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.