CHAPTER V

ENARE SEE TO ENARE TOWN, IN A SQUARE-SAIL VIKING SHIP

When it came to the point, our Neiden carriers, to use a colloquialism, climbed down abjectly. We roused very early, escorted our baggage (once more made up into three twin sacks) down to the shore, and stowed it in the boat on either side of the mast. The carriers hung about, but we ignored them as though they had been men of glass. At last the squint-eyed headman stated their willingness to accept their just dues, and they were handed the contracted-for number of rouble notes with a few impressive remarks thrown in. The discomforts of the place where thieves eventually frizzle was described to them with a lurid wealth of colour, which, being Lutherans, they thoroughly appreciated. And as we had a few minutes on hand whilst the boat was being ballasted, Hayter sketched on a smoothed board a few spirited recollections from Doré's _Dante's Inferno_, so as to ram the matter home. They grew awed and limp, just like so many naughty children, and we left them thoroughly repentant; and I fancy that the next stray English who come in contact with that squint-eyed Finn and his friends will meet with more tender entreatment.

Now our two boatmen were Finns also, but the business on the waters seemed to have lifted them above the ruck of their race. They were civil and willing, and so far as their lights went, attentive. For instance, they had floored their craft amidships with a springy cushion of birch boughs for our special benefit. And moreover, conjointly, they were incomparable boat sailors. In the course of our voyage occasion came more than once when there was need for handiness and quick decision; and South-coast yachtsmen, bred in racers, could not have beaten these inland sailors of the North. The skipper was a little wrinkled man of sixty, grown old in the traffic of the lake. Man and boy he had sailed Enare See whenever it was free from ice for all of a lifetime, and what he did not know about the shoals, and the thousand islands, and the millions of unbuoyed reefs, and the places where the wind eddied, and the other quaintnesses of the place, could have been written large on a thumb-nail and still have been unimportant. He looked out upon his small watery world with a pair of bright bird's eyes, and knew every mood of it by heart, and neither knew anything beyond nor wanted to.

His mate was a man entirely different--a mere creature of thews, who could shift the tack when ordered, set up a backstay, eat, row, smile, or carry out any of these minor offices of life which do not require the effort of a brain. He had the good humour of a puppy, an ample sufficiency of strength, and the face of a prosperous publican. His name was Olaf.

We set off down narrow waters with a snoring breeze from out of the N.N.W. The red house and the well-derrick and the farm-buildings of Ischinlisvuoni quickly dipped from sight behind a bluff; the axe-marks left the trees on shore; and the black forests grew up untouched out of the carpet of ivory-yellow moss. But we were not in the open lake yet. A run of some dozen miles brought us to shallows where a portage was necessary. We had to unload and unballast and drag the boat painfully across a neck of land on rollers, which for the four of us was a full-weight job, as she was a stout, beamy, 25-foot craft, built to endure heavy lake seas and powdering squalls. But we got her nicely launched again, brought down to trim with boulders forward and aft, and once more under way. There were 3500 square miles of lake and island ahead of us; and the neighbourhood was comparatively unknown to any one except Enare natives; and we were anxious to sample as much of it as possible. Moreover, although the breeding season was on, we promised ourselves to shoot a sufficiency of duck for the pot.

Now I am free to confess at once that Enare See was somewhat of a disappointment. We bore away to the south and east, dodging amongst countless isles and innumerable shoals, and sometimes we landed, but most times we contented ourselves by exploring with the eye alone. The islands were of all sizes, from the come-and-go boulder, the bigness of a hat-box, which ducks under every other wave, up to land patches three miles in radius, with harbours, and mountains, and rivers, and men, and all the appurtenances of a pocket continent. But there was nothing (in actual view) large enough to be impressive. The very hills themselves which bounded the lake were more in the form of rolling uplands than craggy mountains.

Of shootable game we came upon barely a trace. A whole day would pass without our seeing a single fowl either in the air, on the land, or upon the face of the waters. And the reindeer, of course, were like our cattle at home here--the domestic possession of the native. We saw these animals, it is true, in quantities. All the islands of Enare are laid down in deer according to their size, and solitary hermits peered at us from patches of ground smaller than a cricket-field, and I hope we cheered their loneliness. They were not very beautiful creatures to look upon just about then. They were very much out of condition. The snows had only just departed, and they were thin with the hard exertion of delving with their forefeet to reach the moss beneath, and worn with hard driving in the sledges. Their antlers were in velvet, and only partly grown, and their coats were very much in a transition state. In fact, they appeared to be clothed in a badly made patchwork of shades, which varied from dirty white to faded brown. These deer get little or no tending in the summer. They are not wanted for traction; they are put out to graze; and they do it industriously. Their owners permeate the neighbourhood in their canoes on fishing intent, and if they manage to cast eyes upon each individual deer once a month, it is a piece of unusual attention.

We came across these lake-fisher Lapps at intervals, and often sat and chatted round their camp fires. I remember well the first of these savage entertainments. Our eyes caught a slim blue drift of wood-smoke rising up from the farther side of an island. We ran down, hauled our wind, and sailed up to it. We were welcomed ashore with easy cordiality. There were three Lapp canoes nuzzling the foot of a black rock, and on the crown of the rock were their crews of four men and three round-faced, good-humoured women. They cleared the place of honour for Hayter and myself, and we sat down in the smoke drift from the fire, where the mosquitoes could only raid us with difficulty, and we listened to the politics of the lake: fishing was good here and bad there; this man had finished eating that lame deer he killed in the early spring; that man's canoe had been beached in a gale, and smashed like an egg.

One lady indeed wanted to know about the outer world. She was a portly young person, whose globular red face beamed with a healthy animal cheerfulness. She had stubby hands, and a figure which resembled a corn sack, well filled, and stamped down. She carried a neat brass wedding-ring slung to her neck-handkerchief, and had a most educated taste in tobacco. She filled her pipe with shavings from my plug of negro-head, lit it with a brand from the fire, and then absorbed the smoke in an ecstasy. It was enjoyment to watch her pleasure: she puffed that pipe to the uttermost ash, and the vapour circled amongst her smiles. Then the spirit of inquisitiveness, and perhaps of envy, took her, and she wanted to know if this beautiful, this exquisite tobacco was the common smoke of my country.

To weakly avoid an hour's complicated explanation, I admitted that it was.

And could English ladies have as much of it as they wished?

With distinct truth I answered that no stint was put upon them in the matter.

The patriarch of this group was a travelled man. His reindeer sledge had carried him in winter as far south as Sodankyla, where he had seen tinned anchovies and a Singer's sewing-machine; and more than once he had boated down the Pasvik Elv to below Boris Gleb and caught glimpses of steamers out on the broad Varanger Fjord beyond. As some advertisement of all this experience, his head was capped with a battered yellow sou'-wester; but the rest of him was clothed in orthodox Lapp attire, and his tattered blue _matsoreo_ was a miracle of barbaric ornament. His sardonic old face peered out from a calico mosquito cowl, which covered all the rest of the head, and his attention was very firmly fixed upon his meal.

In these lake-side camps every one cooks for himself. The lumps of meat (when there are any) are impaled on a piece of stick sharpened at both ends, so that the lower point may be pushed into the ground at an angle, and keep the meat in position whilst it is toasted. But the Lapp does not let his meat become over-cooked, and as a general thing he does very little more than take off the chill. It must be remembered, however, that everything is dried, more or less, and that fresh reindeer meat, or fresh fish, are things never used. Indeed I have frequently seen Lapps, and Finns for the matter of that, go home hungry in a boat half full of sweet, fresh fish, and then make their meal off semi-dried relics reeking of decay.

The coffee alone is a common brew, always made in a kettle of copper with a lid on the spout, and always drunk sweetened with cone beet-sugar after the rest of the meal is finished. And when it is strong enough, Laplander's coffee is the best flavoured in Europe.

After the meal, the fire is carefully quenched with water, and then comes sleep, and then once more away in the canoes. These lake-fisher Lapps think no more of sleeping in the open than do birds or deer, and perhaps the untemptingness of their headquarters has something to do with this.

In the course of our cruise down Enare See we came upon several of these settlements on the coast and on the islands, but they did not strike us as appetising for a prolonged residence. The _gamme_ (house) itself, which is usually some dozen yards beyond high lake-mark, has walls of stones and mud, or turf, with a roof more or less flat, made of turf laid on birch rafters. A chimney is a rarity, and in summer a nuisance. In a land which swarms with mosquitoes, it is always pleasant to have a wood-fire on the floor which will fill the atmosphere with "smudge," after the fashion adopted by the Floridan cracker in his palmetto shack. But the hut is not without luxury. The floor is paved with stone, and round the walls are layers of young birch shoots, which make a springy mattress. In the better _gammer_ the front-door opens on to a sort of lobby, which is used as a store, with a room on either side; but in the generality of these dwellings there is a single chamber, where the family, and the fleas, and the dogs, and a reindeer calf or so, and possibly a sheep, all pig it together, much as Noah and his friends did at their famous convocation.

But besides the one or more _gammer_, there are buildings at these settlements of almost greater importance, and these are the storehouses where the dried fish are stacked for winter sustenance. In nearly all instances these are made solidly of logs (whatever may be the structure of the _gamme_) roofed with birch-bark shingles, and well raised from the ground on piles, so as to keep the contents as dry as may be. There are racks, too, for drying the fish out of reach of the dogs, and the mortal remains of what were once fishes' internals lie trodden into the grass in every direction. The lake-fisher Lapp is not a cleanly person in his disposal of items which he has no particular need for.

The pine forests thicken along the shores as one walks south down Enare See, and the lines of the tree-changes are very clearly defined. The shores are for the most part low-lying, and in many places the trees stand up gaunt and dead for miles at a stretch. For a stranger the navigation here would be a thing impossible. The islands twist and turn and crop up in every direction. Reefs spring up from deep water, and stay just awash. We would frequently run down to a line of creaming surf, open up some passage and slip through it, and then haul our wind and stand along between two lines of reefs with not a dozen inches of water under the keel. In places the great lake was a regular stone-yard.

Our boat was wonderfully handy. In build she was well rockered, with a good beam, but had very fine entrance and a clean run aft. She was of the regular viking build and rig, and from the English ideas of spars and canvas, it was a matter of wonder how she could sail at all anywhere except dead before the wind. A casual onlooker might have classified her as belonging to the lug-sail type, but that emphatically she was not. Her mast was stepped amidships, well set up by forestay, and by a couple of shrouds on either gunwale. When the sail was hoisted, the halliards and the down-haul were brought well aft and made fast to a thwart to serve as backstay. But it was this sail which was the wonderful part of her. It was not a lug at all, but a true square-sail with the halliard bent on to the very centre of the yard, with tack and sheet interchangeable, and with braces to each yard-arm. It was just such a rig as the Northman used when he came to ravage the English coasts. It was the sail which drove the Roman galley. It was the identical sail which the Phoenicians were using when the Londoner went out to dinner in a suit of neat blue paint, and brought his own stone axe to crack the bones.

Going free, and with sheets well-started, this sail had enormous lifting and driving power; and with tack bowsed down to the weather hause-hole, and the sheet flattened aft, our boat would look up to it as close as Norfolk una. The tiller worked with a joint so as to clear the stern-post, and pushed fore and aft after the manner of a single yoke-line; and every time we went about, this tiller was shifted over to the weather side. The gear, too, was of necessity cumbersome, and on no sort of day could she be called a one-man boat. But she was splendidly dry, and we were not without giving her one or two stiff tests. We carried a breeze with us all the time we were on the lake, and once or twice, on the large patches of open, we met that short, steep sea, common to this class of waters, which for a small boat is the wettest sea on earth. She went over it like a cork--she had magnificent lifting power--and at the same time she did not lose her way.

Once, in a heavy rain-squall, we got blown very nearly out of the water; the reefs were blotted out of sight; and the boat showed her one weak point in declining to lie-to. But in Enare this fault did not matter. The skipper luffed up under the lee of an island, Olof ran down sail, and ten minutes later the kettles were singing over a fire in a sheltered cranny of the rocks. The squall swished and boomed overhead, thunder with it and abundance of rain; the camp-fire sent out darting, twisting snakes of flame, which hissed at the wet; and the two Finns squatted beside the blaze like some queer trolls, each working with knife and teeth at a stringy rib-bone. I remember it was at this camp we came upon a piece of chocolate about as big as twelve sixpences (the last of a very slender store), and made a present of it to the skipper. He took it with a twinkle of thanks, and popped it in his mouth. Then he set his jaws to work, and spat with solemn regularity. He believed the gift to be some new form of chewing tobacco.

The rain had come first, and so the squall did not last. The mists dropped, and the sky showed up blue and white, with the sun hanging in it, round as a coin, and red as a soldier's coat. The gaunt pines of the island and the ivory-yellow moss were lit with the glow. It was after midnight. We stood up and watched in silence. A stray duck, the only fowl we saw on all Enare, came flying across--a clean black silhouette against the brightness.

Once more we quenched a camp-fire and mastheaded the brown sail, and once more we left the open lake and dived in amongst another maze of its islands. We had seen our fill of the northern and eastern reaches of Enare See, and were heading now so as to reach Enare Town in the quickest reasonable time. The wind hardened as the sun climbed higher into the sky; and the boat flew south and west with a swirl of sound. The lake-floor rose and sank beneath her, and the surf leaped up from a thousand reefs. The pines roared at us as we drove past a wooded point. Here and there a house of logs showed against a clearing on the shores.

The lake was deserted of man and fowl. The canoes of the fisher Lapps had run into shelter, and the birds were not. The loneliness of the place chilled one like the hour before the dawn.

Then we saw houses of red and gray and ochre standing on a low bluff, and we made for them, ran down sail, and put the boat's nose on a beach of sand. We had arrived at Enare Town, the chief city of the Lapps, and it was three o'clock in the morning. We were deadly tired. The rest-house lay at the top of the bluff, and we climbed to it with yawns and drooping eyelids. There are no locks in Lapland, and we went inside and announced ourselves. A young Lapp and his wife were asleep in the guest-room bed, under a calico mosquito bar. They rose, silent and blinking, and began to clear away their bedding. In a cradle lay a child with its face all blotched with bites, and this also they took away. But what other preparations they made then for our comfort I do not know. We lay down on the floor in our oilskins as we were, and dropped off on the instant into the deadest of sleep.

Up there in the North, where the day lasts bright all round the clock, they set down no arbitrary hours for work and sleep such as are forced upon us here in England. One may often see children winding up their play at 4 A.M., or their elders starting a day's work at six in the afternoon. In our journey which followed, across this country down towards the Arctic Circle, we marched quite as frequently by night as by day. On that special occasion at Enare we breakfasted at twelve midday, and found most of the town outside to welcome us.

We held a levee inside first, because Olof had advertised the wonders of Hayter's Marlin rifle, and the bear-hunting section of Enare (which comprised all the males) could not rest till they understood all about the repeating mechanism. And then we went to present a letter to Herr Praest Hinkola. It turned out that he was away, and was not expected home for some days, but Fru Hinkola and her brother, the postmaster, took us in charge, and strangers in a strange land were never more hospitably entreated. We had all our meals at their table, and if we did not sleep under the parsonage roof, it was only through our own refusal to trespass farther on their kindness.

They were not cheering, however, about our chances of getting through across the country to Kittila. It was never done in summer; there were no roads; the mosquitoes and the swamps were almost impassable; horses or reindeer were utterly out of the question; lakes and rivers lay in the way, over which it was very doubtful if we should find ferriage even for ourselves; and, finally, it was distinctly improbable that we could get carriers to pack our goods beyond the first stage or two. In winter the route was practicable enough, for then the river and the lakes were frozen, and the swamps were covered in snow, and a sledge with relays of deer could get over the ground with ease. But even in winter that way was little traversed. It was from Helsingfors and Uleaborg they got the supplies, and the route to those towns lay through Sodankyla. That was quite practicable even in summer, though of course not for horses or reindeer. We could travel by canoe nearly all the way.

And we should see, what? Well, we should have an excellent view of several hundred miles of river-bank. And we could post onwards with horses either to Kittila or else directly down to the sea, in comparative luxury and comfort.

We had not journeyed that far, however, to exploit future tourist-routes; our business was to visit the Lapland farmer and fisher and herder on his native heath; and we were not going to spare ourselves pains to carry this out. So we announced with a sigh that Sodankyla would not do, and that we were going to worry through the other way somehow; and forthwith the postmaster shook his head, and sent word round the houses that carriers were wanted for the morrow.

In the meantime we looked about us. There are twelve hundred people in Enare, but as the town-limits are some seven miles across, a stranger looking at it from the landing-place might reasonably put down what he saw from there as a small straggling village of new log-houses set down near a spired, red church. The houses were closer once and older, but one of the periodical fires broke out during a gale a few years back and swept the whole place away, so that it had to be entirely rebuilt. Given a sufficient frost to freeze the water, a good breeze, a house afire on the weather side, and one of these Northern wood-built towns will blaze itself to ashes in a dozen hours if it is at all closely built. So the more modern idea is to leave at least a hundred yards between every house, and as the intervening spaces are cultivated, the towns are now going back to the old scheme of being merely clusters of farms. And every building, from the red church down to the smallest fish-barn, has a broad, slanting ladder which leads permanently to its roof, with a great iron hook at the end of a pole, always hung there ready to tear away blazing shingles or smouldering roof-turf.

A few of the Lapps of Enare town keep unostentatious stores, where they sell sewing-cotton, gunpowder, cone-sugar, axes, and coffee-beans, all of which have been brought up by sledges during the winter from Helsingfors, Uleaborg, and the towns without the Arctic Circle. But the import traffic is small, and the reindeer, which form the only export, are driven down alive to the markets. The community is self-supporting: it catches and cures its own fish; produces its own milk, curd, rye-meal, and dried meat; weaves its own woollen cloth and checked cotton wear; builds its own houses, boats, sledges, and churns; makes for itself spoons, casks, bowls, balers, all from the native birch-wood; brings forth its own young, and buries its dead with a roofed-in sledge for a coffin.

The community hinges on the parsonage, the largest house in the place, the only house which has an upper story, which is weather-boarded without, and which has the nakedness of its logs covered by a ceiling within. Here are the brains of the place, the Law of the place, the post-office, the only library. At the parsonage they had two hundred books; and English literature was not neglected. There were translations of Messrs. Stanley Weyman, Fergus Hume, and W. Le Queux, in sumptuous pictured covers. It was there we got our Russian roubles changed to Finnish marks. It was outside the parsonage that a flag flew from the head of a tall, white-painted mast to show that Holy Russia held the land. At the parsonage dwelt the cooper who made the shallow tubs in which milk is set to cream in the dairies, and there also was the Herr Praest, who married every one of the Lutheran Church who wished for marriage within a circle of 200 weary miles; who baptized all those who were admitted to the faith; and who buried all those who were brought in the nailed-down sledges in their own private plot of Christian ground. And if the time was winter, and mother-earth was fast locked in frost, the Herr Praest would see the sledge put into the common grave which was always open, there to lie snugly iced till spring brought a thaw, and let the spades delve out its more proper niche.

One of our great notions in wandering through so dismal a place as Arctic Lapland was to revel in sport which was unattainable elsewhere, and for a good many miles we had seen no living thing except mosquitoes and frogs. We had more or less given up the idea of fishing, but we still held on to the theory that there was game to be found, and, in fact, calculated on it for food to see us across the country. And with these theories still strong within us we began to push inquiries about the shooting, in deadly earnest.

The account was dismal enough. There was no rigorous close-time here, as in Norway, and game was very scarce. Probably there never was much, but by vigorous hunting all the year round there has come to be less. Now, it is not worth one's while to carry a gun in summer. There are rype, willow grouse, and capercailzie, which are fairly in evidence during the courting season, but as soon as family cares begin, they keep well to cover; and since the capercailzie cock has no taste for chickens, and bolts off _solus_ so soon as ever the honeymoon is done, his haunts are in such far depths of the forests that man seldom gets so much as a glimpse of his wonderful plumage. Bird-shooting as an industry is not worth following in Lapland till the leaves have gone, and the snow makes everywhere a staring background.

And big game? Well, of course, the reindeer are all tame, or nominally so; and as for wolves and lynxes, these are mostly legendary. They have been shot--frequently shot--but for the most part round camp-fires, after the fishing yarns have come on. And their skins are rare: these have a way of getting lost, as is explained in the tale. But foxes there are, both white and red, in tolerable numbers, and, of course, the occasional bear. These, again, are for the winter shooting, as it is only their winter coats which have a value. The fox is plentiful. A man who understands the work may put on _ski_ for six consecutive days, and travel 300 miles over the snow, and at the end of the week be owner of three average hides.

But a bear-hunt is a far more troublesome affair. When a track is found, the bear is promptly ringed. That is, the track is not followed up, but a man on _ski_ leaves it at right angles, and working in slightly all the time towards the direction in which the bear was travelling, finally hits the spoor again where he had left it. If he has not seen the spoor in the meanwhile, the bear is somewhere within that ring.

There is no immediate hurry for the next move. Bears only shift their quarters two or three times during the course of the winter, and if undisturbed they will doze for a considerable while when once they have settled down. So if there is no immediate danger of a heavy fall of snow to obliterate the spoor, the finder goes back and organises the hunt at his leisure.

The number of hunters depends upon the two items of pluck and skill, but not more than four go as a general thing, as there is a distinctly commercial side to the business, and the fewer the guns the more there is to every share. The Government gives head-money; the merchant will pay anything between £4 and £10 English for the cleaned skins; and the beef, too, is an asset of value. A third share in a good bear is enough for a Lapp to marry on and set up a tidy farm, if he happen to be economical.

The winter light may be gray and small, but the snow looms white, and the spoor reads like a book. A bear breaks through any crust, and plunges elbow-deep at every stride. His belly trails along the snow and ploughs a great furrow. It takes the drifts of a gale to cover that track. But withal his highness is a scary person, and though he may sleep with shut eyes, he keeps open ears and an active nose. So the callers have to tread with niceness and delicacy if they wish to make sure of an interview; and even supposing that they carry the spoor with them up to the pile of tumbled rocks where it ends, and the absence of back tracks show his bearship is at home, the hunt is by no means over even then. The bear will know quite well that enemies are at hand, but he will not rush them. He is no fool. On the contrary, he is an animal of infinite cunning and resource; and he quite knows that in his stone redoubt there is at least one chance to three of brazening out the situation and wearing his own hide for another season.

It takes a man of much more recklessness, or ignorance of the consequences, than the average Lapp hunter to go into a cave of the rocks and deliberately invite a rough-and-tumble with a live brown-bear.

But the hunters do their best to irritate him from a distance. They fire single shots into the darkness in the hope of riling him sufficiently to make a rush, so that the other guns which remain loaded may drop him when he comes into the open. They do this from every direction on which the cave mouth opens, so as to give him every chance of feeling a shot. And finally, if this method fails, they light a bonfire on his front-door step and stand round on their _ski_ to await results.

It is by no means certain that the smoke will reach him, for there may be quite possibly an outward air-current, and the Lapps have produced their Rembrandtesque effect for no practical return. But if they have luck, and the stinging reek is too strong to be endured, then they have to stand by for quick shooting. The bear bolts like a rabbit, out of the firelight into the gloom, and in a matter of seconds he will be absorbed amongst the tree-stems of the forest. There is something uncanny, something almost devilish in the way a Northern bear can adopt invisibility.

On the whole, then, when a bear is shot it is a day worth remembering, and all involved congratulate themselves on being incomparable hunters. There are plenty to listen to and envy them. Few men can say that they have not been concerned in a hunt. But in all last year head-money was only paid on seven bears in the whole of the Enare district, and that covers some 150,000 square miles. So, whatever can be said against the Lapp as looking on hunting as a business, it must be granted that it comes to him as sport and enjoyment as well, or he would not embark in a trade which brings in such extremely frail dividends for so large a percentage of outlay in risk and exertion. If further proof were needed, it was there plain in Enare Town. The majority of the Lapps lived in snug wooden houses, tilled the ground, tended cattle, lived prosperous lives. The professional hunters were like the hunters of the States, practically outcasts--men of the outer air, it is true, and rare fellows, but in the riches of this life they were un-acquisitive. When one of the rare windfalls came they were generous, and it quickly went; and between whiles they and theirs knew the grip of an empty belly. In Enare Town they lived in peat _gammer_, eyesores amongst the comely houses. Their wives were slatterns, their children ragged, their homes ringed round by squalor and poverty. They lived the free life of the forests, which is the best life of all, but they had to pay its price.