ON TO POKKA, WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO PRINCE
JOHANN OF LAPLAND
Here then was Ivalomati, the village we had looked for so long, a place
made up of one small house of logs, one squalid barn with yawning sides,
and an adult population of three souls--a woman and two men. The adult
population was away fishing, or rather attempting to fish, for, as it
turned out, the toil of twenty-four hours brought forth no catch. A
swarm of children of every age, from the crawler upwards, was left in
charge. It was the eldest girl, a shy, wild creature, almost pretty, who
took the canoe and brought us across the river; and she it was who
offered us all the poor house could afford--a small, bare room.
There was more evidence of real poverty open to the public view in
Ivalomati than at any other place we visited in Arctic Lapland. The
children had not got summer clothes--the first we had seen lacking them.
They wore the tattered rags of some winter furs, exposing three-quarters
of their wretched skins to the intolerable bitings of the mosquitoes.
We made a half-hearted attempt to buy food, and learned definitely what
we had guessed, that they had no food even for themselves.
Life there might be hard, but the adults of Ivalomati were not the sort
to make it most endurable. The two men were Finns, slack, doltish, and
indolent. The woman was a Lapp, worn out with much child-bearing. The
large-skulled, hybrid children seemed to have no occupation except to
play about on a mud heap and try and stay their bellies by chewing the
sappy river-grass.
A tattered, ancient net with birch-bark floats fluttered from the rotten
drying-posts, a plantation of weeds flourished inside a broken-down
fence, and these were the only indications of how a livelihood was made.
Judging from the fly-blown, grass-covered midden outside the crumbling
barn, there once had been a cow in Ivalomati, and a cracked iron
cauldron, still holding the traces of a stew of reed grass and fish
offal, gave indications that the cow had been fed according to the
orthodox fashion of the country; but when we saw the place the cow was
not, and all that stood between the wretched bipeds and starvation were
the few small fish they could manage to dredge out of the Ivalojoki.
We "killed a tin" that night, and washed it down with a dose of weak
cocoa; and after dinner the door opened and our three carriers came in
with a peace-offering. Each had an armful of mouldy hay, which he
deposited on the floor, and Johann gleefully waved a foul brown-calico
sheet, which he pointed out would make us a most luxurious mosquito-bar.
It seemed as though we were really going to get a comfortable night's
sleep, and we wanted it.
The hay smelt of mustiness, and the sheet smelt of something worse, but
we were in no mood for niceties. The room was alive with mosquitoes.
Once, twice, and three times did we make raids upon them, and burn
thousands with flaring torches, and for a moment the place would be
clear. But only for a moment. Through the innumerable chinks of the
walls of the roof there flew in constantly fresh thousands, who would
drum their _pas de charge_ and set to work on our suffering bodies with
heroic disregard of consequences. Desperately weary though we might be,
there was no sleep to be got whilst one lay exposed to that horrible,
relentless biting.
So we ranged the hay diagonally across the room into one long bed, and
took the dirty sheet, and with strings to form the ridge, and thorns to
pin the ends, and stones to hold down the sides, built us a tent some
four feet long, on which we placed high hopes. To be sure it would only
hold a head and shoulders of each of us, but the sleeping-sacks would
sufficiently protect all parts which projected.
It required skill to get inside. We rolled our coats and put them in the
middle of the tent to serve as pillows, and then we got into our sodden
blanket-sacks, lay down on the hay, and cautiously wriggled our heads in
under the opposite ends of the tent. There were three lusty mosquitoes
inside when we arrived, and as these objected to being slaughtered
without a chase, we had managed completely to disarrange the tent before
they had met their due reward. This entailed a reconstruction of the
entire edifice, and as Hayter said he was the least clumsy of the two of
us, he crawled outside, replaced the stones on the sides, and jabbed in
fresh thorns where they were needed. Inside I had plenty of work killing
the mosquitoes which he let in during the process. Finally he crawled in
again, and after the slaying of two others of the little pests which had
managed to secrete themselves up till then, we lay still in the ecstatic
hope that we were going to taste again of that almost forgotten luxury,
easy sleep.
But did we so much as get into a doze? I fancy not. We lay there
motionless on the hay, with our lower extremities hidden from the
insects by the wet blankets, and our heads roof to roof beneath the
odorous tent; and the sweat dripped out of us at every pore. A midnight
sun was blazing high above the hut, and the air in the room was like
that of an oven. The heat under the tent was stifling. Ever and again
first one mosquito, and then another, and then a third, would get inside
our defences, and we would have to bestir ourselves to slay them. The
hay, too, was full of ticks, which added to our torments. When we lay
down, our faces were puffed and blotched with the bites till we could
scarcely see from our eyes; our hands were puffed out like
boxing-gloves; and our arms were swollen till they fitted tight inside a
coat-sleeve. And each of the million bites was a centre of irritation.
Yet every minute this state of torture was being added to.
We passed that night in a condition bordering on frenzy, and let not
those who merely know the mosquito in Africa, in India, and the
Americas, judge us too hardly when I say that at times we wished most
heartily we had never set foot in so detestable a country. Cold, we
could have endured; privation, we were prepared for; but this horrible
stew of flies ground upon the nerves till we were scarcely responsible
for our actions.
* * * * *
In that plan of route we originally laid down at Enare, we had expected
to find Ivalomati to be a village of tolerable size, and hoped to get
carriers there who would take us on across the country to Pokka, and
possibly to Scurujarvi. This idea was of course exploded, and so we set
to work to try the power of blarney upon Pedr, Pat, and Johann, and
persuade them to come farther on.
They did not see it one little bit. They said they had come much too far
from home as it was, and had not the least wish to go farther. They
were quite pleasant over their refusal, and quite determined. Johann
mimicked the pair of us carrying the loads ourselves, tramping through
the country, getting bogged in swamps, and losing the way, and finally
dying of hunger and being covered up (like the babes in the wood) with a
drift of grass and branches; and he roared with laughter at his own
witty pantomime. Pedr glanced towards the direction in which Pokka lay,
turned his back on it with decision, and smiled beautifully. And Pat,
the unshaven Pat, looked so obsequious and so sly, and referred to his
imaginary sore heel with such a roguish eye, that one really expected
him to throw away disguise, and address us as "yer honours," and beg for
John Jamieson's whisky there and then on the spot.
It was funny, but it was not business. Was our tramp across the country
going to be broken after we had got so far and gone through so much, so
very much? We rubbed our aching bites, and reasoned with the carriers
still more earnestly. We besought them almost _in formâ pauperis_
(seeing that we had not got the power to command), and gradually their
mood changed. It is humiliating now to remember how our spirits rose as
they began to yield. And at last they consented to go with us as far as
Pokka; but no farther. Be it well understood, they pointed out, they
would only escort us to Pokka--only. Well, sufficient for the march (we
told ourselves) were the carriers thereof. Subsequent marches must be
left to provide for themselves.
Once they had agreed to go, there was no more delay. We borrowed a
canoe, a very rotten canoe, got on board, and set off up the Ivalojoki.
We had trouble at first, because the river, which was almost as wide as
a lake, was full of weeds, which clung to the canoe and clogged the
paddles. But these cleared as the river narrowed, and we worked up
between low banks where scrub birches grew amongst angular blocks of
gray, lichened stone.
The banks came closer together as we paddled on, and the river increased
in pace, and the way of the canoe grew less. Johann, with his mouth open
and the sweat dripping from his chin, tugged manfully at the sculls in
the bows. Pedr, who was squatted aft with the steering paddle, had his
work cut out to keep clear of rocks round which the water swirled
noisily, and occasionally there was a _bump-bump-bump_ as we dragged
over some submerged boulder which he had not seen.
The little old canoe strained and shivered in the stress of the stream,
and leaked so abundantly that Hayter, who was labouring mid-ships with
the baler, could barely keep the water under; and presently, as she
showed a disposition to swamp altogether, we had to run into the bank
and lighten her burden. Pat, much to his disgust, was ousted from his
rest among the baggage, and made to force his way through the tangle of
shrub and swamp and grasses which made the river-bank; and we two
foreigners went ashore with him. The two Lapps unshipped their paddles,
and punted cannily up the rapids with eight-foot poles. They had hard
work, but we on shore did not exactly find it easy going. Back-washes
branched off the stream, sown with yellow lilies, and some we jumped
across, and some we jumped into; and when the rapids came to an end some
half mile higher up, and we were able to get on board again, liquid mud
oozed from us into little black pools.
Half a mile of smooth brought us to another set of rapids, and once more
a land party of three had to press its way through scrub and morass.
Johann and Pedr punted the light canoe cleverly. One took the stern, the
other perched in the bow. They stood up to put the pole in, and dropped
it vertically. Then came a violent shove, and a sudden sit down at the
end of the thrust. The canoe danced about like a twig in the rapids, and
the waves slopped bountifully over her sides, and every now and again
she had to be brought to the bank to be baled clear and ship a fresh
crew. And finally the rapids got too bad for poling at all, and we made
fast thongs of reindeer hide to the canoe at bow and stern and towed her
empty up-stream with these, pressing through the scrub on the bank when
we could, wading in the river-edge when it was too thick. It was the
only way we could get her along. The river-banks were too swampy and
overgrown to make a portage possible.
As a reward for labour we got some mile of easy water to finish up with,
and then we left the flimsy little canoe finally, and set off once more
on the solid tramp.
Again we came across the winter sleigh-track, a broad swathe cut from
the forest, and left for the snows to smooth down into a road, and in a
couple of miles this led us to a vast, quaking swamp set with a line of
white, bleached crosses to make the trail. But till the frosts of winter
came to harden it, the swamp here was quite impassable; it was a mere
floating quagmire, and we had to skirt it tediously. Acres of
cloud-berries, still unripe, lay upon its surface. The air was musical
with the cries of curlew and other marsh fowl. And from above, the sun
beat upon us with brazen power. Take away the Lapps, take away our sure
knowledge that we were still far within the Arctic Circle, and we might
have been tramping across some primæval land at the back of the Gold
Coast or the Congo.
The ground rose as we toiled on, and for once the mosquitoes were almost
entirely absent. It was bliss to be alive. There was a fine country all
around, and we lazed off for an hour, and made a temporary camp to enjoy
it. Beside us was a pool swarming with tadpoles, and we lay over the
edge and searched and searched in hopes of finding a juvenile frog in
the intermediate stage. But as usual we could not do it.
It was a subject which interested me. At an early age I was taught that
from frog-spawn grew tadpoles, and from these grew frogs. Being of an
inquiring, or a sceptical turn of mind, whichever way one likes to look
at it, I used to catch the little black tadpoles, incarcerate them in
pickle-bottles, and inspect them diligently; but never did the
wished-for result arrive. It may be that a watched tadpole never
changes; and certainly tadpoles do seem to suffer from nerves, because
if one disturbs the surface of a pond where they are occupying
themselves, away go the whole crowd like a lot of animated commas. But I
am inclined to think that nervousness is not the reason of their coy
refusal to do their advertised change-act in public view. It is
beginning to grow on me that they cannot do it. Of course science says
flatly that they do change; but when it wishes, science can lie like
photography or a newspaper; and for the future the tadpole metamorphosis
is eliminated from my private creed. If I am wronging tadpoles as a
nation, I am sorry.
* * * * *
By this stage our Lapp carriers were all very foot-sore, though we
ourselves were quite sound, which does not say much for the theory that
it is always advisable to adopt the foot-gear of the country you are
travelling over. At every halt one or other of them would take off his
boots, extract the grass, spread it out to dry, and add more grass from
the store each carried in his personal knapsack. It was the same grass
which is used for the same purpose in Norway--crisp, dry, green, fine
stuff, without knots, and without seeding tips. It has to be twisted up
and kneaded between the hands to break the fibre; but once so prepared,
it is much like a pad of soft horse-hair in texture. However, as I say,
it chafed badly, and for summer work the bare foot inside the shoe would
probably have been better. That was the way I was going myself; as the
lower extremities of my stockings had long before worn away, and my feet
had grown as hard as a nigger's.
We seemed to be passing away from the birdless region which lay inland
from the Arctic coast. But still there was no great abundance of
feathered creatures. On the swamps one could usually see a pair of
curlew, but seldom more; from behind the forest trees one sometimes
heard the cuckoo's hoot, though from one side of the country to the
other we never saw the bird itself in the actual flesh and feather; and
once, a little ringed dotterel came out into an open space before us and
went through its pitiful pantomime of being wounded, just as one may see
it on the shingle of a Shetland tarn. It was the breeding season for all
of them of course, and even if we had possessed a gun, and from sheer
stress of hunger been willing to slay nursing parents, we should have
got little for our pains; certainly not enough to live on.
It was during a halt on this march, I remember, that Hayter suddenly
exploded into a fit of (apparently) causeless merriment. I asked him
what was the matter. He chuckled and said, "If only it would not cost so
much," and stopped and laughed again.
I did not understand, and asked him to explain further.
He pointed to Johann, who was going through one of his quaint, domestic
exercises, and said, "I wish we could get that beauty to London, and
dump him down in (say) Willis's rooms, and bribe a waiter to put a smart
luncheon in front of him, and then watch from a distance to see the
result."
It was a luscious theme, and we enlarged on it with infinite enjoyment.
We pictured the result of taking Johann back to our native Islands and
launching him upon Society. It would be a thing quite easily done, and
as it happened I knew a parallel case where it was carried out, and many
who read this will probably recollect (perhaps with some discomfiture)
the hero of it. The matter happened quite recently.
Now, who remembers it? There arrived at Liverpool by a B. and A. steamer
not four years ago a jet-black negro from the West Coast of Africa. He
had a little money and more self-confidence than any white man on earth
ever possessed. He wanted to have a good time in England, and he had it.
He had come up from the Coast on the B. and A. boat in the ordinary
second-hand clothes of civilisation, because, of course, plenty of
people on board knew him for what he was. But once ashore in a London
hotel (which is a very long way from a Liverpool quay or the West Coast
of Africa), he took off his shoes and socks and started sandals and bare
legs, he doffed his trousers and coat and shipped long embroidered robes
of green and white, clapped a Haûsa hat on his head in place of the
brown billy-cock, and announced that he was Prince H'umaduya, of some
unpronounceable place behind the British Gold Coast.
Did any one doubt his statement? Not a soul who cared to speak.
Childish, snobbish London took him at his own valuation, and competed
for the honour of fêting him. He went everywhere, did everything, was
fawned upon by everybody. White women waited on him--because he was a
prince. The Lord Mayor gave him a dinner--because he was a prince. And
he accepted it all with the self-assurance he had learned
professionally, and asked for more.
But before his vogue was done, he wisely took himself off, and departed
for Liverpool _en route_ for home and business. I saw him six months
later, in the principal town on the Gold Coast, engaged in his
professional avocation. He was selling a consignment of black,
second-hand, wearing apparel, with noise and industry. Of course he had
gone back to the ordinary boots and trousers and shirt of
pseudo-civilisation, and was in fact very like any other third-rate
auctioneer with a pitch in a back street. His name, as it appeared on
his license and on his signboard down there on the Coast, was John Henry
Brown, and he was reputed to be making money hand over fist, and saving
it. He had tasted the sweets of being an imported prince in London once,
and (as a year or two has passed since then) he is about due to turn up
again and once more offer himself to the lionising public.
Now what we have got in mind is to do the same with Johann. The only
thing necessary will be to teach him a working knowledge of English. We
shall leave his personal habits severely alone; there is a
surprisingness about them which is bound to be appreciated. And to alter
his clothes (for general wear) would be to paint the lily.
John Henry Brown must have been at considerable pains to invent so
picturesque a name as H'umaduya, but a name for our man comes glibly to
hand. _Prince Johann of Lapland_ could not well be improved on for such
a purpose. Get him to London, spend a guinea on a _Morning Post_
announcement of his arrival, and the thing would be done. Cards would
rain in upon him, and people would scuffle with one another for the
honour of getting him to their houses.
It is appetising to picture his behaviour. He would not be bashful in
the very least: there is no shyness about Johann. And he would not be
conventional: no, one could safely swear he would be quite the reverse
of conventional. He might start a dinner seated on an orthodox chair,
but if by any chance a bone came in his way, I am sure he would promptly
retire to the hearth-rug and squat there cross-legged and gnaw it at his
ease. Johann has a peculiar affection for bones. And after that he has
fed, he will take a little tar from the bottle at his belt and anoint
his face luxuriously, in view of a possible inroad of mosquitoes. Later
on, if many people are admiring him excessively, and he feels very
friendly disposed towards them, he will take off his boots and change
the grass in them with care and deliberation. I can imagine the audience
clasping their hands and saying, "How charmingly original it is of the
dear prince to do such a thing!" I wonder, though, how they will stand
it when he begins to scratch himself?
Afterwards I think we shall ship him across to Boston and New York. They
love a prince there too, but they will not have him coloured. H'umaduya
of the Gold Coast would not have gone down at any price in the States.
The Americans have too many niggers at home to tolerate the _bouquet
d'Afrique_ otherwise than in the appartments specially appointed to
contain its assertive flavour; but Prince Johann of Lapland would be a
very different matter. Every paper in New York would publish a personal
interview illustrated with his photographs six hours before he landed.
His political relations with "Czar Nicholas" would be dished up
spicily; and the "barbaric splendours of his princely court" would be
written of with vivid (and a slightly indecent) realism by gentlemen of
the press, who know to a headline what their public want.
But unless there is absolutely no other competition on the carpet, I am
afraid that he would not have so long a reign in the States as he had in
England. In my own, my native land, we like curiosities; in the States
they prefer culture. Curiosities are a drug in the States, and a
slightly impertinent drug at that. Culture is rare, and so they imitate
and talk about it all day long.
* * * * *
Except for the absence of game, the country we were travelling through
was much the same as the Thames valley must have appeared to those
hairy, naked savages who first looked out upon the levels where London
now stands. Here was a forest of fire-slain pines, still reared up gaunt
and gray, defying heaven. Young birches and hazels were growing up round
them. And then would come mile after mile, and mile after mile, of
spongy morass, seamed by rivulets, and smeared by stagnant ponds. The
Thames valley became of use to man, so man drained it, and penned all
the streamlets into one orderly river, and created dry land out of the
swamps. But it is hard to fancy that these great wildernesses so far
within the Arctic Circle will ever be reclaimed by the ditcher for his
master, the factory builder.
We met, though, with some traces of man's handiwork, and man's toil for
his own convenience, as we journeyed on. We came upon a great circular
morass, four miles in diameter. It was ringed in by a jagged paling of
pines, and in the exact centre was a hummocky oasis of gray, lichened
stone. Years before logs had been laid down over the worst parts of the
swamp; they were crumbling and insecure, but they showed a distinct
attempt at road-making; and over these we picked our way in easy peril
of sprained ankles. But still there were many places where the logs had
melted, and through these we had to wallow in the fashion which we had
learned so very thoroughly. I think that this frail path accentuated the
general desolation.
A few miles farther on we met with some more advanced engineering. We
had seen the Tokkaharo River on the map, and had wondered much whether
we could find a ford, or whether we should be forced once more to go
through the operation of rafting. And here before us was a bridge, a
veritable bridge. It was primitive, certainly, and it was not above
suspicion of being rotten. It had two piers of crossed logs, and the
roadway was formed by single trunks, over which one progressed with the
dainty step of the rope-dancer.
It was on this bridge, I regret to say, that Johann belied the
reputation we had made for him, and proved to be not so perfect an
acrobat in practice as he was in personal appearance. He stopped before
the airy structure and looked at it with a puckered face, and it was
evident that he stepped out on it with a failing heart. He travelled
along the first log all right till it began to sway under him, and then
he got demoralised, and landed on the first pier spread-eagle fashion,
being grabbed in the nick of time by Pat and Hayter. The middle span he
did not attempt to walk, but sat a-cock-stride of it, and worked himself
over with his hands. He suffered severely from splinters _en route_, and
the workings of his face were so utterly funny that I regret to say the
entire audience of four shouted with laughter during the whole of his
passage. However he gained the second pier safely, picked a few of the
more obvious splinters out of his person, and contemplated the farther
bank. It was temptingly close. He stepped on to the end of the log,
where it rested on the pier, and stood there for a full minute. He found
the process quite easy; so he set out to walk along it. At the third
step he stretched out his arms, balancing with them. The log was
beginning to sway and buckle under his weight. At the fourth step he
lost his head and his nerve, and made a rush for it. And then he lost
his footing altogether, cannoned against the log with his haunch,
grabbed at it with eager hands, missed, and went souse into ten feet of
icy water in the Takkaharo below. A swirl of the stream put him on the
bank, and he clambered out, and rolled on the green in an ecstasy of
merriment over his own clumsiness.
The log bridge had looked neglected enough, but its reason of being soon
began to get apparent. We came upon a clearing full of old-cut stumps;
wood had been taken from here for building. Then we passed some
quarter-acre patches of rye growing amongst unkempt weeds, enclosed by
rail fences. Then came more patches of clearing and more stumps,
sprawling over two miles of ground. And then, from the top of a knoll, a
high well-derrick rose into view, and directly afterwards we saw beneath
us the scattered settlement of houses which made up the village of
Pokka. Three houses were in sight, sprawling over a square mile of
ground, and each house had its attendant barns and cowsheds. A streamlet
ran between them, broadening out here and there into sedgy lagoons. And
beside the lagoons were nets, with birch-bark floats and pebble sinkers,
hung out to dry upon weather-bleached rails.
We marched up wearily enough to the front of the nearest house, and then
arose a difficulty which was new to us. Our Lapps did not march straight
inside. They did not even knock at the door. They dumped their packs on
to the ground, and hung about near them, three perfect images of
bashfulness.
[Illustration: JOHANN'S ACROBATIC FAILURE.]
Presently the mystery was explained: the house belonged to Finns, an
alien race. We two foreigners, however, were not troubled with any
qualms of inferiority. The wandering Britisher seldom is worried that
way. He is a very complacent animal over questions of nationality, and
is rather apt to thank God in his prayers that he is not as other men
are, "even as this German, or this Chinaman, or this Finn," or whoever
he may have had brought under his lordly notice last. So we knocked at
the door of the house, and presently a man came out. He shook hands
limply with us; he even shook hands with the three Lapps. He was a long,
slack-jointed Finn, with one ear missing and a face as unemotional as a
slab of board. He gave us one of the two rooms his house contained, the
sour-smelling dairy-bedroom; and better still, on pressure, he sold us
food.
A woman brought it in--rye-cake and a double handful of small pieces of
raw fish, semi-dried, and a tub of thick, sour milk. As an after-thought
she produced a wooden spoon, which she thoughtfully licked clean, and
set beside the repast.
With regard to that brown rye-cake of Lapland, I brought a piece home to
England, which my dog saw and annexed. He is a fox-terrier of lusty
appetite, and he tried to eat it. He tried for a whole afternoon, and
finally left the cake alone on a lawn, very little the worse for the
experience. His master, at Pokka, did better. He was sick with hunger,
and devoured two great slabs of the cake, and with it a handful of the
stinking fish.
Looked back at from a distance, those rye-cakes of Lapland do not carry
pleasant memories. The grain from which they are baked grows with little
tending. It is sown; and it is suffered to come up as the weather and
the weeds permit. When it is as near ripe as it chooses to get, it is
reaped, and with the husks, the bran, a larger part of the stalk, and a
fair percentage of the companionable weed, it is chopped into meal. It
is not ground; it is more hay and bran than anything else. Baking days
come seldom, and a large supply is made at once. The dough is pawed out
into discs a foot in diameter and some five-eighths to three-quarters of
an inch thick. Each disc has a hole in the middle, and when they are
baked, the cakes are strung on a stick and hung up on the rafters for
use as required. Age neither softens nor hardens their texture; years
could not deteriorate them.
There are two varieties of these delectable cakes. One sort was like
india-rubber, and on this we could make no impression whatever. But with
the other kind, which was of the consistency of concrete, we could, as a
rule, get on quite well, if we were given time. It was more or less
flavourless, unless it had been packed with stale fish, and it was not
stuff to hurry over. It was not strengthening either, as the system
could assimilate but very little of it. In fact, of all the foods that
ever got past my teeth (and in rambling about the back corners of this
world I have come across some uncanny morsels) the bread of Arctic
Lapland carries the palm for general unsatisfactoriness. But still there
is no denying that the cakes did fill the stomach, and for this purpose
we employed them ravenously whenever they came in our way. There is no
ache so bitter as that of empty belly.
In that sour-smelling dairy-bedroom however at Pokka, Hayter was in
small temper for food. The bites of the preceding night were giving him
the most abominable pain. From scalp to heels he had no sound square
inch on all of his skin. The whole of his body was puffed and reddened,
and each bite was its own centre of irritation. When he scratched
himself he bled, and he had to scratch. He faced the poor meal with
visible shrinkings; he was tormented with a furious thirst, but he could
not eat; and finally, out of sheer weariness, he slid from his stool on
to the floor and dropped off into some sort of sleep.
For the morrow, trouble loomed. Our host, the expressionless man who
lacked an ear, came in and said flatly that no carriers were to be had.
But for myself I heard the news without much stir. I had eaten; and with
food inside him, a man is apt to let the morrow take care of itself.
It seemed good to me to go outside for a whiff of sweet air before
turning in. I strolled across the short-grassed green in front of the
house, and sat me on the well-platform, and stared sleepily at what was
around. From the mistal behind my shoulder came the breathing and
chewing of a couple of cows; from the little two-roomed house at the
other side of the clearing there droned out the snores of the tired
Lapps.
In front of me, the stream widened out into a lagoon, smooth as a sheet
of gleaming metal. Just outside the weeds a fish was rising accurately
in the same spot. The sun lit the forest trees on the opposite shore
with a lurid glow. Mist, like miasma, was rising in gray billows from
some of the farther creeks. I watched it drowsily, and imagined that
somehow or another I was looking upon a sunrise in the Tropics, and that
I had earned a touch of fever. And then I pulled myself together, and
remembered that this was Arctic Lapland, and that it was midnight by the
cuckoo clock in the Finns house, and that the insects were biting me to
pieces. So I got heavily up from the well-cover, and went again to the
sour-smelling dairy, and forgot all things in deep, unconscious sleep.