DOWN THE RAPIDS TO KITTILA TOWN
Huckleberry Finn announced our coming, and after we had taken toll of
the ice-well, we went into the house. Inside the door was a huge room
strewn with sleeping men and women. At one side was a stove with
cooking-places; at the other stood a hand-loom with a piece of chequered
blue-cotton fabric in the course of manufacture. Beside it there
straddled a couple of spinning-wheels.
The room we were given for ourselves, after what we were used to, seemed
an actual palace. It had two windows, a table, a white stone-stove, and
hung on one of the walls was the picture of a gorgeous young lady
working a Singer's sewing-machine. There were two box-beds in the room,
and one of them possessed a mosquito-bar. Ye gods! think of the luxury
of it! Beds and a real mosquito-bar!
The man who received us was the Squire of Küstula, and a great man
indeed. He was a Finn, and yet he was civil and kindly. He set before us
for our entertainment a great bowl of curdled milk, and trotted about
bare-footed beside us, and besought us to eat. But we were a bit too
knocked up to have much appetite then, and we got on to the beds;
whereupon he produced a second mosquito-bar, rigged it, and left us.
Imagine the unspeakable luxury of it! sleep! on a real bed made of
boards and mattressed with hay; and without either fleas or ticks or
mosquitoes to bite one into wakefulness. We revelled there in sleep for
three solid hours.
The noise of the housework roused us, and we got up, very swollen and
stiff from the bites. The tub of curdled milk was on the table, and we
ate it thirstily. The Squire heard us moving, and paddled in on his bare
feet, and grinned affably. His name by the way was Johann Sanmelli Myal,
but we called him Squire from the first, as that name seemed to suit him
best.
We mentioned that we wanted a canoe and men to take us to Kittila, and
he said he had guessed it already, and we could set off whenever we
chose. Here was thoughtfulness and civility! It seemed marvellous to
find such qualities and such a house within a day's march of that
dreadful, listless savage at Scurujärvi.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry were hanging about waiting to be paid, and we
gave them what we had bargained for with the feckless one, and a
_douceur_ over for themselves, and then we went out and strolled about
in the open air.
The settlement was very different from any we had seen before, and I
only hope for the sake of the civil people who live there, that it was
as prosperous as it looked. Viewed from a distance, so that one could
not tell whether the green crops were rye and barley, or lanky maize, it
might have been a settlement in North Carolina or the Western States,
except for one thing--there was no litter about. There were none of
those heaps of disused meat, and yeast, and tomato tins, so inseparable
from new American civilisation. All was trim.
There were a few Lapps about the place it is true, but they were merely
in Küstula as dependants. Not one owned a farm. The people of Küstula,
however, had dealings with the aboriginal in another way. For all winter
traction and transport they used reindeer, but when we visited the
village there was not a single one within its boundaries. Each farmer
had an agreement with a Lapp, and sent away his ear-marked deer to be
pastured under the Lapp's charge on the distant uplands of the fjeld and
tundra.
We made no long stay in Küstula. For the first time since we had set
foot in the country, transport was made ready for us without a weary
haggle of words; and the unaccustomed easiness of it was too delightful
not to be taken advantage of. We limped stiffly down through the
slip-rails of the fields, a bevy of men and children and women all
accompanying us, and we came upon the river some half mile away from
the house where we had slept. The map names it the Loukinenjoki, but the
Finns of Küstula, knowing nothing of imaginative maps, and being taught
on these matters merely by the tradition of their forefathers, preferred
to call it the Loosnen.
The river here was young, being born of rills in the blue mountains only
a few miles away, amongst their swamps and pines and comely birches; and
it ran round bends and curves innumerable. Sometimes it widened into
lagoons, sometimes the banks hemmed it in to narrows, and the waters
spouted with waterfalls and rapids.
On the short grass of the bank lay a new canoe, bottom upwards. I sat
down on her, and discovered also that she was newly tarred. She was
eighteen feet long, and built in the usual way, with two stakes aside,
coming to highest points forward and aft. The Squire himself came with
us as skipper; we ourselves and our baggage were stowed amidships on a
green cushion of springy birch-shoots; and in the bows was Nilas Petrie
Karahoola, a tall, clean-made young Finn, who owned a bottle of smuggled
cognac and a natty little liqueur-glass. When we were all on board, the
canoe showed just seven inches of free-board.
We shoved off, and the population of Küstula on the high bank above,
waved their head-gear and wished us God-speed. But we ourselves could
not linger long over the farewell. A dozen strokes brought the canoe
into the swirl of rapids, where the brown water raced over and between a
tangle of jagged rocks, which the Squire, crouching in the stern with
the steering paddle, had all his work cut out to negotiate. A dozen
times he bumped on some unseen boulder; and once the canoe grounded
amidships, was caught by a swirl on her stern, and was within an ace of
broaching-to and being swamped. But a lusty effort set us free again,
and on we raced; and then after a final dive over a churning three-foot
fall, we reached the deep and placid stream again, and were a mile below
the last field of Küstula. It was quick travelling.
The Squire wiped the perspiration from his face and sat down; Nilas
brought out his cognac-bottle and handed a nip all round; and then the
pair of them settled themselves to steady paddling. We ourselves were
glad enough of the opportunity for _far niente_. We had come through a
surfeit of ill-usage, over-exertion, over-biting, and under-feeding, and
as regards personal appearance we were a couple of gaunt, blotched,
hollow-eyed wrecks. So we lay on the baggage and the springy green
boughs, and watched the banks go by in luxurious idleness.
Comely banks they were too, laid out by Nature with grasses, and planted
with birches, hazels, and pines. They were like bits of the Thames at
Mortlake, or the Dee above Chester. It was hard to realise that in
winter all this was a place of howling gales and tangled snow-drifts.
Now and again we passed a fisher's camp by the water-side--just a fire,
some drying nets, and a piece of cotton cloth which served more as
mosquito-bar than tent; and now and again we met a woman paddling a boat
whilst a man in the stern fished. Some were Lapps, but most were Finns.
We would pass mile after mile of river-bank which had never been touched
by man since the river carved its channel, and mile after mile of forest
which had never felt the axe; but still there was not wanting occasional
evidences that we were getting into a country less sparsely populated
than the aching wilderness we had so wearily tramped through, and the
idea made us think back at some of the halts where we had stayed. Those
at the farther end were already growing faint and hazy: we seemed to
have gone through so much since we had left them.
"I can dimly recall," said one of us, "that years ago we came up to the
Polar Sea in a canoe called the _Windward_. But where was it from? I
forget."
"A settlement called 'London,' wasn't it?" said the other.
"Which was that? I'm getting mixed."
"The place where we got something to eat."
"Ah, I remember, sour milk, wasn't it, and that dog-biscuit stuff? And
the natives came to see us off."...
We were talking half seriously too. All those early stages of our
expedition seemed so distant and nebulous. We had lived a good many
years in those last few weeks.
From all that toil and starvation and strain this river-journey came as
a delightful revel. The paddles _cheeped_ against the gunwales, and the
water trickled musically. Cuckoos called to us from behind the woods. We
took our eyes from one beautiful picture on the shore, only to drink in
the pleasures of the next. And then the Finns would take their paddles
out of the water altogether, and we would drift down the stream and bask
in the sweet, warm silence.
The river would widen out into a still lagoon, walled in by mysterious
pines, a dancing-place for dragon-flies, and we would drowse off almost
into forgetfulness. And then of a sudden the lagoon would empty over a
fall into a narrow gut, and the canoe would leap upon the backs of sleek
brown waves, and frisk through spray, and grate over shoals, and shave
black-fanged rocks by a hand's-breadth. It was work which required the
skilful navigator. Once, after we had gone ashore to boil up the kettles
for a meal, the Finns changed about when we got on board again, and
Nilas at the steering paddle took us down the next rapids and half
filled the canoe with water before she reached their foot. We had to
pull ashore again to bale after this, not because our own sodden
properties would have hurt in the water, but because of some goods of
the Squire's which he was taking as cargo. He, canny man, had a bale of
hides which he wanted to exchange for money in Kittila, and by getting
them down in our hired canoe he was saving a journey.
Other streams joined us as the canoe paddled on, and the river grew in
bigness and use. Hay barns became quite frequent on the banks, on spots
where some distant farmer came to cut the rich grasses, and dry them on
wooden racks and rails, Norwegian fashion, till they turned into scented
hay. This would be sheltered in the rude houses of logs against autumn
rains, and in the winter months, when the river was ice, he could come
with sledge and reindeer and drag the hay home to his farm across the
frozen surface.
Nilas paddled and the Squire steered. There was high ground ahead, and
always on our left-hand side was a great wooded bulk of mountain. The
river scenery changed like the setting of a play: we shot down noisy
rapids with the speed of a running fish; we paddled across leisurely
lagoons; we saved journeys round wide bends by forcing the canoe through
narrow "cut-offs," like those one meets with on the Mississippi; but
always close above us the mountain remained, grand and vast and
immovable. On the hills ahead there were snow patches. On our mountain
there were none. From the waters where its feet were bathed, to the
billowy clouds which cooled its head, trees covered it like a rentless
garment, and nowhere was its naked side exposed.
Nilas put leather gloves over his fingers and paddled on, and the Squire
steered tirelessly. The scenery grew wilder as we drew nearer to
Kittila, and flights of small duck whirred past us down the stream. The
grass was gone from the banks, and the river was hemmed in by arid
bluffs, and walls of rock, and lines of tumbled boulders. The trees were
sterner in shape and colour, and grew into thicker and more gloomy
forests.
Then abruptly it changed again. The forests disappeared. A natural
clearing began, and man had taken advantage of the gap to set up a farm.
The Squire ran the canoe ashore, and we got out and climbed a steep
forty-foot bank. The farm lay before us, trim, orderly, and prosperous,
and the usual fishing implements lay spread about on the bank. The Finn
farmer came out and invited us inside his dwelling. It was probably an
accidental resemblance, but in personal appearance he might have passed
for twin-brother of the estimable President Krüger, of African ill-fame,
in clothes, beard, and everything, with the trifling detail of
steel-rimmed spectacles added. He accepted us first of all as a joke;
but when he heard we had come across from the Arctic Sea, he looked upon
us as a pair of barefaced liars, and regarded us with more respect. He
gave us milk, and then brought all available members of his household
into the farm kitchen, and preached them an improving sermon with us as
text. To the casual observer then we certainly must have looked a pair
of "awful warnings."
In the kitchen a woman was working a hand-loom, and except when a thread
broke in the warp, and demanded repair, the machine clacked away
industriously during the whole of the excellent Krüger's sermon. She was
weaving a checked blue-cotton cloth, and beside her a couple of old
crones span yarn industriously from humming-wheels. Hayter, callous to
the sermon, sat down to sketch the hand-loom weaver. Ever and again a
small fluffy-headed girl edged across into his line of vision, and was
ruthlessly dragged away again by the farmer. She was rather pretty in a
scared sort of way, and at last she got her desire, and was faithfully
depicted in black and white on a page of the sketch-book. Her name was
Edla Dahlgren.
We left the farm at eleven o'clock by the timepiece in the kitchen, and
put out once more into the river. We were in the broad Ounasjoki now, a
river as wide as the Thames at Richmond, but vastly swifter.
[Illustration: ON THE WAY TO KITTILA.]
The canoe ran away down past the shores, and once more forests hedged us
in above the high banks. The river was all swirls and grinding pools,
and oily overfalls, and noisy rapids. At the foot of the banks were
camp-fires sending up trails of thin blue smoke from tiny crumbs of
flame. Filmy mist rose from the tangle of waters, and amongst it here
and there were men and women in canoes, fishing. From behind the
pines on the western bank the sun sent a glow like new-tapped blood.
We passed close to one of the canoes. A woman was in the bow, poling.
Five rods were trolling from the stern, and a man with a calico
mosquito-cowl about his head tended them. The rush of the river drove us
past, and the canoe faded into a black dot amongst the mist. It was the
likeliest looking fishing-water I ever saw.
More fires came up on the banks, winked redly, and disappeared. From
bank to bank the rapids shouted, and the yellow waves spurned us on to
pools of black, sliding water, and the oily rocks sucked us towards them
as we tore past. The dew came down more heavily and the mists closed in;
the river slacked in speed again, and the canoe rode with an easier
motion; and when we looked back, the fishers and their fires were
blotted out against the black background of the pines.
* * * * *
It was midnight. Astern, wrapped in thin blue mist, there loomed up the
great wooded mountains we had voyaged round so long. Ahead, the river
widened out into a still lake, and reflected into it was a cluster of
red and ochre houses above a bright green bank, which made up the
outskirts of straggling Kittila. Well-derricks sprawled amongst the
houses, and the smell of farms and agriculture hung on the air. The sun
was coming up egg-shaped and blood-red from out of the mists and the
pines. It was midnight, and all Kittila slept.
We had been carried three-and-sixty miles from Küstula by the tireless
fingers of the river. We got out of the canoe and turned our backs on
it. Beyond us lay fields gleaming with dew-diamonds. Beyond again, lay
the dwellings of Kittila.
The Squire led us up to a house and woke the inmates. We were given a
room with walls actually papered--with newspapers. A sleepy woman
shuffled off her bedclothes and put on a second garment; but she brisked
up when she saw the strangers were curious people from a far country.
And in a while supper was set before us: the dog-biscuit of the country,
the shell of a Dutch cheese, and thirteen bay-leaf anchovies in a tin.
And then we were given beds with sheets. Here was refinement: we
actually undressed to do justice to it.
* * * * *
A road fit for wheeled vehicles runs through Kittila, and another road,
though a bad one, intersects it lower down and leads to Sodankyla. The
houses of the little town are scattered picturesquely on either side of
this road, and are for the most part stained dragon's-blood red, or
turmeric yellow, with white window-sashes. They have a fine taste for
colour in Kittila. All the better houses are enclosed within their own
neat fences, and of its sort it would be hard to find a more comely
townlet. Even the shops are no disfigurement, and they are more than
twenty in number--quite one-third of all the houses. They display no
sign-boards, and they do not exhibit goods in the windows to give
possible buyers cheap views from the public thoroughfares.
Every house has its well or wells, straddled over by a huge
hoisting-derrick, of the same construction one may see in Spain, or
Southern France, or elsewhere. No house is very large. The risk of fire
is always in the air, and a man as he grows richer, or as his family
increases, does not add an _annexe_ to his original home, but builds a
second house a few yards away, and then others, following a rectangular
plan, till at length he has made himself a courtyard, walled round with
barns and dwellings.
A marvellous tidiness pervades everything. All is kept in good repair.
Not a shingle is displaced from the neat brown roofs, not a scrap of the
farm middens is allowed to straggle. There is no litter anywhere. And
yet these people are Finns of the same race as those squalid, listless
savages we had been living amongst only a few days before. The country
Finn and his long boot are inseparable; even the Squire and Nilas wore
them, although they had telescoped the tops almost down to their ankles;
but in Kittila the high boot was no longer _de rigeur_. Lace boots were
the ordinary wear. Even shoes were not uncommon.
The two largest buildings in Kittila were a big, square schoolhouse with
a high, red stockade, and a large, high-spired church. The school was
having holiday when we were there, and does its business during the
bleak, black months of winter.
The church, in magpie black and white, was hideous. But it was an
elaborate building for all that, with granite foundations, an interior
of grim massiveness, and shutters in the belfry of its wooden tower,
opening and closing like a swell-box of an organ. At the back of the
church was a cemetery, grass-grown and neglected, with wooden and
cast-iron crosses and devices at the grave heads, most with all
inscription quite obliterated. One, over a new grave had the formal _hic
jacet_ scrawled in pencil. Another, which was practically a log-built
mausoleum, had crumbled in places and fallen in, till the dry bones of
the dead shivered at the draught from the crevices. It seemed as though
the Finn once out of life dropped out of memory also, and all care for
his resting-place ceased. It was a utilitarian trait, perhaps, but it
was not quite an amiable one.
There is a chemist in Kittila with whom we foregathered and drank
lemonade, and I do not think it is maligning him to say that he had a
greater liking for winter sledge-exercise than for the mere compounding
of drugs and prescribing for human ailments. He owned six driving-deer,
did this Arctic chemist, which of course, when we were there, were
running out on the fjeld and getting into fettle. He had his private
earmark, drawn on parchment, and stored in an envelope. It was a mere
outline of two bows--thus [Illustration: two bows], divided vertically
down the middle to separate the two ears, with the distinctive markings
traced in with pen and ink. A copy of this was posted with others in a
public place, so that all men might know that deer marked so were the
chemist's property.
When the snows fall, and the time comes for driving, then the little
chemist begins to find life worth living. With pride he showed us his
gear: the smartest outfit imaginable. First, there was a pulling collar
for the deer with two wooden hames bound with iron. Then there was a
saddle of leather, most elaborately worked and embroidered with red. For
the middle of the deer's long neck was another red collar, decorated
with a fine brass bell. The trace was of raw hide, plaited square. There
was one single-tree of bent wood, with a looped thong made fast to its
middle. This thong was passed through a hole under the forefoot of the
sledge, and the loop was slipped over the bit on the stem-head, so that
the deer could always be cast adrift from the sledge at a moment's
notice.
The boat-shaped sledge itself was a miracle of light-blue paint, but a
cranky thing for a beginner to sit. It would roll forty-five degrees
without capsizing, but it was apt to exceed the forty-five. There is a
pole to guide with, and the pole is a thing of use; for riding at speed
in these sledges over an uneven snow-field is distinctly a matter of
balance.
We saw that the little chemist was a man of taste from the trimness of
this turn-out; but when he showed us his own personal attire for winter
journeys, we saw that he was a man of luxury also. Everything was cut
after the mode of the Lapps, and cost was a neglected detail.
He put on his winter rig for our gratification, and we admired him from
head to foot. On the top of him came the _lapinlakki_, the heavy,
square-topped Lappish cap, with the crown made of bright scarlet cloth,
and the band round the head, of otter's fur. Round his neck was the
_sieppura_, a collaret of bear's fur, with the bear's mask hanging over
his breast. The _matsoreo_ (or _peski_) which covered his trunk was of
soft gray-brown reindeer skin, with the hair exquisitely dressed and
finished. The fingerless gloves (_kinteaat_) on his hands were of white
reindeer skin, with the hair outside. He had short, hairless, leather
breeches underneath, but these were joined in mid-thigh by the
_s[)a]p[)a]kkeet_, which were reindeer-skin leggings that reached down
to the ankles, where they were made fast to the leather boots, the
_kallakkoat_, by narrow, red cloth _paulat_, which may be defined as
bandages.
The day happened to be blazing hot, and the little chemist almost melted
under the weight of his furs, which plimmed him out to nearly double
his normal size; but he told us that in winter there were days of bitter
frost and driving gale, when it was dangerous to venture out of doors
even in that Arctic panoply. Here in the interior of Lapland, out of all
distant influence of the Gulf Stream, far greater extremes of
temperature prevail than in more northern spots like, say, Vardö.
The little chemist was a fisherman at times during the summer months,
and being somewhat of a naturalist besides, he had collected on paper
the names of his possible catch. He had not succeeded in finding a
specimen of each in the Ounasjoki so far, but the fish were undoubtedly
in the country, and some day he hoped to complete his basket. I give the
list here, in case somebody may find them interesting:--
Salmo salar
Salmo eriox
Salmo alpinus
Osmerus eperlanus (North of 68°)
Thymallus vulgatis
Coreogonus lavaretus
Coreogonus albula
Esox lucius
Leucuscus grislagine
Perca fluviatilis
He warmed up when the talk got on fish, and took us across to the house
of a neighbour who made his living out of fish-catching as an industry.
The neighbour gave us spruce beer, a flat decoction, which we found
somewhat insipid, and then he started to talk. We warmed as we heard
him; it was quite like being at home again. I have only met one man to
equal him, and he was a Lincolnshire pike-fisherman who never seemed to
catch anything less than a yard in length, or the size of a man's thigh
in girth. This fisherman of Kittila was not quite so artistic in his
yarns as the man of Lincolnshire. He rushed his statements too much, and
did not wait till they were dragged out of him; but he never flinched at
anything. He illustrated his conversation by diagrams with a piece of
charcoal on the floor as he went on; and when his imagination failed
him, one or other of us foreigners would start on a fish story, and he
would take the words out of our mouths and go on again at redoubled
speed.
Verily fishermen are quaintly alike all the world over. There must be
some sort of bacteria in fish which infect the catcher and impel him to
expand facts whether he will or not. I knew an eminent bishop once--but
perhaps he does not count. He was an Irishman as well as a votary of the
fly-rod.
[Illustration: Drinking cups]
[Illustration: ARCTIC LAPLAND TYPES.]