THE REINDEER.
REINDEER.
The Reindeer is of about the size of the Red Deer, but its legs are shorter and thicker. The horns, which exist in both sexes, are divided into several branches; at first they are slender and pointed, but as they grow they extend, and ultimately terminate in broad and toothed palmations. The hair of this animal, which is brown in summer, becomes almost white as winter approaches—a circumstance which accounts for the idea among the ancients, that the “Tarandus” could assume any color it thought proper.
The Reindeer is met with only in the extreme north of Europe and of America. It is more especially a native of Lapland, where it is as serviceable to the sojourner in those icy regions as the Camel to the inhabitants of the sandy desert. The Laplanders keep numerous flocks of them, drive them in summer-time to the mountains of their country, and in winter cause them to return to the plains, where they use them as beasts of burden and of draught, eat their flesh, feed their children with their milk, and clothe themselves with their skins. “These useful animals,” says Mr. Lloyd, “not only mainly contribute to the subsistence, but constitute the chief riches of that nomade people. Without the Reindeer, indeed, the Lapp could hardly contrive to exist in the dreary region he inhabits, the needful provender being too scanty to admit of the well-being of other animals, such as Sheep and horned Cattle, which in more southern countries are made subservient to the purposes of Man.”
“A large herd of Reindeer,” says Lloyd in his Scandinavian Adventures, “traversing the open country or the surface of a frozen lake, as the case may be, when the Lapp is changing his encampment, is a very magnificent sight. In the front walks a Man leading a Reindeer, or perhaps the Man quite alone, who only now and then calls to the animals, which, at a few paces’ distance, faithfully follow where he leads.
“In the first ranks of the herd one commonly sees many noble males, who proudly elevate their heads, attired with large and branching antlers. The rest of the herd follow one another in close phalanx. It resembles a wondrous moving forest, whose innumerably branched crowns, with their rapid and constantly shifting motion, make the most pleasing impression on the eye and mind of the spectator.
“The Lapp sometimes calls a great herd of Reindeer a sava, or sea, a figurative expression, beautiful as faithful; taken, probably, not only from the immensity of the ocean, but from its surface being in constant undulatory motion.”