CHAPTER IX

A PRÉCIS OF LAPPISH HISTORY, AND A NARRATIVE OF TRANSIT BY RAFT AND SWAMP TO IVALOMATI

That grimy little person, Marie, guided us back to our other men, and whether she did it out of sheer good-nature, or for the sake of the one of us she was pleased to admire, or for Johann's sake, it was hard to discover. It seemed that the untutored child of the fjeld could be as arrant a flirt as any young woman with the advantage of half a dozen milliners and a London season's education. But for all that, if there was a breeze blowing, and one did not come too close to her, she really was in her way a pleasant little companion. One could hardly call her good-looking; she was too weather-beaten for that. And she followed the fashion of the fjeld in being more easy than trim in her apparel. Moreover, she was as irresponsible as a cat in her personal habits, which was a _trait_ one did not get used to all at once. But, as I say, she had her attractions, and though one was inclined to smile at her waddling run at the beginning of a march, one regarded it with more respect at the end of the fortieth mile, when it was no more clumsy and no more waddling than it had been at the outset.

Marie led us through river and swamps, through forest and ravine, through all the naked loneliness of the fjeld, with never a scrap of hesitation, never more than a brief glance round when we headed a rise. She knew the wilderness as a hunting-man may know a country here at home. And she led us to the rest-hut which Johann had described, with never a deviation from the bee-line except where the corrugation of the country made curves a necessity.

Pat, with more stubble and more grin, and Pedr, with a smile if possible more beautiful than ever, were at the door to welcome us. Inside, our solid goods were laid out in an orderly row; the brown canvas sacks and the chronically sodden blankets were hung up on the drying-beam above the fire; and the room was filled with a delicious mosquito-proof smoke. It felt quite like a home-coming.

We inducted Marie to a seat on a pile of springy birch-boughs, which the excellent Pat had brought in to form his own bed, and we set before her of our best, which did not amount to much. I think it was the first time she had ever tasted larks in aspic, and unless I am much mistaken she will not greatly regret if it was the last. One thing she did appreciate though, and that was the _Windward's_ slop-chest tobacco. She saw the black cake pass from hand to hand; she drew her knife from its sheath and held out eager fingers; and when she had shredded up a sufficiency and got her iron-lined wooden pipe in full blast, it was a pleasant sight to see her. The smoke exuded from her lips and nostrils in sleek, gray clouds, and the wrinkles in her grimy, weather-beaten little face wreathed themselves into a smile of ecstatic contentment.

The question of sleeping-quarters obtruded itself. We had an acquaintance with the Lapp's casual way of regarding such matters, but we still had (from the conventions of our upbringing) some small spasm of hesitation in offering a spinster guest a shake-down on the floor of a hut containing five full-grown men. We discussed the advisability of turning out ourselves and camping elsewhere with the carriers, and leaving Marie in the orthodox virgin seclusion. But she took the matter out of our hands very simply. She said she must be getting back to her endless work with the deer-pack. She had sat down for an hour on Pat's couch of birch-shoots, and this seemed all the rest she cared for after her gentle forty-mile stroll. She shook hands with us limply all round, and then went into the sunny midnight outside. Hayter and I instinctively took off our caps, but I am afraid she did not know it was intended as a piece of courtesy, because she doubled up in a fit of merriment by way of response. And then Johann went out and walked by her side till they came to the edge of the scrub willows, and I think she appreciated Johann's attentions best, because she understood them more. They stopped there and made their further adieux, and then the squat little figure waved its hand for the last time, and disappeared in the cover, and Johann stood stupidly staring at the place where she had vanished.

We went back into the hut and sat down on the benches. The aroma of the little woman's presence clung to the place, and we could not help thinking of the endless round which had made up her life and would make up her future. Her ancestry dazzled one. Her forefathers were old at a date when the Romans laid down the first legend as a foundation for their history. They came of a fine, crusted, Ural-Altaic stock, who were accustomed to look upon the Adam-and-Eve family as vulgar parvenus. And yet they were people without observable pride or ostentation. They had no monuments, no books, no sculptured or written history. They could look back on neither a nobility nor kings. They had always been hunters and herders, and by reason of this had never acquired the gregarious idea. They were a people of camp-communities, living on their deer, and the camps were always small, because many deer cannot find pasturage in one locality. By reason of this it has never occurred to them to be patriotic, and, as a consequence, when oppression came in their way, they have always been oppressed. In a nation of warriors the small men get weeded out by the chances of battle. In a community which has never fought, the stature of the race deteriorates. The Lapps have never been warriors. They have never even been a nation.

As the world increased in the easy lands of the South, so have the Lapps through the centuries been ever squeezed at its verge towards the bleak, unknown North. It is but rarely they have consented to band together and raise objection. The Norwegians made them serfs by proclamation in the ninth century, and serfs they remained, contentedly enough, so long as the ill-usage dealt out to them was not over-brutal. When they could stand it no longer, they took refuge in the savage forest-dingles, and made expeditions for houghing their enemies' cattle and burning down their wooden homesteads. By this means they regained a wandering independence; but in the fourteenth century the Norskmen again coveted a subject race, and made systematic raids on the nomads, and again wrote them down as serfs in their census. And in the sixteenth century the Swedes followed suit. But only a few of the Lapps were caught. The great majority were still free wanderers on the fjeld and the tundras.

The only Lapps who really suffered were those who were held by the Birkarlians--a band of Swedish adventurers who flourished from the thirteenth century right away down to the year 1700; and in the hands of these hard men they endured what was little better than slavery. They had no redress. They had no trades unions amongst themselves; they did not belong to that larger trades union which is known as a nation; and if the Birkarlians in the course of progress could have endured to this day, it is probable that they would still be holding stunted Laplanders as their unpaid menials.

But time sweeps on, and the sentiment of the world alters. The peculiar institution of slavery has for one reason and another dropped through into mere history; and governments which at one time thought the only self-respecting thing to do was to either shoot the aboriginal or shackle him into servitude, now look upon him as an amiable curiosity, and write out laws for his preservation, much in the same spirit as they appoint close seasons for the elk and the ptarmigan and the aurochs.

Under this fostering care the total Lapp population has risen to some 32,000 as near as it can be reckoned; of which 18,500 wander within the marches of Norway, 7500 are in Sweden, and the balance own as over-lords the Archduke of Finland, and his master the Great White Czar; and each government has its own preservation rules.

The fundamental note of the Russian _régime_ is "No Vodki," and it is easy to create a Prohibition State where distances are big, transport difficult, and the inducements to smuggle small. Norway very wisely does not worry about the liquor question, as in practice there, by reason of the settlement of the country, it would be quite impossible to restrain the aboriginal from purchasing _aquavit_ if he intended to do it. So the Norskman lets the Fin-ne, as he calls the Lapp, diet himself entirely according to taste; and as a consequence, at an occasional wedding, or an annual meat-selling, the little man spends one afternoon in getting blind drunk. He has all the rest of the year to get the aniseed flavour entirely out of his system, so, physically speaking, not much harm is done. Sweden, too, follows the same policy, but provides a slightly less noxious brand of drink.

The Scandinavian farmer, however, who has the Lapp reindeer-herder for an occasional neighbour, does not agree with the enthusiastic theorists who in Stockholm and Christiania make the laws for his preservation. Socially he regards the Lapp as though he were some noxious kind of ape, the which is quite understandable, because the spirit which fosters Aborigines' Protection Societies can only exist at a considerable distance from the aboriginal. He sees the Lapp and his doings personally, and (being somewhat unread) does not regard him from the point of view of an interesting relic of the past. He merely looks upon him in the light of the present, and finds him a thorn in the flesh.

In the old viking days the Scandinavian would yield to no one in his appetite for thieving; but with advancing civilisation he has grown to be a staunch anti-pilferer. He has had game-laws set up above his head, and he respects them. He is allowed to shoot one elk on his own estate, and only one elk, per annum, and he must shoot it in a certain fixed month; and it is not pleasant for him to see the Lapp (who knows no law except the rule of appetite) gaily slaying the great deer whenever they come within range of a rifle-bullet. It annoys him, too, to have his cows milked on the mountains, and his rivers and lakes poached with system and industry. Moreover, it is his custom to leave all his worldly goods unlocked and unguarded, and he expects that no one will steal them; so that when the mountain Lapp comes out of the forest like a quiet ghost, and annexes any trifle, from a sheep to a parcel of smoked salmon which may strike his fancy, the farmer rages, and makes no allowance for the neglect of education. It is tolerably useless to apply to the Government for redress, because governments move slowly, and a Lapp moving on the fjeld, if not tackled at once, is hard to catch; and so he takes the law (and a Remington rifle) into his own most capable hands.

Then begins the trouble. The mountain Lapp, according to his instincts, has stolen; and although under pressure he might peaceably give up the transferred goods, he has a strong dislike to indiscriminate retaliation--when applied to himself. So when he comes across the rotting carcasses of first one, then another, then a dozen, then a score of his cherished deer, ruthlessly shot down and left in their wallows, he accepts the _vendetta_, and prepares to carry it into bloody effect. He owns a rifle, this nomad herder of to-day, who rears the __rensdyr__ amongst the rugged mountains of the Scandinavian peninsula; and though it is an early breech-loader, cast from the army in the early seventies, it is a deadly enough weapon when the butt is cuddled by a vengeful shoulder. And he goes down to the valley-farms and puts lead into beast or man, whichever comes in his way. Upon which the farmers, still saying no word to the Government, arm and organise a Lapp-hunt; and the mountains swallow the tale of what is done; and those who come back to the farms sit down assured that at least some of the aborigines will pester them no more.

This then is the state of things which obtains in this year of grace amongst the fjelds and forests of Northern Norway and Sweden, and as a consequence the Lapps are slow of increase. Over the border, however, in Lapland proper, and in Russian Lapland, their numbers rise appreciably every decade, though it is perhaps hard to decide which are genuine Lapps and which belong to a mixed race. In the extreme east of their territory they are apt to intermarry with the Samoyedes; and I think it is a significant fact that the outer garments of the two races--the Lapp _matsoreo_, and the Samoyede _militza_--are both fashioned on the same cut. In Russian Lapland there is an obvious intermixture with the Russian _moujik_, and in Lapland proper they naturally marry largely with the all-pervading Finn.

The inhabitant of Lapland is not so light-fingered as his more western brother, perhaps because there is less opportunity of pilfering. And he does not make himself so unpopular, because there are fewer aliens for him to get unpopular with, and no one goes out regularly to shoot him as a domestic nuisance. In fact the Lapps we were in contact with (and the Finns, too, for that matter) never stole any of our particular properties; though at the same time it should be confessed that we had remarkably little worth stealing, as the whole of our outfit after Enare (including the clothes on our backs) was not worth a couple of sovereigns, and we did keep a remarkably sharp eye on even the few trifles we had.

The life these aboriginal people lead in Arctic Lapland is undoubtedly hard, and at times they rub shoulders very closely with starvation. But they have got constitutions, built up through countless centuries to endure the privations and (what to a more delicately nurtured race would be) the hardships of their life; and from the number of very old people we saw everywhere through the country, it was plain that the orthodox threescore years and ten was by no means the average limit for the life of an Arctic Lapp. Children there were, too, in all abundance. It was a notable fact that scarcely a woman did we see of child-bearing age without a babe at breast; and though a large percentage of this progeny did not endure the chills of a second or a third winter, enough pulled through to keep the race on the steady increase in numbers. This weeding-out process also obviously did much to counteract the evils of consanguineous marriages, and so maintain the standard of physique. It was one of Nature's balances. Without it the Arctic Lapps would increase for a while abnormally, and then they would dwindle, and in a few centuries they would be gone.

* * * * *

We should have liked much to stay on in that Arctic casual ward, to which Marie guided us, for a day or two to recruit. We were both of us getting very hollow-eyed, and not a little fagged. The mosquito-plague had something to do with this state of things, because when a man has got a constant fever about him, he can scarcely be called healthy. And the want of food was telling on us. We had barely had a decent meal since leaving the _Windward_, and many of our meals were as much like the Barmecide's as a diet of plain water could make them. But it was this very scarcity of food which drove us remorselessly forward. Our own store of those miserable tinned dainties was dwindling, and the carriers' provisions had already been dragged out beyond their calculated time. We had no help for it but to press on to Ivalomati, which was the nearest human habitation.

So we started, and promptly there arrived another difficulty: we lost the way.

In a populated country this is a hard thing to do. Given the general direction, one can always there hit upon a town or a village if one takes sufficient time about the search. But in a land where the town consists of five houses, and a village can earn a name on the map with one roof and a haystack, it is very easy to wander on day after day and never sight anything but sheer wilderness.

In this particular instance it was Johann who failed us. The excellent Johann had never before journeyed West beyond the squalid hut which figured geographically as Menesjärvi; but as at that place we had been unable to get either fresh guides or carriers, we had induced the three who had brought us to come on farther, and Johann had guaranteed (for a consideration) to find the way. He had laid under contribution the entire topographical knowledge of Menesjärvi (which perhaps did not amount to much), and had imbibed it noisily for three solid hours. He had started off with confidence and brought us to the first rest-house in style. Pat and Pedr had found their way from there to the second shelter, where we, with Marie's help, joined them. But before we had been travelling a mile on the final stage, it was clear that the loud-voiced Johann was completely "bushed."

He would not own it at first. We were tramping through a burnt-out forest with gaunt gray-and-black skeleton trees hedging us in impenetrably on every side. Growth and decay is slower up there, deep inside the Arctic Circle, than it is in the Tropics. In a hot, moist country a fallen tree may be blotted out of sight by vegetation in a week, and crumbled into primitive dust in less than a year. But up in the cold North, Nature does not strain herself to work with such fevered speed. A tree dies; and, erect or prone, it may survive for years as a gaunt, dry corpse. There is no jungle to hide it from the air; there are no creepers to bore into its bones and leave openings for the tearing fingers of the weather; there is only the short, crisp moss underfoot, and that rather helps than hinders its preservation. And so for years upon years these dead forests endure, as eyesores to heaven.

Mile after mile we tramped through the winding aisles of these dead trees, the acrobatic Johann waddling stolidly on in the lead. From time to time we looked at the compass, and more than once we had doubts about the direction. But we did not interfere. Johann under the stress of advice was apt to get flustered, and Johann flustered would be a very useless guide indeed. He was all we had got, and so we agreed to let him have his own way.

But at last when he calmly led us back over our own tracks which we had made not half an hour before, and still would have gone complacently on waddling through the wilderness, we called a halt and made him face the situation. He owned up at once to having wandered, which was a confession he could not very well avoid, seeing that our old tracks were by no means microscopic; and after a little more pressure, admitted that he had not the vaguest notion of where he was.

This was unsatisfactory. We had come to see Arctic Lapland, certainly, but it looked as if we were going to inspect a good deal more than we had bargained for. A real solid hunger made us appreciate this very thoroughly.

We asked Johann if he had any suggestion to make. He scratched himself thoroughly for ten minutes and gave the matter his due consideration. Finally he said he thought he could lead us back successfully to the places from which we had come.

We did not see the force of this at all. We intended to get through to the other side of the country, and we stated the proposition with brevity and decision.

But Johann's suggestion found other ready hearers. Pat and Pedr both woke into animation. It appeared that Pat had a sore heel, and possessed a wife (or somebody else's wife) he wanted to return to, and also remembered some important business on Mattosjärvi which ought to be attended to at once. And Pedr, the beautiful Pedr, but without the beautiful smile, stated tersely that he was sick of the whole thing, and intended to go back home there and then.

It was mutiny. They leaned back each against his pack, and began making fast the thongs against their breasts and shoulders. They were frightened, and they were tired, and they were going back to the place from which they had come whether we liked it or whether we did not. It was glaring, flagrant mutiny, and there was only one way to deal with it, and we chose that way.

It was a primitive style of persuasion, and it involved the use of the heavy British hand and the heavy British boot, but it served its purpose then, as it has done thousands of times before; and after the proceedings were over, we stood still a minute to collect breath, and contemplated three very sulky, subdued carriers, squatted on the ground and waiting for orders.

The outlook was not cheerful. The only thing apparently left was to make for Ivalomati on a compass course, which sounds simple enough on paper, but was likely to prove a very different matter in practice. We had carefully checked all our travel up to this on the map, and so far we had never detected the map's accuracy in any one single point. It was a map somewhat reminiscent of those made by boys at school, where one filled in any invitingly bare space with an imaginary river, or a fancy lake, or a decorative range of caterpillar mountains. From an artistic point of view this kind of fiction is very pleasant to look upon and to create, and indeed exercises a wonderful fascination over some people. One remembers the joy poor Stevenson confessed to over the making of that delicious map in _Treasure Island_. But when you are depending on a geographer to lead you out of famine, and when a fictitious scratch of his pen may hustle you into actual starvation, why then you come upon very different views, and cordially agree that any one who writes or draws anything but the bare and naked truth should be led out to suffer a lingering death.

In addition to all this, we could only guess at our "point of departure," and so getting the true magnetic bearing of this problematical Ivalomati was a matter of the airiest uncertainty. However, it was Hobson's choice, and so putting on cheerful, confident faces for the benefit of the frightened, sulky carriers, off we set.

Now this sort of quandary no doubt sounds funny enough from the distance; but viewed at first hand, we failed to catch its humour. We had hunger nipping us in the ribs all the time; we were heavy-footed with weariness; the infernal insect-plague was going on all the time; and there was nothing to tell us whether we were steering right, or wandering completely away into the savage depths of the wilderness.

We met swamps, and plunged across them in curves and zigzags. We tramped through forests of graceful birches, and forests of dreary pines; we clambered over rocks, and waded streams. The land was not entirely desolate of life. Sometimes we saw tiny lemmings before our feet, and once we heard the cry of a cuckoo from far away amongst the trees. At one halt in the middle of a two-mile-wide tremulous morass, we sat beside a pond of clear water, and tried to divert ourselves by overlooking the business of three black-and-gray frogs who dwelt in its depths. We were thankful to those speckled frogs during that halt: they almost interested us. But the greater part of the way was dreary enough. And so we expended an entire day's journey.

Finally, after wallowing painfully through another quagmire of still more horrible wetness and filth, we came upon a river, deep, swift-flowing, and two hundred feet from bank to bank. And this, unless the map was crowning its petty perjuries by the most cruel, colossal lie ever scratched upon paper, was the Repojoki.

Ivalomati, if it existed at all, was obviously on the farther side, and it behoved us to cross with as little delay as might be. But here came another difficulty. We proposed to build a raft to carry our goods piecemeal, and swim it across to the other side. But the Lapps, with the usual contrariness of those who live in a country of water-ways, could not swim a stroke, and refused flatly to be towed over, floated by a log. So there was nothing for it but to build a raft which would carry passengers, and to this pleasing business we set our hands without further talk.

It had been my fortune to make a whole armada of rafts before. I built one in the days of youth to navigate a local duck-pond. I made another in more mature years for the easier fishing of red char in a certain lake of Northern Norway, and another in North Carolina as a lazy way of travelling down the French Broad River; and in the course of writing story-books for the young I must have turned out quite a respectable fleet of rafts--paper rafts--under every conceivable circumstance of theoretical difficulty, with glibness and ease.

But building that raft to cross the Repojoki was very different from all these previous excursions into carpentry. They had been amusement; this was a horrible nightmare. Because we wanted wood, no wood was near the river. The handiest tree lay at the farther side of the last swamp we had waded through, and quite half a mile from the bank. We had to wallow painfully back through this slough, haggle down our trees, lop them into portable lengths, and drag them back through the quaking ooze. We were hungry, we were weary, we were bitten half mad by the hateful insects, and our one utensil for cutting was a small American axe, more fitted to split kindling wood than to swing against a tree.

Two logs we laid upon the bank of the Repojoki, seven feet apart; five others we laid upon these; and then, putting two more parallel to the first two, we made withes from the shoots of Arctic willow, and bound the whole into place. And all the time that we worked, the sun beat upon us, and the mosquitoes covered us in dense, biting clouds. We were like men toiling in a delirium.

We hacked out something that would serve as a paddle, and slid the raft into the swift water. As a vehicle it did not look encouraging. It floated deep, and each log wobbled independently. But we were in no mood for niceness then. The packs were piled on and laboriously paddled over, following a diagonal course in the grip of the racing current. The raft was brought back again, and made the bank some two hundred yards farther down-stream. With a passenger on board besides the paddler, it sank very nearly out of sight, and between each trip it had to be docked for repairs. It was a moist method of making the passage, but it seemed effective.

On the last trip, the ninth, Pedr was passenger with an Englishman for his Charon; and in mid-stream the beautiful Pedr objected to the water swirling round his waist, and began to get nervous. Worse still, he commenced to wriggle, and promptly the raft began to wriggle too. The withes with which it was lashed together untwisted gaily. The paddler paddled for dear life, and Pedr, now solidly scared, embraced him from behind. A log detached itself from the raft and bobbed off in a _pas seul_ down-stream, and on the farther bank Johann and Pat held out branches alluringly over the stream, whilst the other Englishman with them laughed. But still the paddler paddled on.

Then the logs of the raft opened out like the sticks of a fan, and reared up on end, and "Rari nantes in gurgite vasto" chuckled the foreigner on the bank, who knew something about his countryman's capabilities in the water. He had not calculated upon the clinging nature of Pedr, however, and when the pair of them vanished below the swirling surface of the Repojoki--and stayed there--he began to get a little scared himself and to strip off his coat.

However, there is a recognised course of treatment to follow under these circumstances, and the swimming Englishman took it with vigour, and some hundred yards lower down-stream came to bank with his charge. The beautiful Pedr had a big red lump over one eye, which probably explained to him then, and will make him remember in the future, that it is inadvisable to wrestle with a swimmer who is wishing for free use of his limbs in deep, rapid water. I fancy we had, on the whole, a good educational effect upon our Lappish carriers.

* * * * *

Of course we all were as wet as water could make us, and our chattels were sodden, and the exertion of making the raft and navigating her had been great; but the incident of crossing the Repojoki had on the whole distinctly cheered us. On every there-and-back crossing, the raft had been swept some two hundred odd yards down-stream; and so by the time the whole train was across, we had perforce gained knowledge of some thousand yards of the farther bank, and at one place came upon indications of a track. There were no footmarks, certainly; but some bushes had been axed away as though to assist a landing, and we set out from these with renewed hopes of finding Ivalomati.

The country, too, tried to cheer us. It was true there were more swamps, and they were even wetter and wider than those we had crossed before, but their bosky pools were gilded with sunshine, and here and there clumps of pink flowers, and white flowers, and blue flowers, caught the eye and tried to gladden it. On some of the marshes, too, there were curlew; and life, after the dead regions we had passed through, is always pleasant to look upon and hear. At one halt, a pair of these curlew got up, screaming, and went through the same pantomime one had seen them in so many times in the foot-hills at home during breeding season. Hayter must needs stroll off to look for their young. But after he had been gone a dozen minutes, I chanced to look down, and saw the chicken he was searching for squatted stolidly on the ground not four inches from my foot. In tint and shape it harmonised wonderfully with its surroundings, and had evidently received instructions to "lie close" whatever befel. Indeed it withstood a good two minutes' proguing with a grass blade before it deigned to stir; and when the little stilt-legged oddity did get up and run, in three turns it was absorbed into the landscape again beyond human sight. And in the meanwhile its parents were getting more daring. They were making such determined swoops at our heads that we actually had to drive them off. They were as fierce in their respect as nesting Richardson's skuas on the outlying islets of the Shetlands.

Cloud-berries grew on these swamps, but though we looked thirstily for fruit, we could see none even approaching ripeness. Most of the berries were green, or half formed; only a few were scarlet; none had got the amber tint which one has learned to love so well on a Norwegian shooting. And once, too, on a scrap of stony, rising ground, we saw a woodpecker at work, digging grubs from the trunk of a gaunt, dead pine.

We came into another forest, where the air was heavy with mosquitoes, and the weary carriers could hardly drag one foot up to the other, and still on we plodded. And then through the trees we caught a gleam of broad water.

No word was said, but instinctively the pace quickened. A breeze was blowing towards us, and down it came the faint scent of wood-smoke. It seemed the most delicious smell that had ever met our nostrils.

We came out of the cover and stood on the bank of a broad, sluggish river. On the farther bank was a canoe drawn up, and beyond it stood a rude hut of logs. It was Ivalomati, and we did not forget to congratulate ourselves. Johann exploded into roar after roar of laughter, and became the genial acrobat again, as though he had never been anything else; Pedr turned on the beautiful smile to its most beautiful pitch; and Pat forgot his tiredness, and his sore heel, and danced a jig of triumph, and let out of him a regular string of Irish yells for some one to bring across the canoe.