omitted to do this, firstly, because we
preferred to observe things for ourselves, from our own
individual standpoint, unprejudiced by the way in which
other people had observed them; and, secondly, from the far
more potent reason that we made our actual start in a great
hurry, and had little enough time for any preparations
whatever.
However, on our return to England we thought well to check
the information we had garnered. So we duly provided
ourselves with readers' tickets for that institution, and
went to the British Museum Library, and got down every book
which seemed in any way to bear upon the country we had
wandered over, regardless of the tongue in which it was
written. It was a surprise to us to learn (and may we add
that the surprise was not without its pleasant savour?) that
of all the volumes in that collection not one covered the
route which we took during summer through Arctic Lapland.
Many had gone near it, from a gentleman of bygone date who
wrote in Latin, to Mr. Paul du Chaillu, who chats about the
larger part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. But we seemed to
have stumbled across the one bit of Europe which has not
been pilloried on paper at one time or another, and so we
here venture to take up a couple of note-books which were
originally made for personal gratification, and amplify them
into a volume of letterpress and sketches which may haply
interest others.
Contents
CHAPTER I
PAGE
LONDON TO VARDÖ, WITH A FEW EXAMPLES OF HOW
PLANS MAY BE CHANGED 1
CHAPTER II
ACROSS THE VARANGER TO ELVENAES, WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS
ON THE FISHING OF THE FINNER WHALE,
AND A NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS WITH A JEW 19
CHAPTER III
BY CANOE TO THE NEIDEN, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE RUSSIAN
LAPPS' DAUBSFEST AT BORIS GLEB 38
CHAPTER IV
FROM THE NEIDEN ELV TO ENARE SEE, WITH PUNGENT
COMMENT ON THE HABITS OF FINNISH CARRIERS 52
CHAPTER V
ENARE SEE TO ENARE TOWN IN A SQUARE-SAIL VIKING
SHIP 76
CHAPTER VI
INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES: A NARRATIVE OF
PERSONALLY-CONDUCTED TRAVEL 98
CHAPTER VII
INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES--_Continued_ 133
CHAPTER VIII
IN TOUCH WITH THE GENUINE NOMAD, WITH SOME REMARKS
UPON HIS DOMESTIC DEER, HIS TREASURE-HOARDS,
AND THE DECAY OF HIS PRACTICE IN SORCERY 147
CHAPTER IX
A _PRÉCIS_ OF LAPPISH HISTORY, AND A NARRATIVE OF
TRANSIT BY RAFT AND SWAMP TO IVALOMATI 167
CHAPTER X
ON TO POKKA, WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO PRINCE JOHANN
OF LAPLAND 190
CHAPTER XI
THE WORST MARCHES OF ALL 213
CHAPTER XII
DOWN THE RAPIDS TO KITTILA TOWN 239
CHAPTER XIII
THROUGH TO THE SEA: A PROGRESS IN POST-CARTS, WITH
INTERLUDES OF RIVER-FERRIES 257
[Illustration: Log Track across Swamp]
_Note._--River in Norsk is Elv; in Qfensk, Joki. Lake in
Qfensk is Järvi. J is pronounced as Y.
List of Illustrations
FACING PAGE
Ringing a Bear Track _Frontispiece_
Midnight among the Lofötens 4
Vardö Harbour 8
Towing Home Finner Whales 22
The Gates of Russian Lapland 30
Daubsfest at Boris Gleb 42
Finn Carriers crossing Russian Frontier 58
A Lakeside Camp on Enare See 82
Bear Hunt--Smoking him out 96
The Signal Fire 110
A Prosperous Lapp Settlement 118
Herder Lapps' Encampment 152
Raft wrecked on the Repojoki 186
Johann's Acrobatic Failure 208
On the Way to Kittila 249
Arctic Lapland Types 256
_Pen and Ink Vignettes at end of Chapters_
PAGE
Log Track across Swamp xi
The _Windward_ 18
Deep-sea Fishing 37
Feodor and Morris--two Skolte Lapps 51
Viking Boats on Enare See 97
Sketches at Menesjärvi 132
Smoking out Mosquitoes 146
The Sorcerer and the Portrait 166
Marie, the Sorcerer's Daughter 189
Drinking Cups 256
Reindeer Horns 284
Map showing Route _Facing page_ 284
Through Arctic Lapland
CHAPTER I
LONDON TO VARDÖ, WITH A FEW EXAMPLES OF HOW
PLANS MAY BE CHANGED
The wharves of Katherine Dock were black with many thousands of people,
and all their eyes converged on a little auxiliary barque which was
working out of the basin under her own gentle steam. The barque carried
a white tub at her mainmast-head, was rigged with single topsails, bore
many white double-ended boats upturned on skids amidships, and was
decorated with sundry other matters which even to the shore eye would
seem strange in London river. Stacked in her waist were bags of coal,
crates, packing cases, a couple of ice-anchors, a tangle of trellis-work
sledges, and other quaint trifles which had not yet been struck below.
Any craft more unlike the ordinary conventional type of yacht it would
have been hard to conceive, and yet the burgee of the Royal Thames Yacht
Club fluttered out from above the white crow's nest (or fouled the
telescope rail, as the case might be) and an English blue ensign hung
clean and unfrayed from the mizzen truck, as the mizzen gaff, its more
orthodox station, had not yet been set up.
The barque was already a vessel well known. As a sealer and whale-fisher
she had earned fat dividends for Dundee owners; as the _S.Y. Windward_
she had made history, and helped to found the British colony of Elmwood
in Franz Josef's Land, and had been iced up for an Arctic winter in a
bay at the back of Cape Flora; and on this trip she was destined
(although no one even guessed at it then) to acquire a far more
international fame. She was setting out then from Katherine Dock under
the command of that old ice-sailor, Captain James Brown, to carry
recruits and supplies to the Jackson-Harmsworth exploring expedition
after their second winter amongst the polar ice; and she landed these on
the sterile rocks of Franz Josef's Land after a bitter struggle with the
floes, and brought back with her to the land of champagne and telegraph
wires, Frithjof Nansen, the Norskman, as by this time all the world most
thoroughly knows.
Slowly that single-topsail barque was warped across the dock basin, a
strange small creature amongst the huge steam shipping; slowly she
passed through the outer lock; and then the ebb of the muddy river took
her, and she moved out into the stream, and the black crowds on the
dock-head sent up thunderous cheers.
The little auxiliary propeller fluttered astern, and she dropped down
river at no ostentatious speed. But the white barrel perched up there
under the main truck betrayed her always, and every vessel of every
nationality in those cosmopolitan reaches knew her as the yacht of the
English Arctic expedition. The blue ensign was kept on a constant dance
up and down from her mizzen truck, as it answered other bunting, which
was dipped in salute from countless peaks and poop-staffs. Some crews
cheered her as she passed at her puny gait through the crowded shipping;
the band of the _Worcester_ played her down the river out of earshot;
everybody she passed warmed to her enterprise and wished her success and
a snug return.
Ladies, and owner, and shore folk, had come down the river to give her a
final "send off," but these left at Greenhythe with the mud pilot, and
from that began an easy voyage to the rim of the Polar Sea. The
_Windward_ was to go North as much as possible under her own canvas; but
as some steam would certainly be required for head winds and other
emergencies, she was to call in at Vardö at the entrance to the White
Sea to rebunker, so as to have the largest possible supply of good Welsh
steam coal for her final battle with the Northern ice. To this port, in
the north-easternmost angle of Arctic Norway, the _Windward_ carried as
passengers Mr. Cecil Hayter, who drew pictures for this book, and
another man, who wrote it.
Now, to say that we two had a vague notion of what was ahead of us was
putting the matter mildly. We knew many of those concerned in the
Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, and had always had an interest in the
achievements of the _Windward_; and one night in somebody's
billiard-room we had talked vaguely over "going North and doing
something up there" ourselves. We imagined this something might be to
explore the Petchora or one of the lesser-known Northern Siberian
rivers, to make the acquaintance of the Samoyede in his native _choom_,
and incidentally to do some big game shooting. We knew remarkably little
about the country, and so were quite unfettered in making some very
appetising plans. This was six months before the _Windward_ sailed, and
though we met two or three times in the interval, the matter was only
mentioned casually, and with merely a dilettante interest.
Finally, when Mr. Alfred Harmsworth wired "Are you going North with
_Windward_?" and got a simultaneous reply of "Delighted" from each of
us, the yacht was booked to sail in fifty hours' time, and any
preparations we wished to make were naturally hustled.
[Illustration: MIDNIGHT AMONG THE LOFÖTENS.]
When we actually did get under weigh, our outfit consisted of one
inferior double-barrelled 12-bore shot-gun by an anonymous maker, one
good Marlin '45 repeating rifle carrying a long bullet, a small
assortment of tinned foods and loaded cartridges, an imaginative map,
the clothes we stood up in, and a brown canvas, seaman's bag apiece
containing sleeping sack, tooth-brush, spare shirt, and foreign office
passport with a hieroglyphical Russian _visé_. But if our equipment was
slender, the plan of our expedition was at least definite and concise.
The Petchora and North Siberia were to be left undisturbed in their
accustomed darkness. Even the virgin delights of Novaya Zemblya (to
which island a steamer was alleged to be on the point of starting from
Archangel) were to be left for another time. We were going to see the
Lapp in that unmeddled-with country, Arctic Lapland.
It had been my luck to live _en famille_ with some herder Lapps once
before in North-Western Norway. I had some elk shooting and some fishing
up there, and I came across the tribe one day poaching red char from one
of my own hired lakes. I kept silence about my temporary proprietorship,
and assisted to steal my own fish, after which I encamped with them for
seven days, sleeping _à la belle étoile_, and providing my own
nutriment. The tribe possessed some three hundred head of tame reindeer,
and as my available luggage at the time was a Kodak camera, I managed to
get some rather good photographs of the deer at close quarters.
It was these photographs which suggested going to see the Lapp in his
own domains. The map showed the position of Lapland in large letters,
and for the sake of definiteness we made up our minds to cross it from
north to south, and take to the seas again at the head of the Gulf of
Bothnia. That should be our expedition. It was delightfully simple in
its scope and comprehensiveness.
Drawing from our own ignorance, and from the united ignorance of others
(most freely and generously bestowed), we mapped out the details of the
campaign with glibness and ease. At Vardö we were to purchase furs to
wear and horses to ride. Russian horses, or rather ponies, they were to
be: our friends told us all about them. And then we had merely to
procure a guide and interpreter, and set off. There was a road along the
north shore of the Varanger fjord to Vadsö, and from there a bridle path
of sorts led to Næsseby and Puolnak, and down through the country by
Lake Enare to Kittila, where it met a broad road which continued down by
the side of the Torneo River as far as the coast. We knew all this
because the large scale map which we bought at the best map shop in
London said it was so. And there were plenty of villages--the map marked
them with clearness and precision. At nights we would either sleep out
in our furs and blanket sacks, or sleep in the villages.
As regards the commissariat, that we decided would be simple also.
Reindeer meat, salmon, rye bread, milk, cheese, and butter would be
always procurable from the natives. And besides, we should shoot far
more game than we could possibly use for the pot. Men who "knew the
country round there" assured us clearly on this point. Game swarmed. The
country was alive with bear, ptarmigan, willow grouse, and capercailzie.
I wonder now that no one suggested we might pick up a belated mammoth.
And though I personally had been shooting in North Norway before, and so
discounted part of the yarns, I did think we should find enough to keep
going upon.
The few tins of provisions we did take were mainly to serve as luxuries.
For instance, we had quite a large supply of _foie gras_ and larks in
aspic.
I had a vivid recollection of how the last tin of that _pâté de foie
gras_ went. We had put in a forty-mile tramp by way of sharpening the
appetite, and we sat down in the middle of a gray cloud of mosquitoes to
share it between us. It was a tin about four inches in diameter by two
deep, and it contained a generous casing of tallow, which had partly
melted through being carried next to a perspiring Laplander's back.
There was no scrap of any other food available, and so we divided the
_pâté_ (and the tallow) with mathematical accuracy. Hayter eyed the
polished tin when we had finished, and said thoughtfully that he always
had liked _foie gras_. I mentioned that sometimes I preferred beef or
even venison; that I could do with about six pounds of beef just then;
and that as a meal for a hungry man, _foie gras_ was all very well, but
did not seem to go quite far enough.
With these hints, then, at our initial ignorance of what lay beyond, let
me pass on to Vardö, which was the real starting-point of both our plans
and our journey. The _Windward_ made an easy voyage of it on the whole
up to there, and although she carried away her main-topsail yard, and
smashed the reefing spar below it in two places, that was looked upon as
rather a slice of luck, as it might well have been disastrous if such an
accident had happened later, when every ounce of steam and every inch of
canvas might be wanted in the fierce wrestle with the Polar ice. In
Vardö it might be repaired.
[Illustration: VARDÖ HARBOUR.]
Inside Vardö harbour walls, then, to a mooring we came, and the smells
of the place closed round us and took possession. Bobbling about on the
harbour swell around us were some two hundred vessels of strange
Northern rig, and almost all connected with the trade in fish. There is
no agriculture in this town perched on the northern outskirts of the
continent; there are no trees to make a timber business; there are no
metals or fuels to dig from the earth; there are no inducements to weave
or carry on any of the manufactures of a more gentle clime. The sea is
the only field which yields the Vardö man a harvest, and from the sea he
reaps it with unremitting industry. Finns, Russians, Norwegians,
Samoyedes, Lapps, all join in the work and bring their catch, in clumsy
yots, and square-sailed viking boats, and the other weird unhandy craft
of the North, in past the concrete wall of Vardö harbour, and run
alongside the smelling warehouses which are built on piles at the
water-side, and send it ashore all slimy and glistening, and then go off
to dangle bait in the chill inhospitable seas for more.
The men of the town, and the women, gut the fish, and leave the entrails
to rot in the streets, or under the wharfs, or in the harbour water; and
then the carcasses are carried to the outskirts of the town, and hung on
endless racks of wood to shrivel, and dry, and scent the air as
thoroughly as the rains of the climate will permit. At the corner posts
hang posies of cods' heads to serve as fodder for the cows and goats
during the winter, and these too help to amplify the stink. And from the
mainland, beyond the fort, when the breezes blow Vardö-wards, there
drift across more forceful stinks from the factory where they flense the
Finner whales, and try down the blubber into oil, and cut up the pink
beef for canned meats and fodder for the Arctic cow.
In the harbour, steamers from France, and Hamburg, and lower Norway,
load bales of the dried cod, which will carry the aroma of Vardö as far
as Bremen, Brest, and St. Petersburg.
As wooden places go, the town itself is not uncomely. It is built on an
island, which is nearly cut in two by the fjords that form the harbour,
and it has two principal streets running at right angles to one another,
and others again branching off these. The houses are of all colours
from ochre to gray, and all sizes, and all architectures. There are
roses and stocks and geraniums showing from behind the windows. The
older roofs are green with grass, and dotted with the flowers of
buttercup and clover. Some are roofed with turf alone. Goats feed on the
roofs, and ladders lead up to them, so that the owners can pull off
burning rafters in case of a fire. There are goats in the streets too,
snuffling amongst the disused fish.
Once the town was a strong place, but the star-shaped fort, which was
built in 1735, is to-day obsolete, though field-guns and some
breech-loaders on slides still grin through the embrasures, and the
garrison of fifteen men take it in orderly turns to hoist the Norwegian
flag. The racks of drying fish carcasses run along the side of its ramp,
and bristling nosegays of cods' heads dangle on either side of its main
entrance.
There are other towns of Norway given up to the cult of the cod, but
nowhere is it so entirely the one staple of commerce as in this ancient
settlement so far within the Arctic Circle. The tail of the Gulf Stream
keeps its climate equable. It is never very hot and never very cold, and
in this it differs vastly from the interior of the continent to the
southward, where both extremes prevail; and if it has to put up with a
six months' night in the winter of the year, with only a slight
lightening of the gloom at midday to tell that the sun is still
somewhere in the universe to keep the world a-move, at the same time it
has another six months when all lamps can be dismantled and put away,
and day burns high all round the clock and round again.
But the summer is the time when commerce bristles. It is then that the
larger merchants toil to make their wealth; and when the lamps begin to
kindle in the windows, they take the mail steamers and go away to follow
the retiring sun. Some merely retreat to Tromsö, some to Bergen, some to
Petersburg; but there are others who go to Italy and Southern Europe;
and there is one who washes the cod-stink from him, and dons the garb of
fashion, and winter after winter hies him to a tiny principality on the
Riviera, where they keep a roulette bank, which it is his mood to try
and break. The gambling rooms down there are cosmopolitan, certainly,
but I wonder how many people have guessed that they usually contain a
stock-fish prince who gets his wealth from the chilly Polar sea?
Now Vardö was not what we had come so far to see, or smell. We wanted to
get started on our travel in Arctic Lapland as quickly as might be; and
as soon as the whale-boat had set us ashore amongst the fish litter on
one of the wharves, we set about pushing inquiries as far as they would
go.
The success we met with in this pursuit was not brilliant. In fact the
results might be catalogued as almost entirely negative.
In the first instance the horse-bubble was pricked once and for all.
Lapland, it appeared, was largely made up of swamps and lakes and
rivers, and we were gravely informed that the horse was not a navigable
animal. If we wanted to get through, we must walk and wade where that
was possible, and canoe or raft the rest; and it was suggested that if
we wished to ensure success, we had better in addition borrow two pairs
of good reliable wings to help us. Anything we wished to take with us
must be borne about our own persons or carried on the backs of hired
men. And this was about all the definite information we could arrive at.
The cause of the deficit was simple: during the summer months,
communication across the interior was entirely interrupted, and Vardö
could not be expected to know much about a journey which was never done.
In winter, when the snow crust hardened, and the rivers and the lakes
were roofed with massive ice, then movement about the country was a
comparatively easy thing. There were recognised routes, and the
traveller could pack himself into one of the boat-like, reindeer
sledges, and move along over the frozen surface at from six to ten miles
per hour, and be sure of relays of deer at certain appointed stations.
But in summer the deer were away deep in the fjelds, fattening on the
ivory-yellow moss; they were useless to travel with through swamps and
across deep open water, and the mosquitoes would have maddened them if
they had been tried; and, in consequence, the natives of the interior
bowed to the inevitable. They just stayed in their farms, or their
fishing-camps, or their herd-stations, and worked during the brief
summer months to store up food against the long grim frozen night of
winter.
At first, then, it was pointed out to us that we were proposing to do an
impossibility, and it was suggested that we should either wait in Vardö
till the snows came and sledges could be used, or abandon the Lapland
expedition and go off to explore the Petchora, or visit that
fascinatingly unknown island, Novaya Zemblya. We quite saw the charm of
these two last alternatives, and made arrangements for riving the
secrets from Novaya Zemblya some other season, and thinning its flocks
of deer and polar bears, and charting the Matoskin Skyar; but for the
present Lapland was what our souls hankered after, and we had got to get
there somehow.
It is not to be denied, though, that the Novaya Zemblya scheme had its
seductions. There was in Vardö harbour a weird, clumsy craft of the type
locally known as "yot," which had visited that island a-many times with
a crew of hunters. She had two masts with a square sail (not lug)
hoisting on each, and her best point of sailing was more or less before
the wind. With the wind anywhere ahead, she just had to run into
shelter, or drift, till the breeze chose to veer again. She had no
notion whatever of ratching to windward, and was not addicted to making
certain or rapid passages. That summer she was laid up. During the
previous summer (having sailed in the spring) she had gone out to the
Kara Strait, and then pushed up along the Western Novaya Zemblyan coast,
following the line of drift-ice as it retreated north. She had an ample
crew on board, and these made short expeditions inshore, taking with
them powder and shot, and bringing back deer skins and deer meat. They
seldom went far inland from the coast, for fear lest the clumsy "yot"
should be blown off in some sudden gale, and they would be left without
means of retreat; and they went for the commercial business of
meat-hunting alone, just as their fellows hunted the seas for fish; and
when their holds were full of venison and peltries, it was a case of
'bout-ship with them, and back to Vardö again as fast as they could
drive her.
We could not find that any of these hunters had so much as shut the eye
of sleep upon the island. Samoyedes were alleged to reside there
permanently, shifting their _chooms_ from point to point as the struggle
for a lean subsistence prompted; and in the south there certainly was a
Russian colony in the leading strings of the Government of Archangel,
and visited once a year by an erratic steamer. But, as I say, the great
bulk of the island was _terra incognita_; there was no reason why it
should be exceptionally impassable; and there was every cause to expect
that it would be plentifully rambled over by fowl of all sorts--and
possibly the great auk, who knew?--and graciously blessed in the matter
of four-footed big game.
The charm of the Arctic (which must be felt to be understood) had got us
well in tow, and we licked our lips over the thought of this unknown
isle, and drunk up all available yarns concerning it, and made
exhaustive plans to explore it in the not very distant future. But we
did not allow this mere flirtation to seduce us away from the more
immediate business of the present. Lapland was what we wanted, and it
was on schemes for crossing Lapland at which we hammered with
unremitting industry.
At last, after much pressing, it was admitted that we might possibly
find carriers for our transport at the other side of the Varanger fjord,
but at the same time it was pointed out that we probably should not. At
any rate the route from Puolnak was utterly impracticable. Our only
chance was to start from the Neiden Elv, cross from there to Enare See,
boat that, and then trust to luck. Provisions, we were told plainly, it
was most unlikely we should find, but (so absolutely ignorant were these
Vardö people of the interior of Lapland) the prospects of sport were
said to be extremely rosy. There were few bear or other big game, to be
sure, but the gun would provide us with fowl in all abundance for the
pot. And, anyway, it was entirely useless to further recruit our slender
stock of tins. It was vastly improbable that we should be able to get
carriers for the few we had got. It was more than likely that we should
have to desert them, and press on alone with merely cartridges as
personal luggage, if we were fools enough to try and travel through
country at that season where it was not intended by Nature that man
should go.
Now this information was none of it very encouraging, and none of it
very definite. It was most of it frankly given as depending on mere
hearsay. And although we advertised our want largely, and tramped up and
down the fish-strewn streets to see countless likely people, nowhere
could we find a man who knew Lapland personally, much less one who would
(for a fee) act as guide, much less one who could serve as guide and
interpreter both. For here was another difficulty: the Lapps spoke
Quivnsk (or Finnish), and we did not. We possessed a slender vocabulary
of Russian and Norsk between us, and this, it appeared, would be of as
much value in Lapland as Spanish or Fijian. French, German, and English
were equally useless, and, as it turned out, our remaining rags of
schoolboy dog-Latin, made the only language which we brought into that
country which we were able to turn to any practical use within its
marches.
Finally, came the question of money. Finland is a Grand Duchy of
Russia, conquered by that power from Sweden in 1809; but the Russian
rouble has never become acclimatised there. The standard coin is the
"mark," which equals a franc, and which contains ten "pennis." The mark
has overflowed into Lapland; and so that country, peopled though it may
be by the oldest tribe in Europe, and far behindhand in other matters,
is still ahead of England in having the one civilised requisite of a
decimal coinage.
But of Finnish marks in Vardö there was not so much as a single specimen
even on a watch-chain. Norwegian kroner, dirty Russian notes, and greasy
kopecks were current in all abundance, and so were comely English
sovereigns. But of money to help us into this fenced-in Lapland we could
not get one doit. And so, as an intermediate step, we procured roubles
and kopecks, and a rare bother we had with them later on before we could
get them exchanged further. But of that small distraction we were
blissfully ignorant just then. We did not miss it either. We had quite
enough other preliminary difficulties to keep us occupied.
In the meanwhile the _Windward_ was getting a new main-topsail yard and
reefing spar made by a local ship's carpenter with a tendency to
dipsomania, and in spite of her desperate hurry to depart Polewards, she
was kept lingering. And the good fellows we had chummed with during that
pleasant voyage from the Thames, pervaded the town, and competed with
one another in abusing its all-embracing stink. But as the days went on,
the stink was an atmospheric effect which one got used to, and I could
imagine in time one would feel almost lonely without it. To use a
professional term, it was the necessary "local colour." It never
faltered in its vehemence, never varied in its ample quality. Come gale,
come rain, it was always there, always ready to touch the nostril with
its firm caress. It tinctured the wind with its full-flavoured strength,
it came off to the yacht and got into the onion salad on the cabin
table, it even climbed down into the engine-room and odorised that with
the essence of departed cod.
One likened the smell of the place to the lamp of the Persian
fire-worshippers elsewhere. Neither is ever allowed to go out. Day by
day one is replenished with oil, the other with new fishy débris, each
with sacred care. For those Northmen know that if once the stink of fish
died out, Vardö would cease to exist. The barren rocks of the island
barely show so much as a blade of grass. Nothing but fish stands between
their town and obliteration.
[Illustration: The _Windward_]
CHAPTER II
ACROSS THE VARANGER FJORD TO ELVENAES, WITH
SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE FISHING OF FINNER
WHALE, AND A NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS WITH A
JEW.
One of the most looked-forward-to items of our original programme had
been to see the _Windward_ pull her anchors out of European mud for the
last time before she went to wrestle with the Arctic floe. But the
ship's carpenter ashore who had in charge that new main-topsail yard was
slow even in his sober moments; and although every one in authority
raged at the delay, not even statements in Anglo-Saxon (or Scottish) as
to his personal worthiness could bustle him out of his dawdling gait. So
in the end the _Windwards_ saw us off, instead of our doing the like by
them.
We took passage across the broad Varanger fjord to Jarfjord in a little
coaster, and as she steamed out between the harbour walls and met the
roll outside, all hands on the _Windward_, both forward and aft, yelled
themselves hoarse, and we sent back our voices in reply. Then up and
down from their peak went the blue ensign, as the big expedition wished
the little one luck, and we found a Norwegian flag stopped on the rail,
and hoisted that up to the head of the poop-staff (which was as high as
my chin), and dipped it with all goodwill in reply. There were
Norwegians, and Finns, and Russians, and Lapps on the coaster, come from
the villages on the Varanger to do their marketing at the big town, and
at first I fancy they thought us Englishmen mad, but after half an hour
or so they most of them retired to the 'tween decks very sea-sick, and
after that they ceased to give us any thought at all.
We lolled down the northern coast of the Varanger in the trough of a
lusty swell, and periodically we called in at some small, bleak, dreary
harbour, where drying nets formed a festoon before the houses, and
drying cod on their wooden racks, and masses of gray inhospitable stone
blocked in the background. Then when we had negotiated all our ports of
call the helm was starboarded, and we stood out across the broad waters
of the fjord towards the gleaming snow mountains which hedged in the
country of the Lapps thirty miles away on the other side.
Fishers we passed on the way, Russians with long hair and Tartar faces,
clumsy high-booted Finns, and queer-garbed Lapps, swinging over the
swells in their viking boats, toiling at their miles of long-lines. And
then a rain squall drove down, blotting out the view, and we cowered
under the green canvas dodger in front of the wheel on the little
coaster's spar deck, and shivered at the chill.
But presently, out of the grayness of the rain squall there came an old
familiar scent, and the mate at the wheel pulled lustily at the syren
string to advertise our whereabouts. An answering hoot came back, and
then through the mist a small green-painted steamer of some thirty tons
burden loomed out, slowly bearing down upon us. Her pace was almost
imperceptible, but a cumbersome harpoon-shell gun on her stem-head gave
us the necessary hint as to her occupation, and presently we could make
out two towing hawsers astern of her, and a bloated finner whale made
fast, tail foremost, to each.
The fish were blown up like balloons with decomposition, and like
balloons they were striped with longitudinal gores. Their jaws were just
awash, and oil oozed from them in a slimy fan. The smell of them was
almost past endurance. The little green whaler had killed, perhaps,
three hundred miles away, and was towing her catch back to the home
factory for realisation. And a valuable catch it was too. The big black
bull was worth all of £250; and although the cow whale, which showed her
ivory-white belly, was smaller, she would probably fetch her £200 with
bone at its then enormous price.
This fishery of the blue-finned whale, or, as he is more technically
named, the finner, is an industry of comparatively modern birth, and
has its centre in these bleak Northern seas. The right whale and the
sperm whale have been hunted for how many centuries I do not know; the
mist of ages has closed over the first capture, and not many more years
will pass before the last score is nicked in the tally. The right whales
have been chased almost entirely from the face of known waters; they are
searched for from Davis Straits to the Kara Sea; ships have looked for
them amongst the tabular bergs of the Antarctic, but the fishery is on
its last legs. Even with bone at £40 a ton, the Nantucket and the
Peterhead owners are dropping out of what they consider a dying
business. This newer fishery has, however, increased by such leaps and
bounds that in 1894 the kill amounted to 1500 head. And all the credit
is due to a Norwegian skipper, one Svend Foyn.
[Illustration: TOWING HOME FINNER WHALES.]
The finner is no stranger in the North. Whalers of all countries have
seen him spout and gambol for three hundred years, and have cursed him
with maritime point and fluency. Occasionally some harpooner,
disbelieving tradition, made fast to a finner, and experienced that
sensation which the _vaquero_ found when he lassoed the Mexican State
Express. And as fishing implements developed, they shot at him with
harpoon guns and riddled him with explosive lances. But the end was
always the same, it was either "cut" or "swamp," and there was another
white-painted whale boat losing way over the swells, with a
white-faced crew, no harpoon, and an empty tub of line.
Until 1865 the finner whale defied the fishermen of the world, but in
that year Captain Svend Foyn went North with new ideas for conquering
the brute's prodigious vitality; and though he did not succeed at first,
though, indeed he was constantly at shoulder-touch with sudden death, he
figured out the right scheme at last, and then reaped a harvest well
earned. He died, only a year or two back, the richest man in Norway.
Captain Svend Foyn went into this matter in middle life and already
rich. He had two objects in view. In the first instance he wished to be
successful where all the world had failed, and conquer the only animal
remaining which man had not subdued. And in the second place he was
desirous of making money. He was a man scientifically ignorant; he was
quite uneducated beyond the narrow lines of his own craft; but he was
full of wooden-headed pluck, and possessed of a mule's determination.
He started in the right way. He discarded the slow, clumsy,
single-topsail, wooden barque, with auxiliary steam, and her fleet of
carvel-built rowing-boats, and set off in a steamer of fifty tons, which
would tow in the wake of a harpooned finner without breaking the line.
He believed that this would not only tire out the whale with quickness,
but would also prevent the carcase from sinking to the bottom when life
had gone, after its usual fashion.
Captain Svend Foyn's first experiences must have been exciting. He was
frequently towed by some maddened fish at a twenty-knot rate through a
heavy sea, with his fore-deck smothered with water up to the bridge. On
these occasions the engines would be rung to "full astern," and the
little steamer would hang on in tow for twelve hours at a stretch, and
to the jaded sportsman, in search of a new sensation, this method of
hunting may be recommended with confidence. But the conclusion was
always the same; either Captain Foyn was forced to cut, or the harpoon
drew; or the finner died and sunk: at any rate, he never gathered his
game.
Time after time his harpoons made fast, and ninety tons of agonised
living flesh plucked the little steamer, like a dragging child, across
those desolate plains of ocean. Years came and the years went, each dull
with disappointment. But yet he did not give in. He mounted artillery,
and bombarded the finner with heavy shot, and still without effect; he
tried plot after plan, and plan after plot; he expended £20,000 and
human limbs in his experiments, and finally, out of all the failures he
evolved success. He mounted on the stem-head of his steamer a stunted
heavy-breeched gun, which carried an explosive bomb with a huge harpoon,
weighing together over eighty English pounds. The idea of playing the
finner like a trout was abandoned once and for all. The explosion of the
bomb shot it dead; its huge vitality was snapped in a second, and a
three-inch warp made fast to the harpoon kept it from sinking, where a
thinner whale line would have been snapped.
The strongest fish that swam in all the seas was beaten, and Captain
Svend Foyn patented his tactics and took off his oilskins. Then the
business part of him came in, and, until his monopoly ceased, his
launches were catching a hundred finners a year, which may be valued at
£250 apiece.
The fishery has spread since that monopoly granted by law has run out,
and other people are permitted now to profit by the schemes evolved from
Captain Svend Foyn's brain. Anywhere where the rice-like animacula on
which the whale feeds are to be found, there the little whaling steamers
may be seen also, with a look-out man peering from the crow's nest at
their foremast head. In the fjords and bays which lie round that grim
coast to eastwards of the North Cape, in Iceland, and even up some of
the snug inlets of the Varanger Fjord, are numberless stations where the
little steamers can bring their catch for caldrons and axes to resolve
into its commercial elements. The finner soon swells after he is dead,
and lies on the water like a half-submerged balloon, striped, too,
balloon fashion, with gore-like seams. The tail flukes are cut adrift,
and he is towed ignominiously stern first, with a wake of oil fanning
out from his jaws, and a smell which grows with the days, and beats down
the crisp sea air. But when the finner is beached, and the axes and
spades strip off the blubber from the pink beef below, and cut away the
whalebone from the head, then there arises a stink which poisons heaven.
Still, custom is everything. The workers toil at the trying-out the oil,
at resolving the carcase into manure, and tinned meats, and cow-fodder,
and at packing the precious bone, and it never strikes them that a smell
is abroad which is almost palpable in its solidness. But use is
everything in tackling these sort of scents. We were beginning to find
that out for ourselves.
Meanwhile the cold was making us blue. We had amplified our wardrobes by
the purchase of a leather coat apiece in Vardö, and we had on these, and
slop-chest oilskins, but the frosty gale beat through them all as though
they had been gossamer silk. To go below was impossible. The coaster's
'tween decks was an Aceldama of unfettered sea-sickness. The only warm
spot on the spar deck was the engine-room skylight, and that was
occupied by a festive Jew carousing with the skipper and a couple of
farmers from the Russian side. We did not feel inclined to rejoice with
them just then, for, to tell the truth, we were deadly tired. It was ten
o'clock at night, and staring daylight, of course. But then it had been
staring daylight with us continuously since we crossed the Arctic circle
a fortnight before, and as it is hard to put in regular sleep with the
sun burning high in the heavens, we had missed many a regular watch
below. And the reaction was on us then. So we turned in on the deck
planks below the green canvas dodgers in front of the coaster's wheel,
and slept solidly and refreshingly for two whole hours.
The hoot of the syren roused us. We had crossed the broad waters of the
fjord, and were close in to the other side. High bare mountains covered
with snow that was dappled with hummocky rock rose sheer up from the
surf. The sky above was gray and cold. The place was indescribably
sterile and savage. At one point, cowering at the foot of the mountains,
a little white building stood out like some roosting sea-fowl against a
background of dark craggy rock. We were heading towards it, and
gradually as we closed with the coast it shaped itself into a church. It
was Oscarkirche, which marks the sea end of the frontier line which
delimits Russia and Norway.
We shut off steam here, and a boat came out to us from the beach. There
is a Russian fishing village in a masked bay to the eastward, to which
we sent a pedlar ashore with a travelling box of buttons and German
knives. Poor man, he did not seem to anticipate a large rush of
business, if one could judge from his face as he lowered himself and his
pack into the dancing boat. And yet probably his coming was the event of
the summer. It is hard to conceive a more desolate place than that
Russian fishing village. But it was a summer settlement only. In winter
it was deserted. And the Russian Government do their best to foster its
puny trade. It is a free port; there is no customs duty on either
imports or exports: canny Russia does not wish to thrust available trade
into the hands of its Norwegian neighbour next door.
Away we steamed again just outside the spouting reefs, towards the
Jacob's Elv. The wind was blowing straight down on us from Polar ice,
and the cold was bitter. A whale swam parallel to us, some half mile to
seaward, sending up at intervals spouts of feathery gray-blue fog.
We put into many dreary little coves, where a handful of fisher-folk,
with their backs against the snow and the grim walls of stone, dragged a
small living from the cold waters which lapped against their thresholds.
We lay off the beaches whilst these came off and did their traffic, and
then on again through the reefs to the next stop. Wretched as these
villages were, their populace had always spirit on hand to wrangle over
politics, and no Irish Nationalist could hate his "dacent Protestant"
neighbour as thoroughly and efficiently as one of these semi-savages who
held "Left" opinions could loathe another who belonged to the "Right."
And they carried this distaste beyond their social relations. They had
the "boycott" in full working order; "Right" would not trade with "Left"
under any pretence whatever; and if Left could push "Right" a little
farther towards starvation than his normal half-fed average, he
considered he was doing the State a personal service.
At another time we could have moralised over this self-hindrance
principle with weight and dignity, but just then we were too wrapped up
in our own discomforts and the prospects of worse to follow to worry
very much over the foolishness of other fools. The chill was making us
shudder. The grim, savage hills of stone seemed to speak of an infinity
of hardships and wretchedness before we sighted the waters of the
Bothnia. And each of us told the other so often that he "liked it," that
the very repetition of the statement gave it the lie. Alone of all the
ship's company the Jew did not mind. He sat down below, and nipped
brandy all the live-long night, and roared songs in all the tongues of
Pentecost. He was a most cheery fellow.
We were off the entrance to Jarfjord a little after midnight. The sun
was high above the poop-staff. The air was clear and icy, and spray
leaped in jets from reefs on every side of us. The entrance to the fjord
lay amongst a huddle of glacier-worn rocks, with a great table mountain
set up in the middle of them, all snow-clad, all entirely sterile. The
little coaster wound in and out amongst the reefs with easy confidence.
Two small whitened islets, alive with sea-fowl, masked the entrance; and
spouts of mist like the blowing of whales rose up from reefs awash on
either beam. It was a giddy piece of pilotage. In the crevices, snow lay
down to the water's edge, all browned with dust. It was hard to imagine
any spot more savage, and grim, and desolate.
But a change came swiftly. Once we had passed the mouth of this
sea-river, and green tints grew on the rock walls, which deepened as we
steamed on. It was only slime at first, but then came patches of moss,
then bosky lawns of grass, and dwarf shrubs in the more sheltered
corries. The snow line on the hillsides rose towards the summits. The
snow patches in the crevices below grew smaller and more few. Then in a
tiny bay we saw a cabin of logs set in a glow of green. Here was young
rye sprouting. And yet that horrible coast line of the Varanger which we
had just left was only two miles distant, and by straining the eye we
could see the horizon whiten where the seas creamed over the guardian
reefs.
[Illustration: THE GATES OF RUSSIAN LAPLAND.]
The walls of the fjord were still high and some quarter of a mile apart.
The lane of water ran between them, straight as a canal. But always as
we went on mountains grew lower. Presently at the mouth of a
contributory valley we opened out on a small settlement of felt-roofed
wooden houses, with what looked like colossal pink sausages drawn up on
the beach before them. As we drew nearer a waft of odour came to us down
a slant of the wind, and we laughed in pleasure because we were going to
meet again old friends that we thought we had left behind for good. The
pink sausages were flensed Finner whales. In the wooden buildings they
were trying out the blubber, sorting and packing the precious bone,
and working up the beef into its many useful shapes. And the smell of it
all filled the air till one could almost dredge it out in handfuls.
Once more we steamed on, beyond sight of the sea now, with the mountains
drooping to mere uplands on the fjord sides, with the scrub trees
replaced by forests of graceful twenty-foot birches, which covered the
gentle slopes. The air was warm--warm as an English summer. And, note
well the occasion, the first mosquito came to us. We hailed him as a
friend then. Hayter had seen him last in Florida, I had heard his music
a year before on the Gold Coast, and we both mentioned that the
mosquitoes had no power over us, that our skins were invulnerable.
Little did we know the biting power of this Northern monster; bitterly
were we to learn it.
The fjord narrowed, the little steamer anchored, and we put ashore with
some score of others. Our slender baggage was to go round to Elvenaes,
on the Syd Varanger, but we had elected to walk across the intervening
neck of land.
And now with the memory big in us of that grim savage coast not a dozen
miles away, we stepped out down a veritable country lane between slender
birches, with linnets singing behind the foliage on either hand. There
were oak ferns and bracken under the trees, and in the open meads,
buttercups, pansies, cow-parsley, forget-me-nots, wild pelargonium,
dandelions, ranunculi, bright pink campions, and cranberries, with
everlasting moss, and other mosses, and grotesque lichens in all
abundance. The comely woods were musical with birds, and portioned off
by rustic fences. Here and there were gates, slung on hinges, and then
would come a fine trim house of logs covered with painted weather
boarding. We might have been walking in the Tyrol. And when we
remembered that the Arctic circle was over two hundred miles farther to
the southward, and the desolation we had come through still close at
hand to the north, we had to grant that Nature could perform more white
magic than we ever credited her with before.
The narrowing fjord ended in a rolling bay, and against a boat-house
built there was a great cemetery of reindeer horns, heaped up as things
of no beauty or value. A stream went on beside the road, babbling into
idyllic trout-pools. Cow-bells tinkled from within the woods. The
passengers from the coaster had branched off singly and in groups till
only seven of us were left: the roystering Jew, a gloomy young farmer in
high boots, with his sick wife, a nondescript girl, and our two selves.
At intervals we talked, and the Jew gathered flowers for the women, and
then we came to a large house of wood.
It was exactly three o'clock in the morning, but in this sunlit land no
one troubles much with bed, and the owner was standing in his doorway to
take the air. The Jew made discourse--all tongues seemed equally facile
to him,--and the householder came out and shook us all by the hand, and
insisted that we should come inside. The women went off in charge of his
women-kind, but us men he took into the parlour, where we gazed upon a
picture of Martin Luther, some Sloyd work, and an elaborate stove, and
watched the farmer grow drowsy over yarns of bear-hunting in the winter
months. But presently our host set before us beer--delicious Bayersk
öl--which we all drank standing, with a heartfelt cry of "skaal"! We
wanted that beer badly, and it came to us as a pleasant surprise. We
fancied we had left such luxuries behind us for many a long week; for
Lapland is what they call in America "a Prohibition State."
The Jew by this time had quite assumed our chaperonage, and though
inclined to linger over his beer and to hint at another bottle, said he
would come with us when we decided to start. Our fellow-travellers came
to the door to see us off. The sick woman had grown quite a pretty
colour from her walk and from the mild excitement of drinking milk. And
we took leave of them all with handshakes as though they were ancient
friends. Finally, the Jew tore himself away, and we set out again
towards Elvenaes under his convoy.
He was a truly joyous creature, this strayed Hebrew, full of carnal
appetites, but revelling in the beauties of this Arctic oasis which we
were passing through. He discoursed poetry, time-tables, natural
history, and the price of furs all in the same breath. He was full of
surprising moods (and I fear a trifle drunk), and he swung his
brandy-bottle in one hand, and carried a black umbrella tucked under the
other arm. He knew all about our expedition and bubbled with advice:
there were no horses procurable even if horses would have been any good;
there was a Russian Boundary Commission at work in the neighbourhood,
which had mopped up all the horses, and all the boats, and all the
available men; the Neiden route to Enare was quite impracticable: our
way was to push up the Pasvik Elv, and if we would leave it to him he
would see that we got both boats and men, even if he had to impress
Russian soldiers for our carriers. He was a most liberal Jew--with
promises, and other people's beer.
Pines were growing by the wayside now, and heath, and delicate shrubs.
The road was a real road, metalled and embanked, with wooden bridges
over the streams, and stone culverts to carry away the water. Low wooded
hills rose on either side, and the notes of cuckoos floated down to us
faintly over their tree-tops. The scenery was delicately beautiful. We
might have been walking through a park, suitable (as the advertisements
say) for a nobleman or country gentleman.
The one drawback to our perfect pleasure were the thickening swarms of
mosquitoes. The Jew suffered from them terribly. But even they did not
damp his spirits. He slapped the insect pests from his crimson face with
a whisk of green leaves, whistled a stirring march, waved the
brandy-bottle as a drum major waves his cane, and stepped out finely.
As we went on, higher mountains came into view ahead, violet-tipped on
their wooded summits. The road wound stolidly on over bridges, and
embankments, and hollows. Lakes appeared round which we had to skirt,
and then other lakes with wooded islands, and cascades tinkling down
into them from the hills. The Jew struck up the Soldier's March out of
Gounod's _Faust_ to words of his own to put spirit into the pace, and
grew more hot, and slapped at the mosquitoes more busily than ever. He
gave us names for all the lakes we passed, and all the rivers, and all
the hills, and even went so far in his courtesy as to invent titles for
streams that did not negotiate a dozen gallons of water to the hour. The
guide mania was strong in him, and he was touching us on a tender place.
Gradually, by failing to notice his remarks, and by skirmishing off the
road to hunt for the nests of birds, we contrived to let the festive one
draw ahead, and for the next two miles we marched on together in
peaceful enjoyment. We had crossed the divide; we were heading down into
the beautiful valley of the Pasvik Elv where it joins the Syd Varanger;
and we were almost within touch of this mysterious Lapland, which the
wise of Vardö had done so much to keep us away from.
But we had not done with the Jew yet. A dip of the road and a sudden
turn brought us in view of a gorgeous vista up the wooded Pasvik valley.
The silver river sat between two sloping walls of greenery, from which
the cuckoos called; and where it forked, a white turreted chapel reared
up from beneath an umber cliff. In the distance beyond, the whole river
leaped down rocks in a cascade of foaming cream. And there on a bench by
the roadside sat our Hebrew incubus waiting for us. He raised the brandy
bottle, swigged out the dregs, and quoted Heine. Then "Boris Gleb" said
he, and waved the empty flagon towards the pure white tracery of the
chapel. And "Russia" quoth he, and flung the bottle towards the rearing
wall of trees beyond the river. He slid off on to the turf, and settled
himself luxuriously for a doze, and we annexed the bench. We stayed
there an hour absorbing the beauties of that scene, and I think
speculating not a little on the unknown Lapland which lay beyond. And
then the tinkle of a bell roused us. A horse came past, trotting up the
road; and after him came a Lapp, with a bridle in his hand, trying to
catch the horse.
We got up and moved away. The Jew was still sleeping on the turf under
the sunlight. It was the last we ever saw of him, and although we are in
his debt for beer and fiction, I do not think we ever want to see him
more. A little farther on we came across a big shingle-roofed house with
outbuildings, set on a neck of land above the narrows, which commands a
prospect up and down the river; and there we found entertainment. It was
half-past seven in the morning, so we had supper and went to bed.
We made the most of those two unexpected beds. We did not come across
beds again for many a weary mile.
[Illustration: Deep-sea Fishing]
CHAPTER III
BY CANOE TO THE NEIDEN, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE
RUSSIAN LAPP'S DAUBSFEST AT BORIS GLEB
The Lapp in Lapland has his moments of personal cleanliness, as will be
remarked in their place. The Russian Lapp, who resides outside Lapland
proper, especially if he be of the fisher variety, scorns the outward
application of soap and water. In summer a good cake of dirt, especially
if it be well smeared in with tar, goes far to ward off the incessant
gnawings of the mosquito; and in winter, when the mercury of a
thermometer moves always sluggishly far below zero, what poor man would
willingly strip off an extra coat of clothing?
The Russian Lapp indeed has few true and Lappish attributes. He
resembles far more nearly the ordinary Russian _moujik_. He would even
wear the orthodox knee-boot if he could afford it, but he is usually in
a state of abject poverty, and attires himself in whatever rags may come
to hand.
He is not in the least picturesque. Cover up his face and hair, and put
him in a Bradford street, and he would pass for a British tramp,
without work, or any inclination to find work. But his gipsyish face,
with its black, beady eyes, and high cheek-bones, might betray him
somewhat, and anyway the cut of his hair, which is worn along the
eyebrows in front and fringing the coat collar (_à la moujik_) behind,
would cause the more curious of Bradford wayfarers to turn round and
stare.
The Lapp is not much in the reindeer business here on the Russian side.
To begin with, the country is ill-adapted to the raising of deer, as it
is mostly made up of lake and swamp; and as a further reason, the demand
for venison here would be small, since the Russian orthodox church
prohibits meat for quite half the year. So fishing becomes the Lapp's
chief industry, and by fishing he manages to wriggle along just beyond
the grip of starvation.
He permeates the lower reaches of the Pasvik Elv and the shores of the
Syd Varanger Fjord in considerable quantities, and there is a settlement
of him at Boris Gleb, just below the falls of the Pasvik, round the
white turreted church which we had seen from the Jarfjord road. At Boris
Gleb he is at his best. He is under the direct eyebrow of Holy Russia at
Boris Gleb, and has his place in statistics as an orthodox member of the
Greek Church. His houses are of wood, raised above the damp of floods on
curious three-foot piles, and the elements of sanitation are taught to
him by official pressure. He is not obtrusively sanitary, even in Boris
Gleb, which is by way of being a model village, with a rather high-class
patron saint, whom the devout from afar honour with pilgrimages; but he
wears there a kind of official "company manners," and he is quaintly
ready to be stared at by the foreigner.
In the Elvenaes neighbourhood he is known as a Skolte, or bald Lapp,
because though in the present year of grace he wears an ordinary head of
hair, at one time a skin disease ran through the community and made the
heads as bare as a boulder of ice-worn rock.
Now under the brilliant glare of a summer sun, Boris Gleb is not a good
place to visit. Gazed at from afar--say from above Elvenaes, as we saw
it first--it is a fairy chapel set in beauty. Looked at close-to, it is
merely a flimsy building of wood, freakishly architected, and painted an
indifferent white. The inside is tawdry. The priest is a vulgar showman
who would bring out his mother's corpse for a fee, and the interesting
model Skolte Lapps are just about as artificial as all the rest of the
paraphernalia. One does not exactly blame either parson or flock; they
are the possessors of a spectacle, and they exhibit it for a living;
only one kicks one's self for going to stare.
But Boris Gleb during one night of the long dark gloom of winter shows a
very different scene. On the Russian 6th of January (the 18th by our
reckoning) there takes place the annual Daubsfest, and from over the
bleak snows of the fjeld come in the reindeer sledges of Lapps who hold
to the Orthodox faith. For a week previous to the 6th, they are
straggling in towards the sacred place, and they crowd into the wooden
houses of the Skolte Lapps settlement, and spend much time in prayer. On
the 5th of January there is a solemn fast. On the day of the Daubsfest
they all come out of the warm lamp-lit houses into the Arctic gloom, men
and women both, treading barefoot in the snow, all clad merely in a
single linen shirt. They are girt under the arm-pits by a stout woollen
scarf, and in that bitter windy cold they march three times round the
church, solemnly chanting. The priest in his stiff embroidered robes
leads, and he is a showman no longer now, but an earnest Russian pope;
and with him go the surpliced acolytes bearing candles. Three times
round the white church they move, the icy wind whipping the bare bodies
of the singers, and the snow curls wreathing round their ankles. And
then they go off to the middle of the frozen river, and the ceremony
proceeds.
A hole has been dug with hatchets through the ice, and one by one the
Lapps come forward from the circle of worshippers, and the attendants
take them in charge. They lay hold of the scarf beneath the arms, and
the pilgrim is soused once, twice, and a third time deep into the cold
black water which scours so swiftly beneath the ice; and each time the
pope waves the three-armed crucifix before the pilgrim's eyes before
they go under. And when all have been immersed, they go back to the
houses, men and women both, and rub themselves with cloths, and put on
deerskin cloaks, and drink scalding tea in all abundance; and they begin
on the morrow to collect upon their persons another twelve months' dirt.
But whilst it is in action, that Daubsfest at Boris Gleb is an
impressive spectacle. The crowd of shirt-clad Lapps standing there in
the cold and dark of the Arctic night, the faint light of the candles
and torches flaring in the wind, the long-haired pope in his stiff,
embroidered vestments bright with barbaric colours, the aurora borealis
burning with its unspeakable glories far off on the Northern sky, and
the great white church looming weirdly through the gloom, make up a
sight that few who have seen it will ever be inclined to forget.
* * * * *
[Illustration: DAUBSFEST AT BORIS GLEB.]
At Elvenaes once more a change of plan was forced upon us, and this time
it was the Czar who interfered. His Imperial Majesty had sent a Boundary
Commission to fix the frontier line between his possessions and those of
his cousin of Norway, and almost all the available men of Boris Gleb and
Elvenaes had gone to the Commissioner's camp either as servants, or
advisers, or mere camp followers. Consequently the passage to Enare
See up the Pasvik Elv, which requires many arms to wield the paddles and
make the portages, was debarred. The utmost force we could rake up was
two dilapidated Russian Skolte Lapps, who would ferry us in a canoe by
the fjords and rivers to the Neiden, where we must trust to luck in
finding carriers who would take us through overland.
We accepted the alternative with philosophy, and told them we would
start at once. They said "certainly," and proceeded to waste the next
two hours in elaborately doing nothing. We sat down and smoked and
watched them: they were most laborious over it; they sweated and
perspired; and at last, having completed nothing most satisfactorily,
they announced smilingly that they were ready to get under way, and we
stepped on board.
The little craft was very much like a Canadian canoe in her lines, and
floated corkily. She was stained a rich saddle-colour with tar, which
came off in generous patches where one leaned against it. The younger
Lapp (whom we called Morris, through his resemblance to an acquaintance)
sat on the floor-boards forward, with his back in the curve of the bow,
and sculled with a pair of paddles which worked in withy beckets on
thole pins. Feodor, the skipper, squatted aft, with his paddles also in
beckets, and laboured on whichever side was required. As no more paddles
were available, we two English posed as passengers, and lay in
magnificence amidship on a luxurious couch of young green birch shoots,
with our worldly goods and chattels bestowed fore and aft of us. The
canoe just held her load, and there was nothing much to spare, and the
Lapps occupied another half hour in getting her trimmed to their
satisfaction. Then Morris pushed out into the swirling rapids of the
Pasvik, and we left behind us Elvenaes, and those who waved us farewell,
probably for always.
That journey down the Syd Varanger lingers in the memory. A blazing sun
dwelt overhead, in a sky as blue as one could see in Tripoli. The fjord
sides were sloped in graceful curves and draped with comely greenery.
The cuckoo cried to us from the woods. The air above the deep-blue water
was dancing with heat, and flights of whirring cormorants and duck gave
it life. I think, too, that our sense of comfort was accentuated by the
knowledge that not a dozen miles to the northward the cold waves of the
Varanger chilled the fishers to the bone, and frozen cliffs and snowy
ridges glared icily at the sky. Comfort and complacency depend so much
upon comparisons.
The absence of mosquitoes, too, was very grateful. Our faces were all
mottled in close patterns from the bitings of the day before, and we
told ourselves then that we had paid the initiation fee and had earned
immunity for the future. We thought that past experience had taught us
all about mosquitoes, but we were destined to learn a deal more about
the Northern variety of the breed before we were through at the other
side of Arctic Lapland.
The two Lapp canoe men provided us in the meanwhile with plenty of food
for observation. Feodor was the wily one. Work was not a thing Feodor
loved, and he shirked it like a diplomatist. One or other of his thole
pins was constantly carrying away. That naturally had to be replaced. To
do this he unshipped his paddles (which had blades shaped like the
"Warre" oar at Eton) and clambered forward over the baggage, and sorted
amongst the green boughs which formed our couch, till he found a piece
of stick of suitable diameter. He had got a reliable eye, and always
chose one that would be certain to break if properly handled; and then
he went aft again and whittled it accurately down to size with his
sheath-knife. Then he would give the withy beckets a thoughtful
overhaul, and by the time he had got his paddles shipped again and in
the water, he had usually earned a good twenty minutes' shirk. He was a
wrinkled little gnome, this skipper of ours, incredibly dirty, and
brimming with good humour. He had one available eye that gleamed like a
bird's, and over the other he wore a grimy patch made fast with a piece
of rope yarn round his lank black hair. Later on, when we got into a
breeze, this patch kept blowing up and caused him much annoyance. It
seemed that the eye itself was missing, and the wind got into the empty
socket and gave him cold in the head. For which very sufficient reason
he shipped his starboard paddle and held the patch in place with the
spare hand, so as to keep out the draught. He was a wonderfully agile
"sugarer" was this elderly Skolte Lapp.
Morris was different. He plugged away in the bows with never a grunt and
never an easy. He rowed about thirty strokes to the minute, just in the
water and out again, with a bent arm and without much pretence at a
swing. One of us gauged these matters with a professional eye, but we
did not feel inclined just then to set to work and reform the rowing
style of Lapland. He was a whimsical fellow, this same Morris, always
grinning at something, and always shaking back his wispy black hair from
the front of his eyes. We tried to tempt him into travelling up-country
with us, but he shuddered at the idea of getting out of touch with his
birthplace.
* * * * *
We turned out of the Syd Varanger into Bogofjord and crept up by the
flank of gray walls of naked upright rock against a strong ebb-tide, and
amused ourselves by taking occasional compass-bearings, and marvelling
at the inaccuracy of the published maps. Once we put ashore on a
shelving rock covered with mussels, and the crew lunched off kippered
salmon, which they ripped from the family joint in pieces with their
fingers as they required it; and afterwards they sought recreation by
scratching themselves thoroughly for half an hour. Then Morris put on a
pair of fingerless, brown-skin gloves to keep his delicate paws from
blistering, and we started again. A brown team of eider duck rustled
past us, _ventre à l'eau_, heading for the sea, and then a school of
porpoises surged by the canoe in chase of a shoal of flickering silver
fish.
Swarms of mosquitoes accompanied the canoe in a noisy biting cloud, and
it was some gloomy satisfaction to note that the Lapps suffered equally
with ourselves. Feodor indeed suffered so much annoyance that he
actually knocked off work to tie a grimy kerchief carefully round his
head, which it took him twenty minutes to accomplish before he had
managed it to his complete satisfaction.
Broods of duck, some familiar, some strange, began to flight, and we
sighed and broke the tenth commandment. But the gun perforce had to stay
in its mackintosh housing. The Norwegian Government (very properly)
keeps a fatherly eye on all the game within its marches, and has
appointed vigorous close-seasons for all except the outlaw wolf, the
bear, the lynx, the fox, and wild cat. And they ram home the edict by a
good healthy fine for wrongdoers, and a reward for the informer. Once
over the Russian border it would be different. There are no game laws in
Arctic Lapland. There is very little law of any description. We could
bag there whatever came in our way. In fact, Feodor assured us with an
impish grin that we might shoot a Laplander should we feel so disposed,
provided always we ate him afterwards so as to conceal the carcass from
a possible public view. Feodor, the one-eyed, was occasionally rather
grisly in his ideas of wit and humour.
A heavy, drenching rain-squall came on and blotted out all view, and
beat up a small, steep sea, which gave Feodor all he could do to keep
the little canoe from being swamped; and as it was, we two passengers
had to bale industriously to keep the water under. But we did not mind;
the mosquitoes were driven away, and it was an ecstasy to be without
them; the rain, too, cooled our itching bites.
But when we crossed the big fjord for the last time, and turned up
between the low alluvial banks of the Neiden Elv, the wet squall blew
over, and the sun blazed out again, making creation steam. The
mosquitoes came back promptly and punctually, and got to work. On the
mud banks, flocks of woodcock were digging for supper. Small black ducks
took their fluffy broods for excursions on the broad shallow river,
where salmon leaped for sheer sportiveness. Wading fowl plodded and
cried in the adjacent marshes, and from the graceful birch forests which
covered the alluvial flats, cuckoos hooted news of stolen nests. All the
Arctic world was rejoicing in its summer.
And then civilisation began. There was a scrap of fencing here, and a
rail to dry grass on there. A tiny hay barn on stilts perched gingerly
on a promontory, and farther on was a hut with a man building wood
sledges before his door. Then came five houses on a bluff, spread over
half a mile, then two more single dwellings, and afterwards naked river
bank and scrub forest. We had passed the thick of Neiden town.
The shallow river was narrowing, and it became harder to push the canoe
up against the stream. Presently some rapids showed in black and white
ahead, and Feodor put the canoe's nose on a bank, and announced with a
heartfelt sigh that the voyage was over. We got ashore, we and our
chattels, and within an hour we had found a hospitable roof.
We spent some time there in talk, and then we set off along a narrow,
muddy, trail up-stream parallel to the rapids. It seemed there was a man
with influence who had a farm farther on, and if any one could collect
carriers to take our goods across to Enare See, he was the man to do it.
So we tramped along the trail till we came to the river again above the
rapids, and then ferried over and called on the man with influence. He
got out of bed to receive us; yes, he could do this thing we
desired--for a consideration; and so we bought his influence, and bade
him set about his collection there and then.
We walked on up the bank of the river to the Falls of the Neiden, where
the best salmon pools lie. There was a Russian chapel on the way--a
rude, bare cabin of naked logs, with a shuttered window, and a
three-armed cross on one of its gables. The lower arm of these crosses
is always on the slant, as by Russian tradition Christ had one leg
shorter than the other. The Finns and Norwegians round here are
Lutherans to a man, and they look upon everything outside Lutheranism as
degrading superstition. So naturally they do nothing to keep the chapel
in repair. And the stray Lapps from the Russian side, to whom it
belongs, are too miserably poor to notice much the chapel's squalor and
wretchedness.
There was a graveyard round this lonely fane of an alien faith--a bare,
unenclosed patch of mounds, each surmounted by an axe, or shovel, or
some implement used by the departed during his earthly life, and it
struck me that heathendom and Christianity are sometimes very closely
akin. Not a year before I had seen graves in Central African villages
similarly decorated.
Farther on were the falls; and though they were too long to be
impressive from a mere jaded sight-seer's point of view, they were most
appetising when we considered the pools and rapids with the eye of a
fisher for salmon. And here again was another grave, that of a man
carried down the river from above, and stranded dank and drowned on a
jutting rock of the foss. There was no headstone to speak of his fate
and virtues, the mouldering remains of the usual overground coffin
showed the manner of his sepulture. We laid the compass on the mound,
and found it was orientated accurately magnetic east and west, not
allowing for the variation.
So the man had been buried with care and Christian hands, and not
bundled into a box and covered up where he lay. And yet he had not been
thought worth taking down to one of the Lutheran graveyards on the lower
fjords. We wondered much what his story might be, but we could form no
very reasonable hypothesis, nor could we find any person round there in
the Neiden district who would tell us. They all reddened and said they
did not know.
There was a quaintly cumbersome pipe on this lonely grave, and as it
happened we were both collectors of the curious in smoking utensils. It
was a temptation to carry it away. Let it be recounted then as something
of a small virtue that we left the pipe where it lay.
[Illustration: Feodor and Morris--two Skilte Lapps]
CHAPTER IV
FROM THE NEIDEN ELV TO ENARE SEE, WITH PUNGENT
COMMENT ON THE HABITS OF FINNISH CARRIERS
The salmon fisheries of the Neiden River are jealously guarded assets.
Some are held by riparian proprietors whose rights go to the imaginary
line of mid-stream. These are Norwegians and Finns for the most part,
though they might be Hebrews from the carefulness with which they strive
not to be defrauded of a single fish. And the balance is State's land,
rented out in the usual way. Nets are abundant, set out to stakes, with
one end on shore; but rod-fishing is growing commoner. The local
rod-fisherman, however, is but a crude production. His "pole" is comely
enough, though heavy, but he persists in fishing a colossal fly of the
"Jock Scott" order, ten times too big, and he uses it as though the
water were a gong and the salmon could be attracted only by noise. Once
hooked, the fish either breaks him or is jerked skyward like a silver
bird. He would not play a whale; he does not know that such a process
exists.
The Neiden fisherman goes out in a canoe, and his wife or a friend poles
him in or about the rapids. The fish do not run big--a twenty-pounder is
rare--but there are plenty of them, and the local artist annexes just as
many as a very green amateur has any right to expect. Salmon-fishing to
him has much the same interest as mowing swamp-grass for his cows, or
cutting cord-wood for the winter: it is part of the daily labour, and it
never occurs to him to look upon it as a sport. In fact the item of
"sport" has been left out of his education; he looks with suspicion on
any one who hankers after it; and, as a consequence, asks prices for
using a rod on his bit of a stream which would be dear on the Namsen or
any other crack salmon rivers of accessible Western Norway. It is not
that he is averse to fingering the kroner note. On the contrary, he has
a very great affection for money. But he has an exalted notion of the
value of things, and, moreover, he is woodenly conservative. He likes to
handle the salmon himself. He splits it open and kippers it, after which
he stores the worst specimens away for future personal consumption, and
packs off the balance to some place on the Vavanger fjord, where a
steamer calls which will exchange it either for coin or groceries. His
father did this, and his son will do it also, unless by the son's time
no fish should be left in the river, as at the present rate of
destruction may very well happen.
But even had the fishing prospects of the Neiden River been ten times
more appetising, they would not have induced us to make a stay there.
The interior of Lapland lay beyond--a place of great lakes and rivers,
of vast deer-packs and nomad herders; and we hungered to be amongst it
all. Over night--under the blaze of a twelve o'clock sun--we had
commissioned a man to find us carriers, and in the morning we crossed
the river below that lonely Russian chapel, we and our goods, and in ten
minutes the real troubles of the journey had fairly begun.
Never were such carriers. They were all able-bodied Finns, though one
(and he was the strongest) had a hump like a Brahmin cow, another had a
hare-lip, and the headman possessed a most virulent squint; but they
were the most impracticable creatures that ever slouched over the face
of the earth. Our luggage was not heavy; two negro carriers on the Congo
or the Gold Coast would have capered with the whole lot of it; but
through a wish for long quick marches, we had made it up into three
light loads. There were two sacks, and a canvas-covered box containing a
few tins, some cartridges, and four pounds of cake tobacco.
Now we both knew something about packs and loads in other parts of the
world; but the Finn carrier was new to us, and his ways were strange;
and it is always dangerous to introduce customs from a distance for
consumption in a country whose difficulties you do not understand. So
although we made suggestions, we did not insist on them, and the
carriers muddled on with the preparations in their own way.
The neat, rectangular, canvas-covered box was eliminated first. We had
looked upon it as an ideal "load"; in Africa there would have been a
vigorous scramble for it; but the Finns said it was impossible to tackle
anyhow. They scouted all suggestions of slinging, or carrying it hammock
fashion, and fetched out another sack and made a re-stowal. Naturally
the bundle so contrived was about as impossible to carry on human
shoulders as a live porcupine would have been. So a blanket was taken
out of one of the sacks and used as a pad. And next the sacks were
objected to, and their contents split up, till finally our possessions
were made into seven bundles of much fragility.
They worked hard over making this muddle; they took two mortal hours
over it, and frequently called upon us for assistance; but finally they
limbered up with the help of abundance of thongs of reindeer hide and
rope, and we put backs to the river and set off on our march.
The first halt came at the end of the first three hundred yards; a load
had very naturally began to shift, and they all sat down to readjust it.
The second halt came at the quarter mile, and then the stoppages became
more frequent. We came to a standstill eight several times before we had
covered the first mile, and expended exactly two hours and a half of
time in doing it. And as during all this time the sun was blazing upon
us with scorching force and the mosquitoes were biting like dogs, we
were not unspeakably happy.
This start up to the fjeld was over sandy river-beds, through streams,
swamps, and neck-high scrub. A month earlier the country had been under
snow; a week before the tree buds had not burst; and here were dwarf
birches and the Arctic willows in full leaf, and barely so much as a
patch of white left even in the crannies of the distant hills. The
Arctic summer has a great deal of work to get through in a very short
space of time, and rushes its climatic effects. But, worst of all, the
mosquito season had opened ten days before, and was in full swing. And
such mosquitoes! Their cousins of Africa and the Southern States were
nothing to them. They came in their milliards, gaunt gray fellows,
without one grain of fear for death. They got their trunks inserted in
some unlucky pore, and presently their bodies, from the wing-sockets
backwards, would grow into transparent scarlet blobs. We were covered
with blood splashes from slaying these vampires, and sore with slapping
at them; but it was some selfish consolation to see that the men of the
place suffered equally. Each of the Finns carried a bottle of brown
Stockholm tar, which dangled from the waist-belt against his knife, and
with the contents of this he liberally anointed both face and hands.
But this did little more than convert the wearer into an animated
fly-trap. We employed tar for the complexion ourselves till we were
nearly through to the other side of the country, and then we gave it up
and used it for the boots alone, and noted no difference in our
discomforts. We had veils each of us, but these were not often
available. They got entangled by passing shrubs; the enemy would get
inside once every minute or so, however carefully the edges were tucked
in, and this entailed a hunt and a blood splash, and, finally, the mesh
blurred the view, which was a fatal objection.
There was no vestige of path to guide our caravan, and the man with a
squint who led was more than once at a loss, and we had to give him
hints from the compass. This ground is never travelled over in summer,
and but rarely in winter. The Enare district is entered and left by the
Pasvik Elv. The going was very rough. Occasionally we got out on to dry
ground and scrambled over tumbled boulders, or groped our way down
slippery rock faces; but for the most part we trod quaking marsh, which
either swung under our weight, or let us through into brown tarns of
slime. At the outset we were inclined to envy the Finns, who, in their
national boot, which reaches to mid-thigh, went over a good deal of
swamp dry-shod; but when first one and then another got ducked to the
middle, we began to see that there were advantages in less defensive
foot-gear.
That first stretch across the fjeld was a typical piece of primeval
ground. No one except nature had tampered with it since the beginning of
time. Even where the surface was dry there was often a liquid
substratum, and little mud volcanoes rose from dessication cracks which
were a mile away from the nearest open swamp. But the desolation of the
place was cruel. There were no birds, no animals, nothing but the
humming insects. Only once during that day did I hear a solitary
curlew's scream, and that seemed wafted to our ears from an infinite
distance.
We crossed the Russian frontier in the middle of a lake-pitted moor, and
thought with some grim amusement of the foreign office passports with
their hieroglyphical visés, lying packed with the tobacco in the middle
of the humpback's load. The marches of Holy Russia are not so carefully
patrolled as the stay-at-home blood-and-thunder novelist would have one
to suppose. And just about there we halted for perhaps the fiftieth time
that day and made a temporary camp.
[Illustration: FINN CARRIERS CROSSING RUSSIAN FRONTIER.]
These halts live in the memory more than any other feature of the
country. The sitting down to wait perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps an
hour, in a stew of insects, and then repacking the loads and starting
off again at a gait which rarely amounted to the pace of two miles an
hour, was indescribably wearying. When we had Lapps for carriers all
this was changed; they were willing, cheery, and active creatures who
always did their best--but more of them later. With these high-booted
Finns, however, it was almost always the same. They were weak, unwieldy,
unhandy. They could not keep a footing on rock; they were about as
helpless as camels on soft ground; and they always made a point of
getting as badly bogged as possible in every swamp. They were sullen
boors without an ounce of pluck, and if one attempted to hurry them at
all they collapsed at once.
Up to this point the ground had been slowly rising all the way, and the
air was growing cooler. As we went on, the swamp grew more rare. The
water collected in little lakes, and under foot we trod for the most
part on rock pavements worn smooth by a thousand centuries of water and
weather. There were fewer birches, but here and there an abortive pine
twisted and squirmed some five or a dozen feet above the naked stone, to
hint at the vast forests of his giant fellows which lay only a few
hundred miles to the southward. And underfoot, between the outcrops of
rock, were here and there patches of ivory-yellow reindeer moss.
But when we reached the divide, and looked down over the country on the
southern side, the reindeer moss had taken full possession. The pale
sulphur tint was everywhere, but still the fjeld was deserted. There
was not a deer in sight. All that rich lichenous growth was left to run
to waste. Only one living animal did we see on the whole day's march,
and that was a tiny black-and-tan lemming, which I caught in my hand and
(to his surprise) let go again. The country round here is, however, used
largely as a camping-ground by Lapps during the winter, and the yellow
moss, though crumbling and dry as sand, feeds the deer till they are
rolling with fat. It is a very deep snowfall or a very hard frost which
makes these pastures inaccessible. In winter the deer break the
snow-crust with their great splayed fore-hoofs, and then dig down like
terriers, till they are often browsing at the foot of a pit which
completely hides them from any one on the surface.
For cold weather the migrating fjeld-Lapp comes to more permanent
moorings, and sets up for himself a domicile more suited to the climate
than his flimsy conical tent. We came across one of these on this day's
march, in the forks of a growing river. It was a hut of peat and sods,
shaped like a West Greenlander's igloo, and some dozen feet in diameter.
Birch-stems were used inside to support the roof and prop out the walls,
but these were falling in. One well-cleaned rib-bone and some charred
embers were all that remained of furniture. The herdsman Lapp does not
build for futurity; it is a concession to his principles when he builds
at all; and when he quits his turf mansion in the spring, he does not
look to find it still standing in autumn. He is content to waste a day
and build another.
We were fortunate enough to come upon the two-roomed log-hut of a
Finnish farmer to sleep in that night, and thought ourselves in luck's
way. We had to wade a river to reach it; rain had commenced to fall in
torrents, and we were wet and very weary.
The farmer had but one cow, and she was not in milk; the agricultural
part of the farm consisted of a small garden of unenergetic potatoes,
set in drills three feet apart; and they could give us nothing whatever
to eat for love or money. Presumably when times were good they lived on
fish, for there was the disused head of a four-pound pike near the mouth
of the draw-well; and at other times they apparently subsisted upon
water. The water was good; it was sheathed in ice for more than half-way
up the well; and we drank a bucket apiece with gusto. But our appetites
demanded something more; so with much grudging we "killed a tin" out of
our very scanty store, and then lit a fire and topped up with cocoa by
way of dessert. One of us slept that night with his head upon the stone
hearth. We were deadly tired, and though the rain dripped on to us
through the roof, we neither knew nor cared.
The rain had cleared by morning, and we set out with better hopes. We
were getting down towards Enare See, and expected to come across some
duck; also we had managed to pick up an extra carrier, and so hoped
that the pace would improve. The addition to our strength was a boy of
sixteen whose leg had been broken and then set locally, and so had
acquired a limp for life. But for a Finn he had a humorous face, and
occasionally he did manage to instil some life into the proceedings.
The mosquitoes met us punctually at the door and got to work at once.
The man with the hare-lip explained at some length that they would not
be so bad now that the rain had passed over; but though we had grown to
be connoisseurs, we could not notice any difference in their attentions.
And, moreover, as those exasperating halts came with regularity each six
hundred yards, we had every opportunity to get thoroughly maddened with
their bites. We could watch them settle on us in their millions, waddle
along with their ungainly walk one shoulder at a time, and probing with
their long clumsy trunks at every chink. And we saw them flying away
crimson-bellied with blood which we ourselves had a prior claim to.
There was underground drainage in many parts of the fjeld which we
passed over here. Hollows abounded like those one sees on the limestone
hills of Yorkshire, where cave-roofs have fallen in. But we found
neither pot-holes nor cave-openings. Lakes were many. We frequently had
to climb round their sides at the foot of steep, smooth cliffs of
sandstone, and then again to scramble over hard outcrops of the same
rock on the dry ground beyond. The birches were gone. Instead a forest
began to grow of weedy, straggling, dishevelled pines, bare in stalk,
and showing but little greenery. And always where stone was not, the
ivory-yellow moss covered the ground with its dry, crisp carpet.
Occasionally, too, sprouts of mountain-ash appeared, but these were
rare, and they never grew thicker than a finger, or taller than a grown
man's waist. And still the birds kept off: we saw old spoor of reindeer
here and there in the softer ground; but of four-footed creatures in the
flesh and fur, nothing but tiny lemmings.
Meanwhile the lakes were growing larger, and the rivers which linked
them more deep and broad. Enare See as it appears on the maps--even on
the best map, which is that of Russian survey--is large; but Enare See
as it exists in Arctic Lapland is larger by one half. It is no great
sheet of open water like Michigan or Ontario; there is barely one
stretch of unbroken water twelve miles square in all its hundred and
twenty miles of length; and it is hard to say where the lake ends and
where it begins. There are islands all over its great expanse, and the
mainland round is cut up by lakes and water channels. In fact, just as
some one once defined a fishing-net as "a lot of holes tied together
with string," so Enare See might well be described as a collection of
land patches made into islands by water.
Our course swung through half the points of the compass as the water
channels swerved to this side and that, or the fords lay to our right or
left, and those exasperating carriers grew slower in their pace, and
more frequent in their halts, and we had resigned ourselves to another
fifteen solid hours of torment, when a great streak of luck befell us.
Between some bushes at the side of a long narrow lake there lay a canoe.
She was pulled on to the bank and lay bottom upwards, and who she
belonged to we did not know--or care. We were in the mood then to have
cheerfully annexed the Czar's own private dinghy even with sure
foreknowledge that he wanted it himself during the next half hour. And
the carriers seemed to be similarly without scruple. The packs went down
to the ground in quick time; the loppy-legged boy said something funny
and laughed; even the squint-eyed man smiled. The canoe was rolled on to
her keel and shot into the water. The luggage and ourselves went
amidships; the Finns distributed themselves forward and aft; and away we
went with rather less than an inch of free-board.
Now so long as we were in smooth water, this method of travelling was
delightful. The mosquitoes were comparatively absent--we had merely a
paltry thousand or two to remind us of the ravening swarms elsewhere.
There was a brilliant sun. And the hump-backed man, who was squatting on
the floor forward, paddled us on at an excellent pace. But when we got
out in broader water, there was a good ripple on, and the lake came over
both gunwales merrily. The canoe, moreover, was thoroughly sun-cracked,
and leaked like a basket, and nothing but industrious baling kept us
afloat at all. There were always two of us at it, watch and watch about;
and we worked till our arms ached.
The Finns, being brought up in a country full of rivers and water-ways,
naturally could not swim, and if we two foreigners had only had our two
selves to think of, I fancy we should have let that canoe swamp. We had
suffered many things at the hands of those carriers, and we should much
have liked to have seen them--well, inconvenienced. I know this sounds
brutal here from a distance, but we were warmed up to it then, and meant
what we said, as other people who have met the Northern Finn on his
native marsh will possibly understand. But we had the baggage to
consider, and the baggage turned the scale. We made them hug the weather
shores, and kept the balers going without intermission.
It was not all plain rowing, even then. Twice the lake-chain broke; the
rivers which linked the broader water were too shallow to carry a canoe;
and we were forced to make a portage. But if the canoe was small on the
water, she was small also on land; and many hands made light work; and
we had her out, up, over, and launched in almost as quick time as one
could have walked over the intervening necks of land.
But we were not done with the marching yet. The navigable water ended
for good, and once more we were put to footing it through the forest,
and suffering from the flies. But the scenery had changed. The birches
had gone, and so had the Arctic willows, and around us were nothing but
tall gaunt pines, for the most part bleached and dead. A parasite had
invaded the forest and was killing it by slow inches. The same thing is
seen festooning the timber in Florida and Louisiana and the Gulf States
generally, where it is called Spanish moss. It is gray there, and looks
dreary enough as it hangs in melancholy wisps from its dead or dying
victim. But here it was far darker, being in texture like a harsh wool,
almost black; and as it swung in the breeze from those blighted boughs,
it reminded one of funeral plumes. Here, too, there was no undergrowth
of palmetto and saw-grass to tone down the gloom: at the foot of these
doomed trunks was one unvarying carpet of sulphur-coloured moss.
As we marched on (with the never-varying series of halts) the outlines
of a path appeared, crossed and recrossed by the spoor of deer. The
lemmings grew more shy. Against some of the tree trunks the yellow moss
was stacked in columns six feet high to fodder cows in winter. The marks
of axes appeared on the timber, and there were stumps new-scarred. And
then the gleam of water showed through the tree aisles. Our carriers
brisked up; even the humpback straightened himself; and the pace
quickened--to something close on three miles an hour. We swung round a
bluff of sand, and before us lay a log-house painted dragon's-blood red,
with a bay beyond whereon rode a masted boat. That one house made up the
town of Ischinlisvuoni, the northernmost port of Enare See.
Now our first thought was to get a boat which would take us over the
great lake to Enare town, which was distant some eighty-five miles in
crow flight; and here we were in luck's way. The miniature viking ship
riding in the bay had just come up from the very place, and her crew
jumped at the chance (and the profit) of taking us back. We had to wait,
however, till she was refitted. They had met heavy weather on the way up
it appeared, and in one squall their high square-sail had split neatly
down the whole of one of its seams, and naturally this had to be mended
before she could put to sea again. So we went into the red log-house,
and took possession of one of the two rooms, which was furnished
principally with a large white-washed rubble stove that reached up to
the roof beams.
The population, however, though nominally they had cleared out of their
bedchamber for our benefit, had no notion of leaving us to ourselves.
The whole lot of them came in to stare at first, and when the ruck had
gone, there always remained an escort of at least six of both sexes, who
loafed in the doorway, and spat, and watched us as though we had been
performing animals. Occasionally we drove them out and would be alone
for perhaps two minutes, but then again the door would open and others
would come into the room, spit thoughtfully at the floor, and then get
their eyes deliberately focussed. They did not speak either to
themselves or to us; and if they enjoyed the performance, they did not
show it in their faces. They remained always the same wooden,
unemotional boors, and we found by experience the only way to deal
satisfactorily with the Arctic farmer Finns was to take the upper hand,
and keep it. Any attempt at civility they construed as weakness, and
then took advantage of us as a matter of course.
It is queer how these people can thus isolate themselves. The Norwegian
of the North is one of the most civil and obliging fellows on the face
of the earth. The Lapp, though he is frequently a savage in his personal
habits, is none the less a courteous gentleman in his intercourse with
others. And even the Finn fisher has occasionally some rudiments of
civilness and hospitality. But these others are past praying for. They
can read and write, they are oppressed by no government stress, they
could make an easy livelihood if only they had the gumption and the
energy to take it, but they prefer to remain the greatest clods within
all the marches of Europe.
Happily for ourselves a ceremony was taking place outside which began to
draw off the audience. Between the red house and the lake shore was a
building of blackened logs, from the doorway of which smoke had been
issuing ever since our arrival. It was a Finnish vapour-bath, and when
it was heated up, our carriers and the entire population of
Ischinlisvuoni went in in squads to enjoy it.
The Finn of the North seldom or never anoints his person with water in
the ordinary way. But still, on the whole, as back-block tribes go, one
could not call him an uncleanly person. Almost every farm has its
bath-house, and it is very rarely that a fortnight passes without this
being heated and used. The bath at Ischinlisvuoni was typical of all the
lot, for the pattern varies but little. It was a house of logs, twenty
feet by fifteen, and some eighteen feet up to the pitch of the roof.
Along one side, half-way up to the eaves, there ran a broad shelf of
smoothed wood. The floor was of beaten earth, and at one corner beside
the door was a large bee-hive-shaped mound of rubble stones, with a
fireplace in the middle to admit burning logs. This primitive stove is
heated, and the smoke either escapes by the doorway, or remains inside
and blackens the roof. Gradually the air of the place warms, and then
water is thrown on to the glowing stones to saturate it with steam. The
bathers undress at the dwelling-house, and run across the intervening
ground in their birthday attire. Both sexes and all ages bathe
together. They douche with cold water first, stand about on the earthen
floor for a minute or so, and then climb on to the raised shelf and lie
down. Every one has a green birch of sweet-smelling Arctic willow
shoots, with which he (or she) switches his neighbour, and so stimulates
the circulation. And there they stay for twenty minutes or half an hour.
Then out they rush, and if there is snow on the ground they roll on it,
or if not, they dip into the coldest water attainable; and then they go
back into the house again to cool down.
All through that evening, and till three o'clock the next morning, the
bathers in every stage of undress, from the complete to the partial,
were sitting about in the kitchen which was next our room. It never
seemed to strike any of them that the sight for alien eyes might be a
trifle quaint. At the great white Russian stove a woman was cooking
circular cakes of rye with a hole in the middle, and threading them on a
stick as fast as they were baked. Another woman was roasting coffee, and
a man beside her was grinding the beans as they were browned. Half-clad
children were sprawling about the floor, and two or three were asleep in
a corner. A naked man was contemplatively browsing on tobacco before the
stove, and a woman was treading at a spinning-wheel in the middle of the
room. By the window our two boatmen squatted on the ground with palm and
needle, mending the split sail, and beside them the humpback was
playing jigs on a cheap accordion. These were all Finns. The only two
Lapps in the place were supping in a corner, off curdled milk and flinty
rye cakes.
Ethnographically the Lapps and the Finns are not very distinct races,
except in the matter of height. The nose of the district is usually
turned up at the point, the cheek-bones are high, and the skull is well
drawn towards the back. But in the item of clothes they are always
different. The Lapp wears on his back in summer the distinctive
_matsoreo_, which is an outer garment of gray, brown, or electric blue,
closely woven cloth, that reaches down to the knees. It has a high
standing collar more or less profusely embroidered, with other
decorations in colour on both back and front. It is belted about the
middle by a broad surcingle, from which depends the inevitable knife and
tar-bottle, and the more slack there is bunched up forward and aft, the
greater dandy is the wearer. The nether limbs are clad in tight _sarre_
of ivory-white flannel; and on the feet are _lappellinin_, which are
short roomy boots peaked up at the toe, stuffed with grass, and drawn up
over the ankle and made fast over the ends of the _sarre_ by a narrow
red figured bandage, after the fashion of the East Indian _putty_. The
head-gear varies. The orthodox square-topped cap of cloth with its
head-band of fur is rare, and usually appears only in winter or on
festivals. It is picturesque, hot, and expensive, and for daily use a
soft round hat of felt is preferred, or for sea work a sou'-wester. And
the outer clothing of the women is very much the same, except that the
_matsoreo_ is a trifle longer, and the head-gear is merely a simple
handkerchief. The winter garments of skins differ a good deal from
these, but they will be spoken of in their place.
The Finn, on the other hand, is much more ordinary in his attire and
much less picturesque. Take away his high boots and he might be almost
anybody. The boots, however, are certainly a feature. They are peaked at
the toe like the Lapp's, heelless, and have soles and sides all in a
piece. The leg part is of soft leather, and can be drawn up above
mid-thigh if wished; but it is generally worn telescoped, with the baggy
top well below the knee-cap, after the fashion of mediæval villains in
Surrey-side melodramas. For the rest, he is clothed in a coat,
waistcoat, and trousers, scanty of buttons, and with a cut suggestive of
a Leeds clothing factory; carries a thin moustache; and more
infrequently than not wears some physical deformity. His woman-kind are
distinctly his better half, and probably keep him from starvation. They
are bustling and active, utterly devoid of any pretence to figure, and
as a rule gratuitously ugly. They affect, in the summer, garments of
checked cotton, which they weave themselves, and though they also wear
the high boots, the tops of these are discreetly hidden by a skirt of
decent length.
We smoked complacently deep into that sunlit night, and thought with
pleasure of the sail which was to come amongst the islands of the great
lake. But we were not done with our old carriers yet. They wanted
payment, and the squint-eyed man came in to say so. We had the money
ready for him, counted out, in rouble notes. It lay trimly in a heap. We
pointed it out. He inspected, and at once began to object. He desired
payment in kroner or marks; and not having either, we could not well
give it to him. We pointed out (using the words of the Russian consul at
Vardö) that in Russian territory the rouble was legal tender. He seemed
partially to grasp this, and suggested exchange at the rate of one
rouble (which is worth some two-and-a-penny, English) for the Norwegian
krone (which may be valued at thirteen-pence-halfpenny), and became
abusive when we declined to fall in with his ideas. He was not a person
to whom we owed any gratitude or much consideration, but I think he was
surprised at the pace with which he was ejected from the room.
The community here at Ischinlisvuoni had reindeer, which they pastured
in the forest, but they did not meddle with these much during the summer
months. Indeed they looked upon them much as capital to be drawn upon in
time of need during the winter. During the six months of day they lived,
to a large extent, on the produce of the cows, the curdled milk, butter,
and butter milk, eked out with fish from the lake. But these fish, with
some natural perversity, they never ate fresh. The spoils of the nets
were always gutted, split open, perfunctorily dried, and then devoured
raw in a partly decayed state. There is something in the theory: salmon,
boiled or fried, is the most nauseating dish in the world if one has too
much of it, as witness the bargain in the old days of the Newcastle
apprentices, that they were not to dine off salmon more than twice a
week. Salmon, well kippered, and eaten in thin slices, raw, does not
cloy one nearly so much. But when the kippering is imperfect, not to say
sketchy; or when the fish is not kippered at all, but merely more or
less dried, and, moreover, is not salmon or any of his relatives, but
some little soft, white fish like a sloppy trout; then the theory falls
to the ground.
Their fishing-tackle for the summer was simple. It consisted merely of
short small-mesh nets with floats of birch-bark rolls coiled along the
head rope, and pebble sinkers to the foot; and the catches were small.
It was in the dark months that they were more successful. Then they were
able to spear by torchlight, and secured the heavier fish. We saw the
apparatus used lying on foreshore. It consisted of an iron cresset
(_parrila_) with four spear-headed prongs and a long curved iron stem,
which ended with a fork of wood to make fast to the canoe's bow. Long
pitch-pine splinters are laid lengthwise between the prongs, and lit at
the outer end. The wind, or the canoe's motion through the air, keeps
them blazing. The paddler sits in the stern facing forward. The fisher
stands in the bows behind the _parrila_, watching for the fish as they
are attracted upwards by the glare. His weapon is the _arrina_, which is
very like the grains we use here at home for spearing eels. The shaft is
of wood, eight feet long, and fitting into a socket at the head. There
are six spears to the head, the outer two the heaviest, all barbed
inwards, and all converging from the bottom inwards. It is a formidable
implement, and once one gets the knack, very deadly. But it is no
child's play to acquire that said knack, as many an energetic British
poacher can vouch. I fancy, though, that the average fisherman from
these sporting islands would prove himself pretty deadly if he could
take his own tools to the lakes and rivers of Arctic Lapland.
We did not go to sleep that night very confident of a peaceful start
down-lake on the morrow. The squint-eyed man and his friends had been
making irruptions into our room at intervals all through the evening,
noisily, and flatly refusing to be satisfied with their lawful wage. We,
on the other hand, had quite made up our minds not to pay three
shillings for one, and so expected that next morning they would try to
put in force the local equivalent of a _ne exeat regno_. In which case
there would be trouble. Because come what might we were firmly
determined to get under way.
CHAPTER V
ENARE SEE TO ENARE TOWN, IN A SQUARE-SAIL
VIKING SHIP
When it came to the point, our Neiden carriers, to use a colloquialism,
climbed down abjectly. We roused very early, escorted our baggage (once
more made up into three twin sacks) down to the shore, and stowed it in
the boat on either side of the mast. The carriers hung about, but we
ignored them as though they had been men of glass. At last the
squint-eyed headman stated their willingness to accept their just dues,
and they were handed the contracted-for number of rouble notes with a
few impressive remarks thrown in. The discomforts of the place where
thieves eventually frizzle was described to them with a lurid wealth of
colour, which, being Lutherans, they thoroughly appreciated. And as we
had a few minutes on hand whilst the boat was being ballasted, Hayter
sketched on a smoothed board a few spirited recollections from Doré's
_Dante's Inferno_, so as to ram the matter home. They grew awed and
limp, just like so many naughty children, and we left them thoroughly
repentant; and I fancy that the next stray English who come in contact
with that squint-eyed Finn and his friends will meet with more tender
entreatment.
Now our two boatmen were Finns also, but the business on the waters
seemed to have lifted them above the ruck of their race. They were civil
and willing, and so far as their lights went, attentive. For instance,
they had floored their craft amidships with a springy cushion of birch
boughs for our special benefit. And moreover, conjointly, they were
incomparable boat sailors. In the course of our voyage occasion came
more than once when there was need for handiness and quick decision; and
South-coast yachtsmen, bred in racers, could not have beaten these
inland sailors of the North. The skipper was a little wrinkled man of
sixty, grown old in the traffic of the lake. Man and boy he had sailed
Enare See whenever it was free from ice for all of a lifetime, and what
he did not know about the shoals, and the thousand islands, and the
millions of unbuoyed reefs, and the places where the wind eddied, and
the other quaintnesses of the place, could have been written large on a
thumb-nail and still have been unimportant. He looked out upon his small
watery world with a pair of bright bird's eyes, and knew every mood of
it by heart, and neither knew anything beyond nor wanted to.
His mate was a man entirely different--a mere creature of thews, who
could shift the tack when ordered, set up a backstay, eat, row, smile,
or carry out any of these minor offices of life which do not require the
effort of a brain. He had the good humour of a puppy, an ample
sufficiency of strength, and the face of a prosperous publican. His name
was Olaf.
We set off down narrow waters with a snoring breeze from out of the
N.N.W. The red house and the well-derrick and the farm-buildings of
Ischinlisvuoni quickly dipped from sight behind a bluff; the axe-marks
left the trees on shore; and the black forests grew up untouched out of
the carpet of ivory-yellow moss. But we were not in the open lake yet. A
run of some dozen miles brought us to shallows where a portage was
necessary. We had to unload and unballast and drag the boat painfully
across a neck of land on rollers, which for the four of us was a
full-weight job, as she was a stout, beamy, 25-foot craft, built to
endure heavy lake seas and powdering squalls. But we got her nicely
launched again, brought down to trim with boulders forward and aft, and
once more under way. There were 3500 square miles of lake and island
ahead of us; and the neighbourhood was comparatively unknown to any one
except Enare natives; and we were anxious to sample as much of it as
possible. Moreover, although the breeding season was on, we promised
ourselves to shoot a sufficiency of duck for the pot.
Now I am free to confess at once that Enare See was somewhat of a
disappointment. We bore away to the south and east, dodging amongst
countless isles and innumerable shoals, and sometimes we landed, but
most times we contented ourselves by exploring with the eye alone. The
islands were of all sizes, from the come-and-go boulder, the bigness of
a hat-box, which ducks under every other wave, up to land patches three
miles in radius, with harbours, and mountains, and rivers, and men, and
all the appurtenances of a pocket continent. But there was nothing (in
actual view) large enough to be impressive. The very hills themselves
which bounded the lake were more in the form of rolling uplands than
craggy mountains.
Of shootable game we came upon barely a trace. A whole day would pass
without our seeing a single fowl either in the air, on the land, or upon
the face of the waters. And the reindeer, of course, were like our
cattle at home here--the domestic possession of the native. We saw these
animals, it is true, in quantities. All the islands of Enare are laid
down in deer according to their size, and solitary hermits peered at us
from patches of ground smaller than a cricket-field, and I hope we
cheered their loneliness. They were not very beautiful creatures to look
upon just about then. They were very much out of condition. The snows
had only just departed, and they were thin with the hard exertion of
delving with their forefeet to reach the moss beneath, and worn with
hard driving in the sledges. Their antlers were in velvet, and only
partly grown, and their coats were very much in a transition state. In
fact, they appeared to be clothed in a badly made patchwork of shades,
which varied from dirty white to faded brown. These deer get little or
no tending in the summer. They are not wanted for traction; they are put
out to graze; and they do it industriously. Their owners permeate the
neighbourhood in their canoes on fishing intent, and if they manage to
cast eyes upon each individual deer once a month, it is a piece of
unusual attention.
We came across these lake-fisher Lapps at intervals, and often sat and
chatted round their camp fires. I remember well the first of these
savage entertainments. Our eyes caught a slim blue drift of wood-smoke
rising up from the farther side of an island. We ran down, hauled our
wind, and sailed up to it. We were welcomed ashore with easy cordiality.
There were three Lapp canoes nuzzling the foot of a black rock, and on
the crown of the rock were their crews of four men and three
round-faced, good-humoured women. They cleared the place of honour for
Hayter and myself, and we sat down in the smoke drift from the fire,
where the mosquitoes could only raid us with difficulty, and we listened
to the politics of the lake: fishing was good here and bad there; this
man had finished eating that lame deer he killed in the early spring;
that man's canoe had been beached in a gale, and smashed like an egg.
One lady indeed wanted to know about the outer world. She was a portly
young person, whose globular red face beamed with a healthy animal
cheerfulness. She had stubby hands, and a figure which resembled a corn
sack, well filled, and stamped down. She carried a neat brass
wedding-ring slung to her neck-handkerchief, and had a most educated
taste in tobacco. She filled her pipe with shavings from my plug of
negro-head, lit it with a brand from the fire, and then absorbed the
smoke in an ecstasy. It was enjoyment to watch her pleasure: she puffed
that pipe to the uttermost ash, and the vapour circled amongst her
smiles. Then the spirit of inquisitiveness, and perhaps of envy, took
her, and she wanted to know if this beautiful, this exquisite tobacco
was the common smoke of my country.
To weakly avoid an hour's complicated explanation, I admitted that it
was.
And could English ladies have as much of it as they wished?
With distinct truth I answered that no stint was put upon them in the
matter.
The patriarch of this group was a travelled man. His reindeer sledge had
carried him in winter as far south as Sodankyla, where he had seen
tinned anchovies and a Singer's sewing-machine; and more than once he
had boated down the Pasvik Elv to below Boris Gleb and caught glimpses
of steamers out on the broad Varanger Fjord beyond. As some
advertisement of all this experience, his head was capped with a
battered yellow sou'-wester; but the rest of him was clothed in orthodox
Lapp attire, and his tattered blue _matsoreo_ was a miracle of barbaric
ornament. His sardonic old face peered out from a calico mosquito cowl,
which covered all the rest of the head, and his attention was very
firmly fixed upon his meal.
In these lake-side camps every one cooks for himself. The lumps of meat
(when there are any) are impaled on a piece of stick sharpened at both
ends, so that the lower point may be pushed into the ground at an angle,
and keep the meat in position whilst it is toasted. But the Lapp does
not let his meat become over-cooked, and as a general thing he does very
little more than take off the chill. It must be remembered, however,
that everything is dried, more or less, and that fresh reindeer meat, or
fresh fish, are things never used. Indeed I have frequently seen Lapps,
and Finns for the matter of that, go home hungry in a boat half full of
sweet, fresh fish, and then make their meal off semi-dried relics
reeking of decay.
The coffee alone is a common brew, always made in a kettle of copper
with a lid on the spout, and always drunk sweetened with cone beet-sugar
after the rest of the meal is finished. And when it is strong enough,
Laplander's coffee is the best flavoured in Europe.
[Illustration: A LAKESIDE CAMP ON ENARE SEE.]
After the meal, the fire is carefully quenched with water, and then
comes sleep, and then once more away in the canoes. These lake-fisher
Lapps think no more of sleeping in the open than do birds or deer, and
perhaps the untemptingness of their headquarters has something to do
with this.
In the course of our cruise down Enare See we came upon several of these
settlements on the coast and on the islands, but they did not strike us
as appetising for a prolonged residence. The _gamme_ (house) itself,
which is usually some dozen yards beyond high lake-mark, has walls of
stones and mud, or turf, with a roof more or less flat, made of turf
laid on birch rafters. A chimney is a rarity, and in summer a nuisance.
In a land which swarms with mosquitoes, it is always pleasant to have a
wood-fire on the floor which will fill the atmosphere with "smudge,"
after the fashion adopted by the Floridan cracker in his palmetto shack.
But the hut is not without luxury. The floor is paved with stone, and
round the walls are layers of young birch shoots, which make a springy
mattress. In the better _gammer_ the front-door opens on to a sort of
lobby, which is used as a store, with a room on either side; but in the
generality of these dwellings there is a single chamber, where the
family, and the fleas, and the dogs, and a reindeer calf or so, and
possibly a sheep, all pig it together, much as Noah and his friends did
at their famous convocation.
But besides the one or more _gammer_, there are buildings at these
settlements of almost greater importance, and these are the storehouses
where the dried fish are stacked for winter sustenance. In nearly all
instances these are made solidly of logs (whatever may be the structure
of the _gamme_) roofed with birch-bark shingles, and well raised from
the ground on piles, so as to keep the contents as dry as may be. There
are racks, too, for drying the fish out of reach of the dogs, and the
mortal remains of what were once fishes' internals lie trodden into the
grass in every direction. The lake-fisher Lapp is not a cleanly person
in his disposal of items which he has no particular need for.
The pine forests thicken along the shores as one walks south down Enare
See, and the lines of the tree-changes are very clearly defined. The
shores are for the most part low-lying, and in many places the trees
stand up gaunt and dead for miles at a stretch. For a stranger the
navigation here would be a thing impossible. The islands twist and turn
and crop up in every direction. Reefs spring up from deep water, and
stay just awash. We would frequently run down to a line of creaming
surf, open up some passage and slip through it, and then haul our wind
and stand along between two lines of reefs with not a dozen inches of
water under the keel. In places the great lake was a regular stone-yard.
Our boat was wonderfully handy. In build she was well rockered, with a
good beam, but had very fine entrance and a clean run aft. She was of
the regular viking build and rig, and from the English ideas of spars
and canvas, it was a matter of wonder how she could sail at all anywhere
except dead before the wind. A casual onlooker might have classified her
as belonging to the lug-sail type, but that emphatically she was not.
Her mast was stepped amidships, well set up by forestay, and by a couple
of shrouds on either gunwale. When the sail was hoisted, the halliards
and the down-haul were brought well aft and made fast to a thwart to
serve as backstay. But it was this sail which was the wonderful part of
her. It was not a lug at all, but a true square-sail with the halliard
bent on to the very centre of the yard, with tack and sheet
interchangeable, and with braces to each yard-arm. It was just such a
rig as the Northman used when he came to ravage the English coasts. It
was the sail which drove the Roman galley. It was the identical sail
which the Phoenicians were using when the Londoner went out to dinner
in a suit of neat blue paint, and brought his own stone axe to crack the
bones.
Going free, and with sheets well-started, this sail had enormous lifting
and driving power; and with tack bowsed down to the weather hause-hole,
and the sheet flattened aft, our boat would look up to it as close as
Norfolk una. The tiller worked with a joint so as to clear the
stern-post, and pushed fore and aft after the manner of a single
yoke-line; and every time we went about, this tiller was shifted over to
the weather side. The gear, too, was of necessity cumbersome, and on no
sort of day could she be called a one-man boat. But she was splendidly
dry, and we were not without giving her one or two stiff tests. We
carried a breeze with us all the time we were on the lake, and once or
twice, on the large patches of open, we met that short, steep sea,
common to this class of waters, which for a small boat is the wettest
sea on earth. She went over it like a cork--she had magnificent lifting
power--and at the same time she did not lose her way.
Once, in a heavy rain-squall, we got blown very nearly out of the water;
the reefs were blotted out of sight; and the boat showed her one weak
point in declining to lie-to. But in Enare this fault did not matter.
The skipper luffed up under the lee of an island, Olof ran down sail,
and ten minutes later the kettles were singing over a fire in a
sheltered cranny of the rocks. The squall swished and boomed overhead,
thunder with it and abundance of rain; the camp-fire sent out darting,
twisting snakes of flame, which hissed at the wet; and the two Finns
squatted beside the blaze like some queer trolls, each working with
knife and teeth at a stringy rib-bone. I remember it was at this camp we
came upon a piece of chocolate about as big as twelve sixpences (the
last of a very slender store), and made a present of it to the skipper.
He took it with a twinkle of thanks, and popped it in his mouth. Then he
set his jaws to work, and spat with solemn regularity. He believed the
gift to be some new form of chewing tobacco.
The rain had come first, and so the squall did not last. The mists
dropped, and the sky showed up blue and white, with the sun hanging in
it, round as a coin, and red as a soldier's coat. The gaunt pines of the
island and the ivory-yellow moss were lit with the glow. It was after
midnight. We stood up and watched in silence. A stray duck, the only
fowl we saw on all Enare, came flying across--a clean black silhouette
against the brightness.
Once more we quenched a camp-fire and mastheaded the brown sail, and
once more we left the open lake and dived in amongst another maze of its
islands. We had seen our fill of the northern and eastern reaches of
Enare See, and were heading now so as to reach Enare Town in the
quickest reasonable time. The wind hardened as the sun climbed higher
into the sky; and the boat flew south and west with a swirl of sound.
The lake-floor rose and sank beneath her, and the surf leaped up from a
thousand reefs. The pines roared at us as we drove past a wooded point.
Here and there a house of logs showed against a clearing on the shores.
The lake was deserted of man and fowl. The canoes of the fisher Lapps
had run into shelter, and the birds were not. The loneliness of the
place chilled one like the hour before the dawn.
Then we saw houses of red and gray and ochre standing on a low bluff,
and we made for them, ran down sail, and put the boat's nose on a beach
of sand. We had arrived at Enare Town, the chief city of the Lapps, and
it was three o'clock in the morning. We were deadly tired. The
rest-house lay at the top of the bluff, and we climbed to it with yawns
and drooping eyelids. There are no locks in Lapland, and we went inside
and announced ourselves. A young Lapp and his wife were asleep in the
guest-room bed, under a calico mosquito bar. They rose, silent and
blinking, and began to clear away their bedding. In a cradle lay a child
with its face all blotched with bites, and this also they took away. But
what other preparations they made then for our comfort I do not know. We
lay down on the floor in our oilskins as we were, and dropped off on the
instant into the deadest of sleep.
Up there in the North, where the day lasts bright all round the clock,
they set down no arbitrary hours for work and sleep such as are forced
upon us here in England. One may often see children winding up their
play at 4 A.M., or their elders starting a day's work at six in the
afternoon. In our journey which followed, across this country down
towards the Arctic Circle, we marched quite as frequently by night as by
day. On that special occasion at Enare we breakfasted at twelve midday,
and found most of the town outside to welcome us.
We held a levee inside first, because Olof had advertised the wonders of
Hayter's Marlin rifle, and the bear-hunting section of Enare (which
comprised all the males) could not rest till they understood all about
the repeating mechanism. And then we went to present a letter to Herr
Praest Hinkola. It turned out that he was away, and was not expected
home for some days, but Fru Hinkola and her brother, the postmaster,
took us in charge, and strangers in a strange land were never more
hospitably entreated. We had all our meals at their table, and if we did
not sleep under the parsonage roof, it was only through our own refusal
to trespass farther on their kindness.
They were not cheering, however, about our chances of getting through
across the country to Kittila. It was never done in summer; there were
no roads; the mosquitoes and the swamps were almost impassable; horses
or reindeer were utterly out of the question; lakes and rivers lay in
the way, over which it was very doubtful if we should find ferriage even
for ourselves; and, finally, it was distinctly improbable that we could
get carriers to pack our goods beyond the first stage or two. In winter
the route was practicable enough, for then the river and the lakes were
frozen, and the swamps were covered in snow, and a sledge with relays of
deer could get over the ground with ease. But even in winter that way
was little traversed. It was from Helsingfors and Uleaborg they got the
supplies, and the route to those towns lay through Sodankyla. That was
quite practicable even in summer, though of course not for horses or
reindeer. We could travel by canoe nearly all the way.
And we should see, what? Well, we should have an excellent view of
several hundred miles of river-bank. And we could post onwards with
horses either to Kittila or else directly down to the sea, in
comparative luxury and comfort.
We had not journeyed that far, however, to exploit future
tourist-routes; our business was to visit the Lapland farmer and fisher
and herder on his native heath; and we were not going to spare ourselves
pains to carry this out. So we announced with a sigh that Sodankyla
would not do, and that we were going to worry through the other way
somehow; and forthwith the postmaster shook his head, and sent word
round the houses that carriers were wanted for the morrow.
In the meantime we looked about us. There are twelve hundred people in
Enare, but as the town-limits are some seven miles across, a stranger
looking at it from the landing-place might reasonably put down what he
saw from there as a small straggling village of new log-houses set down
near a spired, red church. The houses were closer once and older, but
one of the periodical fires broke out during a gale a few years back and
swept the whole place away, so that it had to be entirely rebuilt. Given
a sufficient frost to freeze the water, a good breeze, a house afire on
the weather side, and one of these Northern wood-built towns will blaze
itself to ashes in a dozen hours if it is at all closely built. So the
more modern idea is to leave at least a hundred yards between every
house, and as the intervening spaces are cultivated, the towns are now
going back to the old scheme of being merely clusters of farms. And
every building, from the red church down to the smallest fish-barn, has
a broad, slanting ladder which leads permanently to its roof, with a
great iron hook at the end of a pole, always hung there ready to tear
away blazing shingles or smouldering roof-turf.
A few of the Lapps of Enare town keep unostentatious stores, where they
sell sewing-cotton, gunpowder, cone-sugar, axes, and coffee-beans, all
of which have been brought up by sledges during the winter from
Helsingfors, Uleaborg, and the towns without the Arctic Circle. But the
import traffic is small, and the reindeer, which form the only export,
are driven down alive to the markets. The community is self-supporting:
it catches and cures its own fish; produces its own milk, curd,
rye-meal, and dried meat; weaves its own woollen cloth and checked
cotton wear; builds its own houses, boats, sledges, and churns; makes
for itself spoons, casks, bowls, balers, all from the native
birch-wood; brings forth its own young, and buries its dead with a
roofed-in sledge for a coffin.
The community hinges on the parsonage, the largest house in the place,
the only house which has an upper story, which is weather-boarded
without, and which has the nakedness of its logs covered by a ceiling
within. Here are the brains of the place, the Law of the place, the
post-office, the only library. At the parsonage they had two hundred
books; and English literature was not neglected. There were translations
of Messrs. Stanley Weyman, Fergus Hume, and W. Le Queux, in sumptuous
pictured covers. It was there we got our Russian roubles changed to
Finnish marks. It was outside the parsonage that a flag flew from the
head of a tall, white-painted mast to show that Holy Russia held the
land. At the parsonage dwelt the cooper who made the shallow tubs in
which milk is set to cream in the dairies, and there also was the Herr
Praest, who married every one of the Lutheran Church who wished for
marriage within a circle of 200 weary miles; who baptized all those who
were admitted to the faith; and who buried all those who were brought in
the nailed-down sledges in their own private plot of Christian ground.
And if the time was winter, and mother-earth was fast locked in frost,
the Herr Praest would see the sledge put into the common grave which was
always open, there to lie snugly iced till spring brought a thaw, and
let the spades delve out its more proper niche.
One of our great notions in wandering through so dismal a place as
Arctic Lapland was to revel in sport which was unattainable elsewhere,
and for a good many miles we had seen no living thing except mosquitoes
and frogs. We had more or less given up the idea of fishing, but we
still held on to the theory that there was game to be found, and, in
fact, calculated on it for food to see us across the country. And with
these theories still strong within us we began to push inquiries about
the shooting, in deadly earnest.
The account was dismal enough. There was no rigorous close-time here, as
in Norway, and game was very scarce. Probably there never was much, but
by vigorous hunting all the year round there has come to be less. Now,
it is not worth one's while to carry a gun in summer. There are rype,
willow grouse, and capercailzie, which are fairly in evidence during the
courting season, but as soon as family cares begin, they keep well to
cover; and since the capercailzie cock has no taste for chickens, and
bolts off _solus_ so soon as ever the honeymoon is done, his haunts are
in such far depths of the forests that man seldom gets so much as a
glimpse of his wonderful plumage. Bird-shooting as an industry is not
worth following in Lapland till the leaves have gone, and the snow makes
everywhere a staring background.
And big game? Well, of course, the reindeer are all tame, or nominally
so; and as for wolves and lynxes, these are mostly legendary. They have
been shot--frequently shot--but for the most part round camp-fires,
after the fishing yarns have come on. And their skins are rare: these
have a way of getting lost, as is explained in the tale. But foxes there
are, both white and red, in tolerable numbers, and, of course, the
occasional bear. These, again, are for the winter shooting, as it is
only their winter coats which have a value. The fox is plentiful. A man
who understands the work may put on _ski_ for six consecutive days, and
travel 300 miles over the snow, and at the end of the week be owner of
three average hides.
But a bear-hunt is a far more troublesome affair. When a track is found,
the bear is promptly ringed. That is, the track is not followed up, but
a man on _ski_ leaves it at right angles, and working in slightly all
the time towards the direction in which the bear was travelling, finally
hits the spoor again where he had left it. If he has not seen the spoor
in the meanwhile, the bear is somewhere within that ring.
There is no immediate hurry for the next move. Bears only shift their
quarters two or three times during the course of the winter, and if
undisturbed they will doze for a considerable while when once they have
settled down. So if there is no immediate danger of a heavy fall of snow
to obliterate the spoor, the finder goes back and organises the hunt at
his leisure.
The number of hunters depends upon the two items of pluck and skill,
but not more than four go as a general thing, as there is a distinctly
commercial side to the business, and the fewer the guns the more there
is to every share. The Government gives head-money; the merchant will
pay anything between £4 and £10 English for the cleaned skins; and the
beef, too, is an asset of value. A third share in a good bear is enough
for a Lapp to marry on and set up a tidy farm, if he happen to be
economical.
The winter light may be gray and small, but the snow looms white, and
the spoor reads like a book. A bear breaks through any crust, and
plunges elbow-deep at every stride. His belly trails along the snow and
ploughs a great furrow. It takes the drifts of a gale to cover that
track. But withal his highness is a scary person, and though he may
sleep with shut eyes, he keeps open ears and an active nose. So the
callers have to tread with niceness and delicacy if they wish to make
sure of an interview; and even supposing that they carry the spoor with
them up to the pile of tumbled rocks where it ends, and the absence of
back tracks show his bearship is at home, the hunt is by no means over
even then. The bear will know quite well that enemies are at hand, but
he will not rush them. He is no fool. On the contrary, he is an animal
of infinite cunning and resource; and he quite knows that in his stone
redoubt there is at least one chance to three of brazening out the
situation and wearing his own hide for another season.
It takes a man of much more recklessness, or ignorance of the
consequences, than the average Lapp hunter to go into a cave of the
rocks and deliberately invite a rough-and-tumble with a live brown-bear.
But the hunters do their best to irritate him from a distance. They fire
single shots into the darkness in the hope of riling him sufficiently to
make a rush, so that the other guns which remain loaded may drop him
when he comes into the open. They do this from every direction on which
the cave mouth opens, so as to give him every chance of feeling a shot.
And finally, if this method fails, they light a bonfire on his
front-door step and stand round on their _ski_ to await results.
It is by no means certain that the smoke will reach him, for there may
be quite possibly an outward air-current, and the Lapps have produced
their Rembrandtesque effect for no practical return. But if they have
luck, and the stinging reek is too strong to be endured, then they have
to stand by for quick shooting. The bear bolts like a rabbit, out of the
firelight into the gloom, and in a matter of seconds he will be absorbed
amongst the tree-stems of the forest. There is something uncanny,
something almost devilish in the way a Northern bear can adopt
invisibility.
[Illustration: BEAR HUNT--SMOKING HIM OUT.]
On the whole, then, when a bear is shot it is a day worth remembering,
and all involved congratulate themselves on being incomparable hunters.
There are plenty to listen to and envy them. Few men can say that
they have not been concerned in a hunt. But in all last year head-money
was only paid on seven bears in the whole of the Enare district, and
that covers some 150,000 square miles. So, whatever can be said against
the Lapp as looking on hunting as a business, it must be granted that it
comes to him as sport and enjoyment as well, or he would not embark in a
trade which brings in such extremely frail dividends for so large a
percentage of outlay in risk and exertion. If further proof were needed,
it was there plain in Enare Town. The majority of the Lapps lived in
snug wooden houses, tilled the ground, tended cattle, lived prosperous
lives. The professional hunters were like the hunters of the States,
practically outcasts--men of the outer air, it is true, and rare
fellows, but in the riches of this life they were un-acquisitive. When
one of the rare windfalls came they were generous, and it quickly went;
and between whiles they and theirs knew the grip of an empty belly. In
Enare Town they lived in peat _gammer_, eyesores amongst the comely
houses. Their wives were slatterns, their children ragged, their homes
ringed round by squalor and poverty. They lived the free life of the
forests, which is the best life of all, but they had to pay its price.
[Illustration: Viking Boats on Enare See]
CHAPTER VI
INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES: A NARRATIVE
OF PERSONALLY-CONDUCTED TRAVEL
It was manifestly absurd to drag the Marlin and its cartridges any
farther. In the first case there was absolutely no probability of
finding big game for it to shoot; in the second it was more than likely
that carriers would be unprocurable farther inside the country, and we
should have to hump all necessaries on our own backs, and the rifle
would have to be jettisoned. In mid-Lapland it was unlikely also that we
should find a purchaser, and here in Enare one offered. Who does not
know the delights of doing a trade? We sold the Marlin for the price it
had cost in London town, and threw in the cartridges as ballast to the
bargain. It was the postmaster who bought; and in the joy of his
purchase he put the Marlin to his shoulder, aimed at a hut some fifty
yards away, and pulled trigger. The result was surprising. The bullet
went in at one side of the hut and out at the other, and as the
inhabitants happened to be within at the time, they came out hurriedly,
and looking distinctly worried. The postmaster was only acquainted up to
then with the penetrative power of the local weapon. So this performance
of the Marlin made him dance with delight.
His thirst was whetted. He had tasted the delights of owning one good
weapon, and he wanted another, and he cast his eyes upon it with frank
longing. Now our 12-bore shot-gun would not have been classed in England
as excellent; indeed it would barely have toed the mark at tolerable. It
was an old friend certainly; it had done good service in many climes,
and it had seen so many things that its owner was devoutly thankful it
could not talk. But it showed the batterings of travel. Its stock was
scored and scarred; its barrel was browned more by oil and tallow rubbed
on bright-red rust than by the more scientific method of the gunsmith's
shop. It had been spoken of by a whisky miller in the Great Smoky
Mountains of Tennessee (who used shot-guns in the defence of his
business) as homely; it had been described in more than one stately home
of England as "that qualified old blunderbuss"; and its owner always
started out across the seas from his native island with the advice,
"Now, don't bring that rotten old tin spout back this time."
Still it had its points, that much-abused old gun. Held straight, it was
deadly enough. It had many a time carried a ball in its right barrel
with sound effect; and once, in Africa, when in a moment of stress and
panic the ball cartridge was slipped into the left barrel, which was
alleged to be "full choke," it eased itself of the charge without
bursting, although it nearly did dislocate the firer's shoulder in the
recoil by way of remonstrance. And at the same time it performed most
thoroughly the requisite business with the bullet.
It was one of those guns which was probably always second-hand, and it
had never been a high-class weapon even in its palmy days. Even its
builder had sent it out into the cold, suspicious world without the
testimonial of his name. Yet the man who carried it so many miles
through so many scenes, and slept by its side before camp-fires, and
nursed it in his lap through many a weary hour when--well, when things
were not exactly so smooth as they might have been, and grumbled at its
weight under tropical suns, and swore when he missed his supper with it,
and got hot when jeerers made sport of its battered ugliness,--that man,
I say, would give more than one crisp note to-day if he might have it
stored away at home in some dark corner near at hand, from where he
could take it out at times and abuse it with rough, friendly words, as
one old chum abuses another. He would like to lift it in his fingers
again, and put his chin against that piece of spun yarn which was served
round the stock where--pah! what nonsense is this? The gun was not fit
to carry. It was absurd to go about with such a weapon, when better guns
were so handy. And if (as a matter of accurate fact) it was rather more
serviceable than any of the other guns in Enare, why, of course, the
people up there were little better than rank barbarians, and what could
be expected of their artillery?
* * * * *
And so at Enare the old gun remained, and forty marks exchanged hands
over the transaction. We travelled thereafter the lighter by several
pounds of dead weight, and we did not miss the weapon's usefulness. Even
had we condescended to the murder of nursing mothers, we could barely
have filled a decent game-bag with birds from one end of the country to
the other. So one wished the postmaster good luck with his purchase; but
many a thought went backwards after the old gun's welfare, and many a
sighing hope was registered that the new owner would entreat it
tenderly.
The postmaster was the active spirit of Enare Town, and we made a good
move in securing his vote and influence. He could not give us any
information about much of our journey, it is true, because, as he
explained before, all his experience of passage in and out of the
country had been by the Sodankya route; but at least he could put us in
the way of negotiating the first stage. He sent round word, and, after a
delay, carriers came to our dwelling with thongs of reindeer harness in
their hands ready to strap on their packs. But when they heard what was
required, they demurred. They had no taste for wandering away into the
distant wilderness. The postmaster delivered to them an hour's animated
lecture in Qfinsk before they would even think of it. Then they replied
with more objections, and thus for two more solid hours the argument
went on. There were three carriers--two Lapps and a Finn--and they stood
in a row with their mouths open, and looked rather limp and dejected
whilst the postmaster railed at them and detailed their prospective
duties. A decorative background of Lapps arranged itself behind the
group and watched proceedings with curiosity and attention. They rather
regarded us as villagers elsewhere do a travelling circus.
We impressed upon the postmaster that what we really would like was one
reliable carrier who would go through the country with us as far as
Kittila, and engage the other carriers and guides as they were needed
along the route--you see our demands by this time were getting simpler.
We had quite given up the idea of the combined guide-interpreter person;
and the postmaster urged this proposition with fluency and noise. He
pointed out the easiness with which such a piece of work could be done.
He dwelt upon the wealth which would accrue to the happy man who did it.
But the three carriers did not warm to the scheme one little bit. They
merely looked frightened, and shook their heads, and the Finn paid us
the compliment of glancing in our direction, and then turning away with
a perceptible shudder.
The postmaster gave it up. "Very well," said he, "then you shall just
take them the first stage to Lusaniemi, and then they must get other
carriers."
The faces brightened at once. They were very like children these Lapps
and Northern Finns. And they set about making up the packs to their
fancy, and getting them strapped to their shoulders with the thongs of
reindeer hide. The word went round, and the houses exuded more men,
children, and women, all smiling their goodwill, all anxious to wish us
God-speed. One wrinkled old crone of a woman, long past walking, was
dragged up by her grandchildren in one of the boat-like reindeer sledges
that she might not miss the spectacle.
We were all ready to start, when one more request was made for--shall we
say, a souvenir. Would we fire one shot with the Marlin at a mark to
show how good an aim Englishmen can make with a heavy rifle?
Was there ever a more embarrassing favour asked? We had made a good
impression on Enare--there was not a doubt of it; and here was an
excellent chance of destroying it in a single moment before the
assembled community. But there was no evasion possible, and so one of us
shouldered the rifle, took a quick sight on the mark they pointed out
(and which he could only just see), and pressed delicately on the hair
trigger. The bullet sped, and the crowd ran off to see the result. It
was a lucky shot; it had blundered in "plum-centre"; and furthermore, it
had pierced in through the log wall of the house on which the mark was
set, and out again on the opposite side. Whatever else had happened, the
reputation of the Marlin rifle for penetration was established in the
Lapp capital for good and always. We were so overcome by the warmth of
the multitude of the subsequent good-byes, that I regret to say we
marched off neglecting to pay a debt of tenpence to the good lady with
whom we lodged.
Our escort left us at the last of the dozen houses which formed the
town, and from there on, excepting for one or two turf _gamme_ of pariah
hunters, we came across no human dwellings for some time. The way lay
through a thick and fairly tall forest, mostly of pines and birches,
though in places there was a heavy jungle of shrubs and undergrowth.
There were no birds, and no sign of larger game. Only insects abounded.
For awhile we had a trail to walk on, but this grew more disused, and
finally vanished, and more than once we got astray, and had to make
sharp turnings to recover the direction.
It was not altogether country that would have suited a bicyclist. There
were rivers to plod through, and swamps to clog one, cliffs to scramble
up and down, and thickets to disarrange one's personal appearance, and
most effectually to tear a mosquito veil if one had been worn. As a main
direction, we were heading east along the flank of a steep valley, with
hills on one side and a deep river on the other, which sometimes broke
up into noisy rapids. As a general thing the trees closed us in, but now
and again we got out on to rising ground, and found a view which it was
worth stopping to look at.
The pace of our caravan now, was very different from that detestable
slouch we had been forced to put up with at the north of Enare See. We
logged off a good steady four miles to the hour, and after the first
stop (which always comes early on a march, to get the loads finally
adjusted) halts were pleasingly infrequent. The two Lapps were the
willingest fellows on earth, and the solitary, high-booted Finn,
although he was a poorer creature, was forced to keep up with his
better's lead. The elder Lapp, who headed the advance, was a
melancholy-faced man of some personal beauty. He had lost his wife a few
months before, had had his house burnt on the top of that, and so found
himself, in middle life, changed from a prosperous family man to a
homeless widower; and these things do not tend to cheer a man. He was a
dull, capable servant, but we could not bring ourselves to like him.
Johann, the younger Lapp, was a very different animal. We took him to be
aged eighteen, though he turned out afterwards to be ten years older
than that estimate. He stood about four feet ten inches high in his
_lappellinin_, and the full curve of his bandy legs was charmingly
exhibited by the skin-tight white-flannel garments which covered them.
He had a quaintly ugly face, beardless as a girl's, and thatched above
by a fell of coarse, black hair; and with his gaily-piped _matsoreo_ off
and packed against his load (as he always carried it on the march), and
a tight, striped jersey covering his upper man, he was an exact
reproduction of the peripatetic acrobat one comes across at English
fairs and seaside summer beaches. Indeed one could never quite get over
the idea that he was merely playing the part of carrier for a joke, and
that some day, quite unexpectedly, he would doff his load, produce a
square of threadbare carpet, and go through some entertaining
contortions, and afterwards hand round his wooden coffee-bowl for
coppers.
He was a fellow of infinite thews and a boundless appetite for hilarity.
He always had the heaviest load foisted on him, and received it with a
joke and a grimace; and after the most wearisome march he could always
tell funny tales, and laugh uproariously at his own excessive wit. In
his personal habits he was an irresponsible savage; but in a land where
everybody was accustomed to do everything for themselves, he was
surprisingly thoughtful and attentive. For instance, after he had been
drinking at a stream, he frequently offered his wooden cup to one of us
that we might drink with niceness also, instead of being forced to lap
the water up like a dog; and more than once, when our kettle and the
carriers' were heating together on a camp-fire, he has burnt his own
fingers that he might take our kettle off and hand it to us. Indeed in
these little attentions he distinguished himself above all his
countrymen we met, and perhaps it was partly for this reason along with
the others that we grew so much to like him.
* * * * *
Two deserted villages did we pass through on this march, with their few
mouldering remnants of huts and clearings almost blotted into forest by
the second growth. In one of them there was an especially picturesque
bit, and we came to a halt, and Hayter sat himself on the wreck of an
old reindeer sledge and tried to sketch it. He was prepared for
annoyance from the mosquitoes, and he got it. He battled with them
bravely for a long time: he smoked like a chimney; he slapped himself
with frantic industry; and at last he gave it up in despair. He had
covered three pages of his sketch-book with blood--his own blood--and
pencil scratches, and dishevelled insect corpses, and he certainly did
get three good impressionist sketches of the atmospheric condition, but
he carried away no intelligible note of the ruined huts and the
clearing.
The carriers shouldered their loads again, and we knocked out our
tobacco into the grass; but the caravan did not start till the two
Lapps had come up and carefully stamped out any smoulder which might
remain.
All trails which might at one time lead out of that village were long
since grown up. The forest is always greedy to take back any territory
of which man has robbed it. So we had to make our own path as we
progressed, and pressed on through clinging undergrowth. The dim roar of
the foss down in the valley rumbled through the air, but no birds
lightened the march with their songs. Occasionally the straining ear
thought it caught the cry of some feathered creature, but it always
turned out (on seeking deeper) to be tree-branches grinding together in
imitation of bird sounds.
Ant-hills, built of pine-needles and clay, perched under the trees on
the steep hillside, with gallery entrances into them of the bigness of
peas, and a marvellous insect busyness pervading all their
neighbourhood. They were not so large as those pine-needle ant-hills one
meets with in north-western Norway, and of course were dwarfed by the
huge ant-mounds of Africa, but they ran to a goodly size here in the
Enare district, often reaching to a four-foot height above a seven-foot
base.
We had passed the noisy falls by this time, and when we could catch
sight of it through the trees, we could make out that the farther side
of the valley was moving away from us. We were working downwards all
the time, and presently we stepped out from the cover and stood on the
sand beaches of Muddusjärvi.
It was necessary to cross this lake before we could get any farther, and
the packs were thrown down, and we proceeded to telegraph our need to a
tiny farm on the other side. The Finn did not help. He was driven half
mad with the mosquitoes, and he lay on the sand, with his head wrapped
in his coat, writhing with the irritation of his bites. But we others
dragged some dead wood to the extreme water's edge, and shredded it with
our sheath-knives, and set it alight, and coaxed it into a goodly flame.
And then we added more fuel, and still more. There is always plenty of
dead wood ready to hand in these austere forests, which no one but
Nature herself cuts or cares for, and we dragged down whole trees to
dedicate them to the flames.
The lake was dim with mist, and a clear signal was imperative; and
Johann, the eccentric, must needs climb trees and dance upon dead
branches, crooning music to himself, till he and the branch came
crashing down to the ground. He was a weird creature. So we made this
beacon of ours no niggling flicker. We had got to make our presence
known and our needs understood; so we built us a royal blaze which
roared, and writhed, and rose high into heaven; and then we ranged
ourselves in the valley of smoke which drifted to leeward (to keep out
of the mosquitoes' reach), and one by one stepped out and hailed at the
upmost stretch of our voices, that some one, we did not know who, might
bring across a boat.
It was a good opportunity to experiment for the best travelling note of
sound. The Echoes from their perches on the frowning hillsides across
the lake appointed themselves judges, unasked, and we mortals began the
contest.
First Johann coughed the wood-smoke from his lungs and ran forward as
though he were going to throw a cricket ball, and set back his
shoulders, and yelled out a sort of dog-yap on two high notes. He
scored, but not heavily.
The other Lapp lifted up his head and emitted a melancholy howl like a
wolf's. We listened. Yes, that certainly carried farther.
The Finn lay on the ground, with head shrouded from the insects with his
coat, and would not compete. So we foreigners in our turn cooeed, after
the Australian fashion, and the Echoes, fickle ladies that they were,
awarded the palm to the newer, stranger, imported sound. They cooeed
back that the cooee won by an easy thousand yards.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE SIGNAL FIRE.]
Water-mists hung in filmy layers above the lake, and thickened as the
hours drew on. Patience and more fuel to the beacon were the only things
that would help us, and we applied them both assiduously. And when we
were not working, we sat where the smoke of the fire could drift solidly
over us, and those gentlemen of England who sit at home at ease, and
have never seen the mosquito at his worst, do not understand the luxury
of it. There are not many insects whose proud boast it is that they can
make the monarch man find stinging wood-reek fascinating.
"_Illi robur et aes triplex
Circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci
Commisit pelago ratem
Primus_,"
wrote Horace in the days gone by; but unknown lands, had he known it,
can contain far more horrid torments than the unknown sea.
* * * * *
But at last our vigil and beckoning came to an end. Through the gray
lake-mists there loomed out a hazy dot of a deeper gray. It grew and
blackened, and resolved itself into a canoe, spiritlessly sent along by
a single paddler. We watched its approach with warming hearts. And lo!
the solitary paddler was a woman, old, bent, and toothless. All her
men-kind were away, it seemed, fishing up a farther arm of the lake. It
was a year since she had been in a boat, because of her rheumatism.
Moreover she had been in bed, and so our beacon had been lost on her,
and being rather deaf, our shouts had fallen but dimly upon her notice.
She hoped, with fluttering courtesy, that we would forgive her
dilatoriness. Poor old crone! we shook hands with her all round, and
soon let her know where the indebtedness was placed.
But the canoe was small, perilously small, and leaky, and it obviously
would not hold the party of us. So the packs were piled in on to the wet
floor-boards, and we foreigners paddled off to an appointed place where
there was a larger craft, and we took the old lady, enthroned on a brown
canvas sack, as an honoured passenger. The carriers tossed the remaining
embers of the fire into the lake, carefully extinguishing with water
every remaining spark, and then they went round by the beaches to meet
us; and we ran the other canoe down into the lake, and made the
trans-shipment, and paddled off in triumph. The old woman watched all
passively. She was past the age of doing much for herself, or giving
directions. She had a strong face, but the days of initiative had passed
from her, and it must have been by a marvellous and unaccustomed
exercise of will that she roused from her bed, and brought that first
canoe across through the dank lake-mists to succour us. We recognised
this, and I think we were duly thankful.
We beached the canoe before the little farm, and went up to the hut
there and took possession as a matter of course. There is an entire lack
of formality about quartering yourself in your neighbour's house in
Arctic Lapland.
The old woman, with her latent housewifely instincts aroused, pottered
about with a burning green branch to drive away the intruding mosquito.
There were two rooms to the hut--a general living-room, and a tiny
cupboard-like chamber which held two box-beds. There was a pet reindeer
calf in the larger room, a frail, stilt-legged creature of the bigness
of a greyhound, with a hoarse, dog's bark. It had an amazing knack of
getting into every one's way, and sucked without invitation every finger
that dangled within its reach. Of food about the place there was no
single scrap. Milk, fish, bread, were all unprocurable. And so we were
reduced to "killing a tin" from our scanty store, and making a sketchy
meal off preserved dainties, which seemed to provoke the appetite rather
than appease it. Ours was the smaller room, and we lit a fire on the
stone hearth, and brewed milkless, sugarless cocoa, and finished up with
a dessert of that and cigarettes.
The warmth grew in the little chamber, and there was a dry floor of
boards beneath us. The mosquitoes, too, seemed for the moment to have
left us. Here seemed an opportunity for taking off our clothes, the
first for many days. The scars on the vulnerable parts beneath them were
cruel. Hayter's legs and knees were so swollen with the bites that he
could not rid himself of his breeches until he had slit the bands of
them with his knife. Our arms were tight in the sleeves of our coats;
our hands were the size of boxing-gloves; we were both of us bloodied
and blotched all over with the treatment we had undergone.
Personally I got on to one of the beds and fell asleep there in the act
of filling a final pipe. But Hayter did not get so far. He was seated on
the floor when I saw him last, reeving a new lace in one of his boots;
and when I roused in the morning, he was still upon the floor, with the
lace in one hand and the boot under his head. I fancy we must have been
a trifle worn out when we finally reached the shelter of that little
farm on Muddusjärvi.
* * * * *
We were woke by Johann at 5.30 the next morning (after three hours'
sleep), but did not make a start of it much before eight. We were bound
up the lake, and as a paddle had been broken in the landing overnight,
another had to be hacked out of the solid tree with axe and knife before
we could leave. You may use another man's property if you find it lying
about in Lapland, but you are expected to make all damage good. As
Johann pointed out, it is sometimes a profitable move to leave an old
paddle or a battered pair of _ski_ where the chance, needy stranger can
lay hold of them, as by that means he does the breaking, and one gets
provided with brand-new implements free of trouble. And there is no fear
of being taken in by some one who is incompetent to do the requisite
carpentering. Axe and knife, and more rarely a saw, are the only tools
in the country, and within all its marches one could not find a grown,
sound man unable to use all three with deftness.
We paid off our Finn carrier at this point, and gave the old lady of the
house two marks, at which she nearly bowed herself in two. And then we
embarked in the canoe again, with the two Lapps paddling, one the bows,
and one aft, and set off up the lake.
Muddusjärvi is narrow here, and contracts still more farther on, till
one could well set it down as a mere currentless river. It sits quietly
between its low banks, and is fed from the low, hummocky hills on the
northern side, and by the higher hills beyond them. There is thick cover
in beyond these banks, but no sign of game anywhere.
Reed grasses which scraped against the canoe's tarry side were beginning
to grow in the shallows, and then, just as the lake was beginning to
widen again, we landed before a cluster of three huts, and tried for
carriers. Johann and the melancholy Lapp went up to do the negotiation,
and we foreigners got out of the canoe and stretched our limbs. A flock
of ten diminutive sheep, two of them black, sauntered up and nibbled at
my legs. The farm was small, but it seemed fertile and cared-for, and by
no means poverty-stricken. There was a grass-field, enclosed by
split-rail fence, and manured. And good grass it was, too, well cleared
from weeds. But there were no carriers available here, which was what
we were particularly interested in just then, so we went back to the
canoe and once more got her under way.
We opened up broad Muddusjärvi after this--a fine sheet of water,
bordered by wooded hills; but presently we turned due north again, and
paddled up a narrower arm of the lake, and landed at another Lapp farm.
This was certainly the most prosperous place that we had come across
since entering the country, and it was marvellous to think that such a
spot could exist so far inland and so deep within the Arctic Circle.
There were store sheds and outhouses running right up from the lake
beach, in all abundance; and the big, log dwelling-house itself, on the
top of the rise, was a place of mark. It had yellow window frames and a
shingle roof. Its big kitchen living-room measured twenty good feet by
five-and-twenty, and it had no less than two separate bedrooms, not to
mention the usual combined dairy-bedroom, each with a separate door of
its own.
But then this estate was no one-man farm. It doubtless had called one
man owner sometime during history; but he had begotten sons, who shared
the land between them, _more Hibernico_, and then in the recent past
these amalgamated into a sensible partnership. By dyke and axe they had
added a few more acres to the ancestral plot from the forest swamp at
the back; but only a very few: mere husbandry is of small account in
this far Northern clime. What they did was to increase the number of
nets, and build more fishing canoes, and more drying sheds in which to
cure the catch. It was from the lake they got the more important
harvest. The milk and the cheese, and the rye and the meat of sheep and
oxen, were good, but they could not be depended on. It was the fish that
never failed. No Arctic storm, no broken summer, could kill the crop of
the lake or deny it leave to ripen.
Still twenty acres of good mowing-grass had this partnership got growing
bravely in their rail-enclosed fields, and a potato garden, and a flock
of sheep, and some dozen healthy cows; and as wealth goes in Lapland,
they were rich men. But the struggle for existence up there in the North
does not permit of any idle hands. If a sufficient living is to be got,
all must work for it. There was no sitting back to enjoy a life of
moneyed ease on the shores of Muddusjärvi.
The place, as we saw it, hummed so briskly with work that we were almost
ashamed of our own unattached condition. A big catch of fish had just
been brought in from the lake, and they lay gleaming against the grass,
sorted out into tubs according to their kind, awaiting their turn for
evisceration. All spare hands were hard at this work. One of the
partners, a comparatively big man for a Lapp, gave the lead. He took his
fish up by the back, cut through three-quarters of the neck down to the
backbone, slit up the belly, emptied the guts on to the grass, and
twisted the tail-flukes through a slit in the gills, so as to keep the
flattened carcass perpetually open. Two women and a bent old man toiled
at the same work, though with less deftness; and two small girls
squatted on the grass, and picked with care the fishes' sounds from
amongst the other inconsidered debris, and washed them in water, and
stored them in a wooden bowl of birch.
In the shed built for that purpose, these finny spoils, strung on
sticks, were put up to dry. There were no salmon or trout there; they
were all coarse fish; some, of the bigness of sardines, strung through
the eyes; some, of the perch tribes, hooped into circles like those
above described; and a few stray pike, half decapitated, each on his own
especial withe, hung up like shrivelled criminals with their wicked
heads a-cock.
There was a draw-well in front of the house, with a huge, straddling
counterpoise-derrick over it in constant use. We stood by this for some
time watching the bustling life of the place. Johann came and said that
a carrier was available, but he must dine before he set out, and he
(Johann) had received an invitation to dine also. We accepted the delay,
and when one of the ladies asked us, we went up to the house. She
produced stools, and wiped them down with a corner of her skirt before
offering them to be sat on. Verily feminine human nature of a certain
class is much the same all the world over.
[Illustration: A PROSPEROUS LAPP SETTLEMENT.]
It was the dairy-bedroom we sat in, the room of state and honour, and as
it was comparatively free from mosquitoes--there were some paltry dozen
or so to remind us of our immunity--we rolled cigarettes in peace, and
Hayter produced a sketch-book. The old woman who had charge of us was
shown what was wanted, and took up her position, nothing loath. She
stood like a professional model--a rare thing in this fidgety land--and
the sketch progressed with speed.
A very happy likeness it was, and the old woman was amazed to see
herself for the first time in all a long life on paper. But she was not
altogether pleased. On some occasion during her days she had broken a
leg, which (according to the primitive method of the country) had been
set with a reef in it. When she walked this gave her a prodigious limp.
When she stood at rest upon both feet, it naturally skewed her shoulders
well out of the horizontal. The sketch faithfully reproduced this trait,
and the old lady objected in her top key. She wanted to be drawn
straight as she would like to be, and not with rugged face and halting
body, as the accident of years and weather had happened to make her. She
was very like her sisters in more favoured climes, this middle-aged dame
of Lapland.
But she did not stay arguing long. Work could not stop. She left us in
the dairy and went away to the kitchen, and the _whirr_ of a
spinning-wheel told us what was her employment.
Hayter's pencil, however, was not permitted to rest. Johann had
evidently exploited its powers, and presently he came in half-dragging,
half-leading, a younger, more comely girl, and whom he explained he was
sweet on himself. He backed her up against the wall, arranged her hands
and her head-kerchief, and explained that he would like a portrait of
her executed in the best style for his own personal use and convenience.
Her name he said was Margrete, and he mentioned that she was famed for
her skill in milking cows in the summer and making clothes during the
long nights of winter. The gay _matsoreo_ which he was at that moment
wearing himself was the outcome of her clever knife and needle.
In view of the forty-nine mile tramp ahead, Johann had annexed a bundle
of the fine, dried grass they use here in the shoes, and whilst the
sketch of his sweetheart was progressing--by the way she was only one of
his many loves--he dumped himself down acrobat-fashion on the floor and
took off his foot-gear, and arranged the packing of grass therein with
vast deliberateness and care. A small, solemn child, all bumpy about the
head from bites, came in, stark-naked, from the other room, and stayed
to stare. A couple of dogs--stout, gray, wire-coated fellows, like the
dogs of the Eskimo--added themselves unobtrusively to the audience.
A lover of trimness in the female ankle should not go to Lapland to find
his models, as the trouser, strapped on to the boot-top, is fatal to any
idea of symmetry. And in fact female personal beauty of any sort is not
there brought to any high stage of cultivation. The faces of the women
always verge towards plain, and their figures can only be described as
dumpy. But if the features of these Lappish women are homely and perhaps
rugged, at any rate they are invariably pleasant in expression, and such
a thing as a peevish face cannot be found from one side of the country
to the other. They wriggle along through life on the lean edge of
starvation. They have everlastingly to confront the struggle for the
next meal, and the meal after that, and this constant strain marks the
forehead and wrinkles the cheek; but at least they are free from those
more branding worries of larger communities, which whiten the cheek and
draw lines from the mouths of the women we know so well at home.
A cuckoo clock in the great, busy kitchen hooted half hourly. In this
land of the midnight sun and of midday night one cannot tell the time by
the heavens as the countryman does in England and lower Europe. A
timepiece of sorts is a primitive necessity, and many are the varieties
which find a use. In the larger coast towns, like Vardö, the watchmakers
drive a roaring trade, and dozens of watches with curious tooled brass
cases dangle from the rods in the windows. Up-country almost every hut
sports its clock--some investment from a winter's marketing trip in the
tiny, boat-like, reindeer sledges at Abö or Sodankyla, or even far
Helsingfors.
An ordinary solid clock does not take the Laplander's eye. He likes
something flimsy, and if possible novel. At one place, hung on a peg
driven into the logs of the wall, we were condemned to gaze hourly upon
the exasperating device of a dentifrice advertisement, wherein a smiling
young female drew a tooth-brush briskly across a beautiful set of
cardboard teeth between every tick. I was half frantic with bites at
that halt I remember, and deadly tired, and much wishful for sleep and
forgetfulness. But neither would come. Hour after hour I was condemned
to remain awake, and stare at the tooth-brush clock, and read the legend
(printed in my native tongue) that it was made in Germany, and that the
dentifrice was put up into neat packets, priced sixpence, or one
shilling, which could be obtained from any chemist with the least
presumption to call himself respectable. I argued at the time that the
clock had evidently drifted far from the land where the ingenious
advertiser destined it, seeing that the letterpress was English, and the
Laplanders do not use tooth-powder even if they could have read about
its existence. And I savagely hoped that the man who sent it out had
gone bankrupt as a penalty for annoying me. But at this peaceful
distance of time and space I am inclined to call back that wish. And
besides, I could not injure him (by conspicuously refusing to buy his
wares) even if I wished, as the name of the ingenious dentrifice has
completely passed away from me.
* * * * *
Fortune took it into her fickle head to smile on us at this halt. We got
no less than two new carriers, and rare fellows they proved to be. They
agreed after about an hour's palaver to take our packs upon their
shoulders, and once more we started down the lake. The whole population
were either on the beach, or came there to see us off. The eight ladies
who were employed in the dissection of more fish, left off that
employment for the moment, and stood up, and took of their
head-kerchiefs and waved them diligently. And Margrete came down, and
stood where the shingle was wet, and kissed her hand. Johann saw, and so
moved was he that he must needs stand up on the top of the pile of packs
to wave back, thereby very nearly upsetting the canoe and all of us. We
got hold of his bandy legs and pulled him down, and he lay on the wet
floor-boards with his head undermost, bawling with laughter, and
thinking it the best joke in all the world.
He was hinting to another girl that he would die for her, at our next
halt. He was a most fickle swain, this india-rubber Lapp.
We paddled eleven miles to the end of Muddusjärvi--or at least the Lapps
paddled; we two foreigners lay against the packs, basking in the sun,
and smoked, and lazed, and admired the colouring on the hills. And at
the end of the lake we disembarked and paid off the melancholy Lapp from
Enare, who took back the canoe. Poor fellow, he had had his troubles and
we should have pitied him. Moreover, he was intelligent, and strong, and
willing, and we should have appreciated all these qualities. But as it
was, I am afraid our principal sentiment towards him was one of dislike.
We had sufficient worries of our own for all practical purposes, and
that mournful face hanging between us and the sun did not tend to
lighten them.
The caravan limbered up and stepped out down an avenue thirty feet wide,
cut from the forest to provide for the winter sleigh traffic. The stumps
were still _in situ_; rocks and boulders were scattered about everywhere
between the grim forest-walls. An unmeddled-with undergrowth lay
breast-high all down the clearing. A tiny winding ribband of track gave
us just space in which to set our feet as we marched; and even this led
into quagmires and morasses, which we were forced to wade through or
circumnavigate. But all these obstructions would be blotted out by the
winter's snow, and the sleighs could travel briskly over the hard white
crust. Scarcely a soul moved from place to place during the bright,
soft, insect-ridden months of summer. Indeed this march was rendered
memorable by our meeting another wayfarer. He was a man dressed in the
Lapp clothes, but with a purely Tartar physiognomy, and he and we
exchanged but the chilliest of salutations. Even the cheery Johann
forbore to bestow on him his usual grin of greeting.
As though the mosquitoes were not sufficient plague (and their numbers,
if it were possible, increased) we here passed into a belt that was
peopled by still more insect horrors. Dragon-flies in millions rustled
through the air, though these did not worry us. But they were
accompanied by loathly great horse-flies, as thick as a finger, and
monstrous blue-bottles, which were maddening in their attentions. The
blue-bottle one could hear and avoid; but the attack of the horse-fly
was stealthy. The beast would fly up without a sound, and alight like a
piece of thistle-down, and one would know nothing of the matter until
one was bitten. They could go through a coat as easily as one could push
in a pin; even corduroy riding-breeches could not impede them; and on
the place of each bite, there arose in the next half hour a great wen,
which one wanted to tear out bodily by the finger-nails. That part of
Lapland would be a lepidopterist's heaven; but for any ordinarily
constituted man it came very near to being the other place.
It must be remembered, too, that if we two foreigners suffered badly
from this plague of flies, our carriers were ten times more tormented. A
man with his hands free can thresh about, and to a certain extent beat
the insects from him, unless he perishes with the exertion; but to a
carrier impeded with a pack, this form of athleticism is necessarily
limited. Our Lapps put calico cowls over their heads, which covered all
except their faces, and their faces and hands they smeared with a
liberal ointment of tar, and yet they suffered horribly. Still for all
that they made no complaint. Johann would give out his great guffaws of
laughter when things were at their worst, and the others would chime in
merrily enough. They might be miserable, but they saw no reason to make
themselves unhappy about it.
They were good fellows these two new carriers of ours. The younger one,
Pedr, was a regular Adonis in his way, and certainly the only really
handsome man we saw in Lapland. He had rare, fine features, perfect
teeth, and a beautiful smile, which he laid on whenever conversation was
demanded of him. He did not talk much; he seemed to find the smile much
more effective.
The other addition of our force of a surety had stepped straight out of
County Galway. It was true he wore a blue _matsoreo_ piped with red and
most dandily worked upon the shoulders. It was true he wore the Lapp
shoe, and the tight white-flannel Lapp trousers (all of them rather
shabby), and carried sheath-knife and tar-bottle dangling from his
embroidered belt. It is true he talked only barbarous Qfinsk, but he
spoke it with the softest, most insinuating brogue imaginable. His
whimsical, humorous face, with its two days' stubble of hair, was the
most truly Irish piece of human furniture one ever put eyes upon.
He had a blue eye and a captivating grin--grin was the only word for it.
He was always willing to do the larger share of the work, and--always
did the least. He lied to one, and grinned without shame when he was
found out. He tried brazenly and without the least concealment to
swindle us over his wages, and grinned delightedly when we objected to
paying him more than his just due. He provided us with free amusement
the whole time we had him, and did it all deliberately. To have called
such a delicious person anything else but Pat would have been an insult
both to himself and to us.
* * * * *
We had a desperately hard journey of it on this march, and, moreover,
passed nothing sufficiently interesting to note. The broad sleigh-cut
continued all the way; the forest hedged it in on either side; the path
underfoot was never level and seldom dry; and the insect plagues were a
torment too horrible even to think back upon. In the end we came upon
the swampy margin of a lake--the Menesjärvi we had heard so much
about--and there, after some searching, found a canoe pulled up amongst
the lake-side rushes.
Now the canoe was thoroughly sun-dried, and when put in the water
she leaked after the manner of a basket. Moreover, she was
small--unmistakably small. It was quite obvious to the naked eye that
she would not hold the whole caravan, and equally obvious (when one
looked at each member in turn) that no one wanted any more marching.
However, for Pedr and Pat to walk farther was out of the question. They
were both done to a turn, and fit to drop as it was. So they were put in
the canoe with the baggage, and it just held the load, and Pat (wily
man) annexed the baler, whilst Pedr took the paddles. They bestowed on
us one ample grin, and one of the beautiful smiles, and pushed off.
We three others had to tramp wearily round the margin of the lake to
Menesjärvi Town.
We started off across grassy swamp, and put up a pair of ptarmigan in
the first two dozen yards. The cock was a lovely fellow, splendid in his
summer plumage. He flew off at once; but the hen waited and glared. We
beat about a little to find the chickens; but we did not trouble very
much. We were wearily tired; and so we stumped on without seeing them.
We got out of the swamp soon, and walked through a dry,
straight-stemmed, pine forest, hung with that melancholy, lichenous
growth like the Spanish moss of the Gulf States which we had seen on the
trees near Ischinlisvuoni. But here it seemed younger, or else was
having less deadly effect, for the pines were few of them dead, and for
the most part in sturdy health. Crisp ivory-yellow reindeer moss made
the carpet on which we walked, and at times, through the tree aisles,
we caught sight of deer feeding.
* * * * *
It was a weary march that, for weary men, under the shade of those
gloomy pines, but we were buoyed up with thoughts of the entertainment
we should get at Menesjärvi, which the map marked as a town, or at least
a considerable village. And lo! when we did reach it, the place was
nothing more than the squalid huts of one small family.
But what they had, they offered with the usual easy courtesy. A couple
who were sleeping there turned out of their best room, the dairy, and we
were ushered in and invited to take the vacated couch. We did not do
this; we had had enough of insects of one kind and another that day; and
we thought the floor would be good enough for us. And so on the floor we
camped.
We dined first, sketchily. The room we were in was the dairy. Along
shelves on one side were a couple of rows of wooden-hooped bowls,
eighteen inches in diameter by four deep, in which milk of various dates
and various stages of decomposition was set to cream and curdle. From
time to time the good-wife came in from the farther room, and took up a
horn spoon which lay handy, and skimmed a part of one of the bowls into
a birch-wood piggin which she carried, and then licked the spoon clean
so as to be ready for next time.
Hayter said he quite granted that the lady of the house was very neat
and tidy in her habits, but he would not have any milk. I did. I ate a
bowlful of the clammy, sour curd. I was far too ravenous to be nice
about what I swallowed. And then we divided the contents of one of those
unsatisfactory tins between us. There was not a scrap of anything else
to be had for love, money, or blows.
Three times whilst this process was going on had we with torch and
fingers cleared the room of mosquitoes; three times had fresh swarms
arrived to take possession. The building was full of chinks; it was
impossible for us to stop them up; and so with pain (and some profanity)
we made up our minds to accept _kismet_, and let the enemy do their
worst. We crawled into our sleeping-sacks, and tried to doze.
Never was there a greater failure. The stinging little pests settled on
us in their hundreds, and sleep was out of the question. It was twelve
o'clock at night, and the sun outside, high in the heavens, was beating
on the shingle roof till the room within was like an oven. The air
reeked with sourness from the milk on the shelves, and we were tormented
with an unquenchable thirst as a result of our bites. Hayter, by the
way, was in a tidy fever.
We tried pulling the heavy blanket-sacks over our heads and getting off
to sleep that way. But the result inside was a choking Turkish bath, and
as the mosquitoes got in also, we did not get much profit that way. We
tried leaving our heads outside the sacks, and protecting them with hats
and veils, but that was a more dismal failure still. And finally we were
reduced to lying on our backs and keeping our faces in the midst of a
halo of pungent, stinging, ship's tobacco-smoke.
In the meanwhile we had not been left in our lonesomeness. Almost the
entire time we had one visitor or another staring as though we had been
strange and slightly amusing animals. It is a curious _trait_ of the
Lapps, that although in many simple ways they are a very polite people,
they will enter your room at any time without knocking or asking any
trace of permission, and will stare complacently at what is going on
without uttering so much as a word of comment.
A weird crew they were too, this audience at Menesjärvi, and it was hard
at times to persuade ourselves that we had not gone to sleep after all,
and that these were merely the people of fever and nightmare. They were
most of them deformed. One hump-backed girl, with pigeon breast and a
livid face, had a wedding ring on her finger and a couple of puny brats
at her heels. Intermarriage does dreadful work amongst some of these
isolated communities. Those who have been on Fair Island, that tiny
patch of land between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, where once an
Armada ship was wrecked, will have seen a grisly instance of this
nearer home.
The dogs alone were well-shapen and well-cared for. But then the Lapps
always are kind to their dogs, just as the Northern Finns are almost
invariably brutal.
[Illustration: Sketches at Menesjärvi]
CHAPTER VII
INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES--(_Continued_)
We had small appetite for breakfast next morning after that horrible
night, and this was a fortunate thing, for there was little enough
provender available. We could not buy so much as a crumb of bread or a
shred of fish. The wretched people had none to sell. Johann showed a
pleasant piece of thoughtfulness. He came into the dairy with a blazing
bundle of green twigs in his hand, and filled the room with clean, fresh
wood-smoke, so that we might have the early morning in peace. Even the
sour-milk smell fled before that billowing wood-reek.
A mark paid our poor night's lodging, and for another mark we chartered
a good canoe to take us down the lake and up the Menesjoki, with a limp,
small boy to bring her back. The hump-backed woman and her brood came
down to the lake-shore and stared drearily at us as we paddled off.
* * * * *
That morning voyage down the lake lingers in the memory as one of the
seven pleasures of life. The sun was bright and glorious in a blue sky
overhead; a breeze fanned the fever from our hands and faces; and the
canoe carried us as though it were the delightful vessel of a dream. The
water tinkled and the paddles _cheeped_ against the gunwales. We drank
deep of the ease and gentleness of it all.
All around the lake were hills, pine-covered and highish, but, as usual,
many patches of the forests were dead, and the tree skeletons stood out
gray and naked amongst their feathered comrades. Only one green patch
was visible on all the shores, and that was Menesjärvi, where we had
come from. The eye should have dwelt on it with pleasure, but the
horrors of the night we had spent there were still big in us, and we
turned from it with shudders.
We got into the Menesjoki after three times grounding on the shallows,
and paddled pleasantly up between its banks. Here indeed was surprising
scenery. We might have been rowing by some river-side park on the
Thames, the cultivated growth of ages, the daily care of a hundred
gardeners. There were graceful foliage trees, and trim, well-favoured
shrubs, and clumps of flowers, and lawns of the pleasantest green, all
repeated faithfully in the still mirror of the water. It was hard to
keep in mind that human foot did not tread these banks once in a dozen
years.
Fish rising at flies dappled the water mirror with dainty rings, and now
and again the swirl of a foraging pike gashed it with a rippling fan.
Even the mosquitoes, those insects of the devil, seemed to respect the
sanctity of this paradise, and acknowledged that they were too evil to
sully its delights.
The river wound into countless curves, and the Lapps paddled on at a
steady gait. A brood of duck appeared in the water ahead of us, black in
body, with a white bar across the wings. _Leenoot_ was their country
name. There was no drake; he was away from family cares. But Madame was
fully alive to the unpleasantness of our neighbourhood. Away the whole
crew of them went, splutter and splash, paddling lustily. The old lady
led the way and quacked out directions, to which her family were fully
obedient. One by one they left her, some diving, some swimming direct to
the cover on the banks; and then she herself, with a final quack of
defiance, got in the air and flew away through an alley of black pines.
The river-side park ended here, as though we had left one estate and
come upon another owned by some churl with no eye to neatness or
horticultural beauty. A sandy bluff reared up above the stream, and on
it was a dead forest of gaunt, gray, barkless pines, standing up as an
eyesore to heaven. It had not been killed by fire; it had not been
ring-barked or destroyed by any device of man; but the trees, the old,
the young, and the sapling, had simply got tired of life, and so died
altogether in rank as they stood. The mosquitoes came back here, and set
about their iniquitous work. The stream grew swifter and more hard to
paddle against; the sun went in; and we were brought from our brief,
pleasant dream, back to some of the more crude realities of Arctic
Lapland. I remembered that my ankles were puffed like some old
cab-horse's with the bites, and I got out the bottle and rubbed brown
tar on them and on my face as a preventive unguent.
Still more did the river water quicken in speed, till at last we came
upon a noisy rapid, and had to put the canoe's nose upon the bank. We
disembarked. The limp boy from Menesjärvi started to paddle her back;
the three Lapps shouldered their burdens; and once more we stepped out
through the country under the shade of stately pines.
We found ourselves amongst a herd of grazing reindeer--if herd can be
used for such a scattered flock. Now we would see one through the
palings of the pines, trotting away from us into the deeper quiet of the
woods. Now one would stalk out in lordly majesty, and stand, a clear
mark against some sky-line, and stare in haughty wonder as to who those
intruders could be who dared to bring their taint between the wind and
his nobility. And then as we came up, back would go the branching
antlers against the straight, strong back, and in a moment the forest
would have swallowed him from view.
They were all in velvet, these deer, with the young horn hot and
feverish beneath its covering, and with their antlers in many cases only
half-grown. They were only just recovering from the leanness of spring.
They were still casting their coats, and the old hair hung from them in
faded, matted tufts, which made them look dishevelled and woebegone. Six
weeks later they would be in their prime, rolling in fat, sleek-coated,
and ready for heavy sledge-work, and short commons, and all another
winter's stress. They would be decked, too, with new antlers, clean and
unsplintered, and proudly conscious of the two new points which marked
the dignity of another year's growth. But at present their one life-duty
was to eat, and eat, and eat; and the crisp ivory-yellow moss which lay
thick beneath the pines, and the tender shoots of the birches and the
Arctic willows, provided the wherewithal.
It was Pat's delight to set off these deer into a stretching gallop.
"_Porro_," he would whisper when his poacher's blue eye caught sight of
one of the brown forms grazing between the tree-stems. And then the
Lapps would all creep forward on their silent foot-gear till the
reindeer espied them, and Pat would set back his head and let a regular
Irish yell out of him till the forest rang again. The deer would start
off with the last mouthful of the crisp, yellow moss hanging from its
lips, and the perspiring Johann would burst into a great guffaw, and
Pedr would deliver himself of one of those beautiful smiles which
served to express his every emotion. And then Pat would turn to us with
his droll grin, and we would have to laugh too, whether we wanted to or
not. He was really a most cheery ruffian, this strayed Galwegian.
We came across a great stretch of marsh after this, with logs laid down
over the worst parts, and at the farther side we made a midday camp w
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