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