CHAPTER VII

INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES--(_Continued_)

We had small appetite for breakfast next morning after that horrible night, and this was a fortunate thing, for there was little enough provender available. We could not buy so much as a crumb of bread or a shred of fish. The wretched people had none to sell. Johann showed a pleasant piece of thoughtfulness. He came into the dairy with a blazing bundle of green twigs in his hand, and filled the room with clean, fresh wood-smoke, so that we might have the early morning in peace. Even the sour-milk smell fled before that billowing wood-reek.

A mark paid our poor night's lodging, and for another mark we chartered a good canoe to take us down the lake and up the Menesjoki, with a limp, small boy to bring her back. The hump-backed woman and her brood came down to the lake-shore and stared drearily at us as we paddled off.

* * * * *

That morning voyage down the lake lingers in the memory as one of the seven pleasures of life. The sun was bright and glorious in a blue sky overhead; a breeze fanned the fever from our hands and faces; and the canoe carried us as though it were the delightful vessel of a dream. The water tinkled and the paddles _cheeped_ against the gunwales. We drank deep of the ease and gentleness of it all.

All around the lake were hills, pine-covered and highish, but, as usual, many patches of the forests were dead, and the tree skeletons stood out gray and naked amongst their feathered comrades. Only one green patch was visible on all the shores, and that was Menesjärvi, where we had come from. The eye should have dwelt on it with pleasure, but the horrors of the night we had spent there were still big in us, and we turned from it with shudders.

We got into the Menesjoki after three times grounding on the shallows, and paddled pleasantly up between its banks. Here indeed was surprising scenery. We might have been rowing by some river-side park on the Thames, the cultivated growth of ages, the daily care of a hundred gardeners. There were graceful foliage trees, and trim, well-favoured shrubs, and clumps of flowers, and lawns of the pleasantest green, all repeated faithfully in the still mirror of the water. It was hard to keep in mind that human foot did not tread these banks once in a dozen years.

Fish rising at flies dappled the water mirror with dainty rings, and now and again the swirl of a foraging pike gashed it with a rippling fan. Even the mosquitoes, those insects of the devil, seemed to respect the sanctity of this paradise, and acknowledged that they were too evil to sully its delights.

The river wound into countless curves, and the Lapps paddled on at a steady gait. A brood of duck appeared in the water ahead of us, black in body, with a white bar across the wings. _Leenoot_ was their country name. There was no drake; he was away from family cares. But Madame was fully alive to the unpleasantness of our neighbourhood. Away the whole crew of them went, splutter and splash, paddling lustily. The old lady led the way and quacked out directions, to which her family were fully obedient. One by one they left her, some diving, some swimming direct to the cover on the banks; and then she herself, with a final quack of defiance, got in the air and flew away through an alley of black pines.

The river-side park ended here, as though we had left one estate and come upon another owned by some churl with no eye to neatness or horticultural beauty. A sandy bluff reared up above the stream, and on it was a dead forest of gaunt, gray, barkless pines, standing up as an eyesore to heaven. It had not been killed by fire; it had not been ring-barked or destroyed by any device of man; but the trees, the old, the young, and the sapling, had simply got tired of life, and so died altogether in rank as they stood. The mosquitoes came back here, and set about their iniquitous work. The stream grew swifter and more hard to paddle against; the sun went in; and we were brought from our brief, pleasant dream, back to some of the more crude realities of Arctic Lapland. I remembered that my ankles were puffed like some old cab-horse's with the bites, and I got out the bottle and rubbed brown tar on them and on my face as a preventive unguent.

Still more did the river water quicken in speed, till at last we came upon a noisy rapid, and had to put the canoe's nose upon the bank. We disembarked. The limp boy from Menesjärvi started to paddle her back; the three Lapps shouldered their burdens; and once more we stepped out through the country under the shade of stately pines.

We found ourselves amongst a herd of grazing reindeer--if herd can be used for such a scattered flock. Now we would see one through the palings of the pines, trotting away from us into the deeper quiet of the woods. Now one would stalk out in lordly majesty, and stand, a clear mark against some sky-line, and stare in haughty wonder as to who those intruders could be who dared to bring their taint between the wind and his nobility. And then as we came up, back would go the branching antlers against the straight, strong back, and in a moment the forest would have swallowed him from view.

They were all in velvet, these deer, with the young horn hot and feverish beneath its covering, and with their antlers in many cases only half-grown. They were only just recovering from the leanness of spring. They were still casting their coats, and the old hair hung from them in faded, matted tufts, which made them look dishevelled and woebegone. Six weeks later they would be in their prime, rolling in fat, sleek-coated, and ready for heavy sledge-work, and short commons, and all another winter's stress. They would be decked, too, with new antlers, clean and unsplintered, and proudly conscious of the two new points which marked the dignity of another year's growth. But at present their one life-duty was to eat, and eat, and eat; and the crisp ivory-yellow moss which lay thick beneath the pines, and the tender shoots of the birches and the Arctic willows, provided the wherewithal.

It was Pat's delight to set off these deer into a stretching gallop. "_Porro_," he would whisper when his poacher's blue eye caught sight of one of the brown forms grazing between the tree-stems. And then the Lapps would all creep forward on their silent foot-gear till the reindeer espied them, and Pat would set back his head and let a regular Irish yell out of him till the forest rang again. The deer would start off with the last mouthful of the crisp, yellow moss hanging from its lips, and the perspiring Johann would burst into a great guffaw, and Pedr would deliver himself of one of those beautiful smiles which served to express his every emotion. And then Pat would turn to us with his droll grin, and we would have to laugh too, whether we wanted to or not. He was really a most cheery ruffian, this strayed Galwegian.

We came across a great stretch of marsh after this, with logs laid down over the worst parts, and at the farther side we made a midday camp with a fire which would cook the kettles and provide us with a smoke-shelter at one and the same time. And at this camp it was that Johann told us a very curious tale. He was not diffuse in his telling, because he had no long powers of description, and I do not think he lied over it, because he lacked the requisite power of imaginativeness. If Pat, for instance, had told the tale, we should have taken it as a piece of genial fiction, and thought no more about it; but as it was Johann's tale, told perspiringly, with many awed shrinkings, and mostly in pantomime, it weighed upon us sufficiently to provide us with conversation for the next several days, and then we received a sort of confirmation of it which--but that will be mentioned in its place.

Briefly, and without Johann's gesticulations, the tale was this:--He was out one day in a canoe on Enare See, fishing--following his usual vocation, in fact. Suddenly in the sky there appeared to him a fish, a huge fish, a green fish, a fish eight times as long as his canoe. He put up eight fingers, and we counted them. He looked up by chance and saw it, and where it had come from he did not know. It floated quite easily in the air about the height of--of--he pointed out a black pine--about so high above his canoe. It had a tail which could move, and a great ring round its neck which whirred when it went ahead. Finally it left him and flew towards the mountains of the southward, and there was lost to view.

We attempted to get more out of Johann, but that was all he could tell. We gave him pencil and paper and told him to draw the fish; and he tried, certainly, but without any useful result; but then sketching is not a spontaneous art. And in the end we gave up trying to extract any more information on the subject, and talked over what we had got.

"Is this some sort of a legend?" said one of us.

"Not it," said the other.

"Then what do you think of it?"

"Seems to me to spell air-ship."

"Looks like it, and a good one at that.'

"Russian?"

"Who's else?"

"_Phe-ew!_" said the other. "This may mean something pretty big, if we can only come in touch with it." And so here we were provided with a topic of talk which involved the fate of navies, the policies of nations, and indeed the government of the whole wide world. It was a god-send to us. In many a camp, on many a weary march when of ourselves we should not have been able to rise above the depression of circumstances, it was enough to begin: "Touching that air-ship of Johann's, I've been thinking--," and there would start up a whirl of talk which lifted us clean away from the insects and the domestic worries of Arctic Lapland.

* * * * *

To the stranger accustomed to bivouacs in other lands, it is wonderful to see the care with which the Lapps extinguish every grain of flame before leaving one of their camp-fires. The fire itself is always built close to a stream or pond of water--an ordinary necessity of camping when there is a kettle to be filled--and, if possible, on a flooring of rock. When the camp is struck, all remaining embers are tossed into the water, and then the extinguishing fluid is scooped up and soused over the hearth till not the faintest smoulder remains.

To the stranger, I say, coming raw into the country, all this laborious care seemed excessive; but before we had travelled a hundred miles into Lapland the reason became very apparent. If a breeze gets up, smouldering embers will rise from the place of fire and travel like birds down the wind. In a million cases they do no harm. But in the million-and-first they will drop upon some patch of reindeer moss, and then the mischief begins. The dry lichenous growth, crisp as cigar-ash, will carry the fire along like a train of gunpowder. Dead resinous branches of pine are licked up by the tongues of flame, and in an hour's time the whole forest will be blazing, and a mark has been daubed across the country which will endure a hundred years. In Africa or America this would not matter. It would mean so much more ground cleared for the game or cultivation. But in Lapland it implies that valuable acreage of reindeer pasture has been taken entirely away from that generation, and human existence will be correspondingly harder; and so the man who sets the forest ablaze not only injures his neighbours, but he inconveniences that much more important personage, himself.

Even in the ordinary way of Nature, the reindeer moss is a crop requiring delicate management. Deer cannot be set to graze on it indiscriminately year after year. It demands its regular rotation of rest. In some districts four years, in others five, have to be given to a piece of fjeld to recover after a herd has grazed it for a short three weeks. And here, then, is the secret of the migratory life of the herder-Lapp of Northern Europe, which has endured down so many countless hundred years with scarcely a trace of change. To live, his beasts must live; and to find food for them he has constantly to move about over large desolate areas of the country; and so it is the scheme of his life which has divorced him from the idea of fixed abode, and not the mere relish for vagabondage. We had not seen him in Arctic Lapland yet, this pastoral wanderer; the fishers and the farmer Lapps we had come across were only his refined descendants; and we were keenly anxious to get into his neighbourhood, and watch him herd his deer, and see the life he led in summer under the conical shelter of his _la-wo_. It was this kind of Lapp I had lived with once before on a bleak fjeld of north-western Norway; it was this nomad aboriginal we had both read of in the improving books of childhood; and because we had come so far and gone through so much to renew his acquaintance, and still not met him face to face, we felt that we had been in some vague degree imposed upon. Well, we were to see enough of him very soon; but more about that in its place.

We came across traces of the nomads, however, on this very march. Johann, from the head of the caravan, halted till we came up to him. He pointed with outstretched arm down an aisle of the tree-stems. "_La-wo_," said he, and showed us a cone of birch-stems set round the ashes of a hearth. This then was some reindeer-herder's temporary rest. The vadmal cloth which made the tent-cover was gone, the fire was cold, the deer were driven away to other pastures, the Lapp herders had followed the deer. Only the tent-frame was left amongst the scent of the pines and the juniper, and beside it one human utensil. It was a "screw" of birch-bark, like those coils of paper in which the country grocer at home puts up sweetmeats for children--a flimsy vessel such as Adam might have used to scoop up his morning drink. It was new, and its edges were unfrayed; a thing made in a minute, and cast away when camp was struck to save the labour of portage. It was typical of the nomads' _ménage_. They are a people who have reduced the list of "things which one can do without" almost to the vanishing point.

We were skirting now by the side of another ample lake, about one-quarter the size of Menesjärvi, but we did not tramp along its winding beaches. We kept on through the pines, and saw the blue water only now and again through the trim paling of their stems, and the sun sailing high overhead warmed us as though we had been tramping through some wood of the Engadine instead of this grim forest so far within the Arctic Circle. But no birds sang or sent their calls through the trees; the air had been filtered clear of all feathered creatures; the swarming insects peopled it alone, and pestered us with their ravening attentions.

But if we suffered abominably from this plague of flies, it was some slender pleasure to know that they in their turn did not carry on a life of unfettered delight. They had their enemies. At one halt, on a small oasis in the middle of a two-mile-wide morass, I saw a loathly horse-fly, which had marked me for his next meal, get checked in mid-career as he flew towards my sleeve. He had blundered into a spider's web, and lay there struggling manfully. The whole net swayed and swung; the juniper twigs on which it hung actually buckled under the strain; but not a mesh gave. And presently the proprietor, a huge, orange-bodied spider, appeared from his private residence, and laid out along a warp, and (so to speak) threw off his coat and got to work.

From a seaman's point of view that orange-bodied spider was a marvel of dexterity. He threw bowlines over the buzzing wings of the horse-fly, got a purchase on them, hauled them home against its body, and made them fast there with clever hitches. One by one he disentangled the horse-fly's legs from the mesh, and roped them up too. And then he marled the victim's body up into one helpless bundle, and carried it off to eat alive under a thatch of the juniper leaves.

Pat, to secure a longer rest at this halt, must needs change the grass in his boots, to do which entailed pulling it out, spreading it abroad to dry, and then packing it back again with one hand whilst he used the other as a last. Inserting the naked foot into the nest thus made was a matter for niceness and accuracy, and it was not usually managed at the first attempt. And then the coarse flannel trouser--which was very much like the trunk-hose of our own ancestors--had to be carefully brought round inside the mouth of the boot, and snugly made fast there with five feet of red, embroidered, inch-and-a-half-wide bandage, which sported the two orthodox thongs for tying at its outer end.

The other two Lapps filled in time by capturing horse-flies and mosquitoes and "taking it out of them," after the manner of the story-book naughty child at home. I suppose we ought to have taught them better; but we did not: we felt that a little cruelty was justifiable.

On through more forests of pines we went, and through more swamps, with cloud-berries tantalisingly unripe beside our feet. We had visions of cloud-berries from other days,--plump, yellow, juicy fruit, ice cold, and slightly acid,--and with the fever of the bites constantly upon us, and mouths like dried leather, they were visions which made us sigh. Verily in this world--especially in the Arctic part of it--man cannot get all he wants, even though he offer in exchange much fine gold.

We sheltered under a new kind of roof at the end of that march--a regular Arctic casual ward. It was a rude house of logs twenty feet square, furnished with fixed bunks and a table set against the wall, one movable bench, and a fire-hearth in one corner built of rubble stone. The nearest human habitation was the squalid hut with the hump-backed woman we had left behind us at Menesjärvi. We were in a place of shelter built for the benefit of the sleigh traveller should he be caught in one of the whirling storms of winter. It was the distant finger of Holy Russia, showing how even the least-considered of her subjects is not left without some paternal care.

We filled the room with wood-smoke and prepared to enjoy ourselves. The Lapps undressed to their shirts, and squatted on the floor, and dined off reeking fish and strong rye-bread. We also ate from our poor store. And then we had a solemn palaver over the arrangement for the morrow, and then we lay down where we were, and slept.

The wood-smoke died away from the air, and the mosquitoes came back through the chinks; but they browsed upon us undisturbed. We did not wake.