IN TOUCH WITH THE GENUINE NOMAD, WITH SOME
REMARKS UPON HIS DOMESTIC DEER, HIS TREASURE-HOARDS,
AND THE DECAY OF HIS PRACTICE IN
SORCERY
We roused after an uneasy sleep and stepped outside the rest-hut, and
looked at the hot, round sun which hung behind a hilltop close at hand.
Hayter guessed the hour as 6 A.M. I considered it to be six in the
evening. We had no watch, and did not in the least know which was right,
nor did we remarkably care. We were in a land where the daylight endured
for each hour of the twenty-four on end, and we were setting off to
visit those to whom the very name of hours was an unknown thing. We were
going to seek the nomad herders in the deeper recesses of the fjeld.
We might be a week before we found them, we might be only a day. Their
trail grows up after them, and no one but a herder Lapp himself should
know his own whereabouts. To come across the deer pack, the only way was
to quarter the country in great wide beats, and to do this quickly one
must travel light. So we arranged to reduce our _entourage_ to the
smallest possible limits.
The excellent Johann was to come with us as personal attendant, and for
once in his life that cheerful person pouted and looked sad. We might
get lost, he pointed out; we should probably find no herder Lapps at
all; and even if we did, it was by no means certain that they would
entreat us civilly. And finally--well, he did not want to go. He
puckered up his face and nearly blubbered over it. He was a bit of a
child, this loud-voiced acrobat in disguise. But in the end, when we did
start, he had got his usual noisy spirits back again at the end of the
first half-mile.
By way of baggage we had each of us a couple of tins of food, and though
Hayter and I carried a tooth-brush each in addition, that was the end of
our burdens. We were marching light, in the strictest sense of the word,
and everything else that we possessed was left to the tender care of the
other two carriers at the rest-hut. If we wished to drink, we must lift
up fjeld water in the cup of our hands; when we slept, it must be _à la
belle étoile_. No other methods are possible in the heart of Arctic
Lapland.
In this irresponsible trim, then, we set off, and travelled for I cannot
say exactly how long or how far. We had no watch to mark the time,
nothing but the weariness of the legs to check the mileage. We slept
when we felt inclined, we ate frugally when the emptiness of our
insides refused any longer to be humbugged by draughts of water. I fancy
we were two days at this game, though it might have lasted three, and if
any one insisted on four, I would not stand out very firmly. When one is
on the tramp like this, and tumbles off to rest, bone-weary, it is
astonishingly hard to calculate how long sleep has endured. At any rate
three out of the six tins had been emptied, and we were looking
longingly at the survivors.
Then we came across an encampment of the deer-herders. It was the
distant bark of a dog which first gave us advertisement of their
neighbourhood. We were amongst a tangle of small hills, sparsely wooded,
and richly carpeted with the ivory-yellow moss. We stopped and listened,
holding our breath.
The deep-toned bark came to us again, carrying over the hills and
through the scattered stems of the pines and the birches. Johann
stretched out an arm and swept it slowly through a sextant of space. He
brought it to a rest, and looked at each of us in turn. We nodded. Then
we started off again down the direction he had pointed.
On the top of each rise we stretched out our necks expecting to see the
deer-herd close beneath. There was nothing but the aching emptiness of
the fjeld, and the dog's bark was not repeated. Had we----
No, there was a reindeer, and another, and four more. And there were
fifty grazing on the yellow side of that ravine, with two bulls
fighting in the middle of them. And there was the bivouac down amongst
that juniper scrub and those gray tumbled rocks beside the stream.
A watchful hound woke out of sleep, saw us, and gave tongue diligently.
Some one out of sight whistled. A stunted woman bobbed up from a
sky-line, and then a little bandy-legged man appeared on our flank, and
came running up, shouting diligently.
Johann's face up to this had been doubtful; he was by no means certain
that he, a denizen of huts, would get a civil reception from the free
nomad of the fjeld. But the sight of the bandy-legged man running, or
the words that he shouted, seemed to drive away all unpleasant
suspicions. Johann capered to meet him, guffawing with delight; and they
shook hands limply and interchanged their views on the situation for at
least ten minutes. Then the little bandy-legged man came up and smiled a
welcome, shook hands limply with us also, and invited us to his
residence.
By this time news had gone round, flying from mouth to mouth across the
ridges of the fjeld, and there had arrived at the bivouac two small
girls in leather breeches and trim _matsoreos_ of skin, a wrinkled old
woman, a half-grown boy, and Marie, the squat little person who had seen
us first from the sky-line. We settled ourselves about upon the rocks
and amongst the scented juniper bushes, and exchanged our news with
vigorous pantomime.
A fire smouldered on a small hill of ashes in a handy open space. In the
background stood the brown cloth-covered _la-wo_, a residence far more
like the North American conical _tee-pee_ than its nearer neighbour the
Samoyede _choom_; and though it yielded up a thin smoke from the
bristling sticks at its apex, to tell that the domestic hearth was lit
inside, and all was ready for habitation, it was plainly impossible to
pack so large a party under shelter of the sloping walls on a floor
space which was only seven feet in diameter. And besides, the _la-wo_ is
not meant for a parlour; it is merely a shelter. Go all over the rest of
the world, and the host will ask his guest to "come inside"; the
wandering Arab will invite you to his black tent; even the Congo savage
will ask one to enter his hut of reeds; but to the nomad Lapp this idea
of a "home" has not yet come. He will offer his hospitality to the
chance stranger; he may even be lavish so far as his starveling means
admit; but he has no house-pride; the lee of a rock or the sunny side of
a brae under Jove's cold sky is the only snug corner or dining-place
which it occurs to him is needed.
However, it was evident we were being pressed to "stay and dine."
The contents of the larder ran about till they were needed--to wit,
small black-and-tan lemmings. There were plenty of them around, and the
Lapps got up and ranged about to catch the needful supply. We turned to
and did our share. They are foolish creatures, these lemmings, in
personal appearance something between a guinea-pig and a rat, and with
very little notion of self-preservation. After catching your lemming you
skin and gut him, and then place him to toast in front of the general
fire on the end of a pointed stick, which is jabbed into the ground.
We got these preliminaries settled, and squatted in a ring round the
fire watching the roasts--all, that is, except the wrinkled old woman.
She, good soul, was engaged upon a much more tedious ceremony. Out of a
skin knapsack she had taken a small skin bag. From this she extracted
some twelve green coffee-beans, which she proceeded to roast one by one
in a small iron spoon, to the accompaniment of vast care and solicitude.
When all were cooked to her taste, she bruised them to coarse
fragments--and be it well understood she did not grind them--between two
stones, and put the result with water into a kettle of copper, which had
one lid in the usual place, and another on the end of the spout to keep
out smoke and feathery wood-ash.
[Illustration: HERDER LAPPS' ENCAMPMENT.]
In the kettle the whole mixture was boiled up together into a bubbling
broth of coffee fragments and coffee extract. She cleared it by an old
trick which is known to campers all the world over. She put into the
kettle a small splash of cold water, and the coffee-grounds were
promptly precipitated to the bottom. Then she poured the clear, brown,
steaming liquor into a blackened bowl of birch-root, and handed it to
the good-man, her husband.
We had finished our two lemmings apiece by this time--exquisitely nasty
they were, too--and here was after-dinner _café noir_. The host took the
bowl in his fingers, and the old woman, hunting in the leather knapsack,
produced a block of beet-sugar wrapped in a careful fold of skin. The
host bit a chunk off this, and lodged it in his teeth; then he lifted
the bowl to his lips and drank.
In a more civilised man this would have been rudeness, in a savage it
was an act of simple courtesy. It was a plain assurance to all who
beheld that the bowl contained no poison. Then he handed it on, and we
drank in our turn, and I do not know that I have ever tasted more
perfect coffee. The two girls and the half-grown boy went off to attend
to their business with the herd, and we others sprawled back where we
were, and smoked, and dropped off to sleep when we felt so inclined.
The summer herding of reindeer by these mountain Lapps is more active
work than the pastoral life of an English shepherd. A sheep, of course,
requires some management, and even a flock of lumbering Southdowns can
at times stampede and do themselves considerable damage. But a reindeer
herd of (say) 300 head, maddened by mosquito bites, and once well on
the move, is a force which it requires more than the ordinary bucolic
science to deal with. They may easily take a month to recollect after a
successful break like this.
As a consequence, the patrol round the herd is constant and strict. Each
sentry has a coil of small rope, and at the least sign of a gathering
together of the beasts preparatory to a rush, the sentry scampers at
speed across the direction in which they are heading, paying out the
rope as he (or she) goes, so that it lies like a lean gray snake upon
the uneven ground. It is rather wonderful to watch what happens. The
deer charge up with growing speed, sight the rope, and pull up with
absurd haste, snuffing it and trembling. And then up comes the sentry, a
leather-clad imp of perhaps three foot six in total length, and with
voice and foot drives back the great antlered brutes in ignominy to
their pasturage.
But, at the same time, it is not advisable to let the mosquito-plague
torment the beasts too much, and this is why the summer herding is done
on the high ground, where these pests are fewer. Still even there they
sometimes abound; and, when they grow very bad, the mountain Lapps will
(for a treat) light fires to windward of their herd, and let them revel
in the sanctuary of smoke. Fancy semi-wild deer, even through the custom
of ages, accepting a diet of smoke!
The domesticated reindeer of Arctic Lapland varies much in bigness,
according to the age and the breed; but, taking the average, they are
smaller than the wild deer of the high fjeld in Southern Norway, and
smaller than the domestic reindeer of Siberia. Still they are of no puny
size, and a fine red stag of the Scottish Highlands would find many
equals in girth and shoulder height amongst the Arctic herds. But the
Scotchman would tower above the rest by reason of his carriage of the
head and antlers.
There is nothing majestic about a reindeer's deportment. He is usually
cow-hocked. His great splay-feet, with their two lateral hoofs, are
excellent, it is true, for getting grip on snow surfaces, but
architecturally they are far from beautiful. And the carriage of the
head is distinctly bad; whether standing still or on the move, they have
their ears on a level with the withers, and the hairy nose stuck out in
front.
Amongst all the deer tribes of other lands the females are hornless, but
the reindeer, whether she is wild or whether she is domesticated, sports
antlers of orthodox shape. They are slightly smaller than her husband's,
but, like his, they begin to appear within a few weeks of birth, which,
seeing that most deer do not show a trace of horn till they are at least
nine months old, is an abnormally early development. The lady's
head-gear, too, although it is slimmer and has less points than
monsieur's, is worn all through the winter, and is not got rid of till
the troubles of maternity begin in the spring. And here she shows her
superiority, for the bull reindeer has always cast his antlers by the
end of November. This trifling fact is usually overlooked by those
artists who at Christmas-time draw such pleasing pictures of impossible
Lapps careering in toy-shop sledges towards a genuinely London-made
_aurora borealis_. It seems a pity to cast comparison on so many pretty
drawings, but let us be accurate sometimes, even if we have to forego an
artistic effect.
The sledge-deer is not a natural product, but the outcome of severe
training. It takes three winters of hard breaking-in before he could
sell with the warranty of "Quiet to drive in single harness: has dragged
a lady." He is not a picturesque animal when he is on the move, with a
sledge behind him jolting along at the end of its long, hide trace. He
gets over the ground quickly, it is true, but he leaves all possible
grace out of the performance. His gait is a series of long, striding
slides, which make one think he is eternally on the point of coming
down, and predict for him wrung withers, sprung hocks, and a necessity
for embrocation on every muscle of his body. He overreaches at every
step, and rattles his great splay hoofs against one another like some
one playing castanets. But, if not over-pressed, he can get over
enormous distances at an eight- to ten-mile-an-hour speed (according to
the ground), in front of a 200-lb. load, in the worst of Arctic weather,
and on a miraculously small supply of forage; and he possesses climbing
powers which would put even a Spanish _contrabandista's_ mule to the
blush.
But the nomad Lapp of this district does not exist merely as a breeder
of draught animals, and not two per cent of his flock ever feel the
chafe of trace or collar. He is a purveyor of meat: he breeds, rears,
and tends his deer for the one sole purpose that in due time they may be
driven down to a market, and there be exchanged for the luxuries of life
and a balance of current coin. He needs sugar, green coffee-beans, and
Russian leaf-tobacco, and the fjeld produces none of these things; but
in the places where the reindeer can be sold, there they may be bought
from traders.
And at the same time he uses the herd in a measure to support his own
life. The thick syrupy milk--almost as dense as the condensed Swiss milk
one gets in tins elsewhere--makes part of his daily meal. We came across
it not unfrequently. It is carried in grimy bladders, and, after the
custom of the country, is usually rather sour. At meal-times it is
poured into a large bowl of birch-root, which the host holds between his
knees. There is one spoon, a shallow affair of bone, which is handed
from one to another, and it is always considered polite to lick the
spoon quite clean before passing it on. The milk itself, either by
reason of its surroundings, or because it is made that way, has a
telling flavour of ancient turpentine, which clings in the memory. But
I do not think that reindeer milk eaten _à la laponne_ will ever be
introduced as a delicacy by English _gourmets_.
Farther westward in Lapland, the ownership of the deer is different.
Every Finn farmer must have his six to eighteen deer for winter traffic,
and as the country is more thickly settled there, a great many deer are
required. In the summer these are handed over to some Lapp, who will
graze them and return them when the snow comes again in good condition
for the heavy work. The Lapp gets a fee for his trouble, and takes as a
perquisite any increase which may occur whilst the beasts are under his
charge. He runs all the deer entrusted to him in this way together in
one big herd, and separates them (if so be he should forget the
individuals) by their respective ear-markings, which are registered
property.
The niceties of scientific breeding are beyond the crude wit of this
meat farmer of Arctic Lapland, and though he occasionally does a swap,
weight for weight, and age for age, to bring new blood from a distant
herd into his own, and so prevent continuous in-breeding, this is about
the utmost extent of his efforts. He accepts the new-born calves as they
appear, and does his best to keep them in fettle and get them fit for
market in the smallest possible time. In summer he drives them through
the forests of Arctic willow and birch, where they may browse on the
young shoots or eat the crisp moss underfoot. And for the benefit of
those that have not seen the performance, I may say it is a quaint sight
to watch a solemn reindeer reared up on his hind legs, with his great
splay fore-hoofs against a birch trunk, trying to grab the tender
foliage which dangles so temptingly just above his hairy muzzle. His one
regret, then, is that Nature has not given him wings. But in winter the
mountain Lapp herds his deer where the snow blanket is thinnest, so that
they may most easily delve down to the moss beneath.
It is a curious sight, also, to see a reindeer-herd feeding in the gloom
of the Arctic night, when a six-foot layer of snow intervenes between
the glowering sky and its food. Each deer digs for itself a pit, hoeing
the white mass with its prominent brow-tines, and scratching out the
powdery snow with its forefeet, after the manner of a fox terrier
delving for rabbits; so that when it is grazing on the succulent moss
below it is quite out of sight from the snow surface above. The deer
does not enlarge the floor of this pit to any great extent, and it does
not understand the art of making a trench. When one patch of the moss is
eaten bare, it clambers to the surface again and makes another pit.
When the sleigh traveller, driving along through the dark twilight,
comes across one of these places where a deer herd has been digging down
to food, he generally has plenty of occupation before he has crossed it
safely to the farther side.
The reindeer, by the way, is identical with the cariboo of Northern
America, and at one time, though long ago, it certainly existed in these
islands of Great Britain and Ireland. It lingered longest in Caithness,
and certainly was not extinguished there till the middle of the
thirteenth century. But although the American red man, and the trapper,
and the pre-historic Scotchman, have all, at one time or another, made
their living out of the deer, none of these ever bred them as a domestic
animal--that is an occupation parochial to the Lapp alone.
Here is a very interesting proposition. Where has all the money gone to
for which, during so many weary centuries, these herds have been
exchanged? The Lapp does not spend it upon himself, that is evident; and
if he hoards it, where is his strong room? Legend alone deigns to tell:
the Lapp himself preserves a massive ignorance.
It was a Norskman of Namsdalen who taught me all I know upon the
subject, and what he said was too much like a fairy-tale to be taken
very seriously. He was my hunter at the time. We were after elk, and he
was moved to speech by the finding of the despoiled carcass of a cow-elk
which had been slain by poacher Lapps. It seems he had once been
enamoured of a Lappish woman (Fin-ne, he called her) himself, and under
pressure she had shown him the hoard of her tribe.
It lay in a narrow glacier which trickled its frozen stream down a
bleak pass in the mountain. At one place a spur of the rock had canted
away the moraine stones into the centre of the stream, and behind the
spur was a little bay of rock filled, as it were, with a backwater of
clear green ice. At the edge of this they knelt, and stabbed and dug
with their sheath-knives, and as the pit deepened round their feet they
heard the muffled groans which poured from the heart of the glacier.
These were the ghosts in the ice, the Fin-ne woman told him--clammy,
resistless ghosts, who strangled thieves, as they had done through
countless thousands of years. And when at last their knives had slashed
a way to the lip of the cave, which lay below, my superstitious Norsk
hunter almost believed her.
The woman herself would not go inside--she dared not. But the Norskman,
though full of shrinkings, slid down over the glittering ice fragments
into the cold, black cave beyond. And there, in the half gloom, lit only
by the few rays which struggled in through the hole they had dug, and
the cold green light from the ice, what a sight it was that met his
eyes! He was in the treasure-house of the Lapps, a regular Aladdin's
cave, crammed with the plunder of centuries.
In ordinary sacks of skin were the _kroner_ of recent years, and the
national silver coinage which obtained before that. There in heaps were
the heterogeneous coins of past ages and every country. And beyond was
a curious litter of pewter candlesticks, jewelled sword-hilts, a gold
Communion chalice, a rusted iron mace, a bone crucifix, bowls, chains,
ladles, knives, some of precious metal, some mere valueless relics: and
outside, the ghosts of the ice creaked and rustled incessantly.
Here, then, was the tale of how those old sea rovers, who stormed
Scarborough, and burned the Humber villages, and ravaged the coasts of
England and France, obtained meat to victual their galleys. Here was the
plunder they had brought back from their distant piracies, peddled away
to buy deer meat for fresh expeditions. But the man who looked on it all
did not stop to make more than a hasty catalogue. The whispering ghosts
of the ice scared him, the cold darkness of the place chilled his blood,
and without, in the daylight, the Fin-ne woman incessantly whimpered and
cried out that he should come back to her....
This is the tale as it was told to me beside the relics of that murdered
cow-elk in Namsdalen, and this is all I know about the matter. A glow
for treasure-hunting warmed in me. I wanted to set off at once and see
that cave by the glacier for myself, and finger its contents. But the
hunter was not to be persuaded; he said he had forgotten its
whereabouts. That, of course, was absurd for a man who knew every tree
and every rock on the fjeld. But I rather think the Lapps had scared him
into holding his tongue about the matter. He had a very real terror of
their powers of sorcery, as I had learned already, and I was inclined to
credit his tale about the hoard--he had not got the necessary power of
invention to have made it up. Besides, the viking "local colour" which
he gave me (and which I have forgotten) was clean beyond him.
* * * * *
Where these herder Lapps, who were our hosts just then in Arctic
Lapland, had their strong-room we were not indelicate enough to inquire,
but we did push questions, as far as they would go, upon another
point--we wanted to witness some practical sorcery. We wished to see the
drum brought out, a genuine active curse performed, and then watch it go
home to roost. When I had lived with Laplanders before, I had seen
nothing of these things, and well-informed friends afterwards had blamed
me for not furthering questions and watching real _bona fide_ sorcery in
full working action.
Such a thing as witch-, or rather wizard-craft seemed an anachronism,
and yet it was undoubtedly done and believed in. Many a Norwegian valley
farmer, who has offended his Fin-ne neighbour, has been told that his
sheep or his oxen shall in consequence suffer, and has watched the poor
brutes pine away and die from no apparent ailment. From a distance one
glibly diagnoses poison cunningly administered, but on the spot one
seems to grasp that some other influence is at work which is not so
easily explained away.
We were keen, then, to see this sorcery process in full working order.
We wanted to inspect the oval-headed drum with its curious figuring
which is the outward and visible sign, and to watch all the ritual of
spell-weaving by a recognised practitioner. We were prepared to supply
him with a subject. Hayter and I both agreed that there was a certain
large fat man of our acquaintance whom we would gladly sacrifice to the
cause of science. Hayter should draw his portrait, we would have him
thoroughly cursed, and we would go back to England and note the result
for ourselves. If the fat man had dwindled appreciably, then we would
credit the powers of Lapland sorcerers; otherwise we would withhold
judgment, or perhaps go so far as to disbelieve.
So we broached the matter openly round the camp-fire. Our grimy host
grinned and shook his head. Hayter drew the fat man's portrait and held
it out alluringly. Our host sighed; the fat man was certainly a most
tempting subject to carry a real good, comprehensive curse. But as he
sighed, he shook his head. He said he had thrown up his practice as a
sorcerer; he tried to imply he had sold it, and then he denied having
ever practised at all. Yes, he quite understood what we wanted; he
looked at the portrait hungrily, and rubbed his scrubby chin, and was
truly sorry he could not undertake the job. But that sort of thing was
past and over now--at any rate, on behalf of foreigners. And yet----He
looked at the fat man's portrait again, and took an imaginary drum
between his knees and tapped music from its head. And then he frowned
and shrugged his shoulders, and begged some ship's tobacco, and began
ostentatiously to talk about an attack of _laminitis_ in one of his
deer's hoofs, which we had been prescribing for.
He let us understand very clearly that the subject was a delicate one,
and that he did not choose to be drawn on it; and from him--upon
sorcery--we heard no more. As it chanced, his daughter Marie took a
great fancy to one of us, and we thought we might get news of what we
wanted from her. But although the favoured one took many walks with the
young lady over the quiet folds of the tundra (always keeping carefully
on the windward side of her), he never got any definite information on
the subject he had at heart. The damsel was clearly as ignorant as
himself, and in the end, when he was "cut out" by the gallant Johann, he
bore the pain of being supplanted like a man. Marie was very nice,
but--well, one could not always manage to keep to windward of her.
And so there ended our dealing with the matter. It had been one of my
aspirations to some time have the power of writing a genuine interview
with a practical sorcerer, and the thing plainly could not be done. If
witchcraft is still practised in Lapland, it is done with small
ostentation, but I am inclined to think the whole business has died out.
The degenerate Lapps,--those whose fathers have at one time failed as
deer-herders on the fjeld, and who have come down to being vagabond
river-fishers, or mere prosperous lake-side farmers,--are moving with
the times. Many of them can read, and some can write. Schoolmasters go
amongst them during the idle months of winter. And before that practical
person--the schoolmaster--the practising warlock has to hide his drum.
Holy Russia is at the schoolmaster's back, and here is another of the
crimes with which that terrible country must be charged: it has elbowed
out of Europe the final relics of the cult of sorcery. One could almost
turn Nihilist out of sheer regret.
[Illustration: The Sorcerer and the Portrait]