[CHAPTER III]
BY CANOE TO THE NEIDEN, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE
RUSSIAN LAPP’S DAUBSFEST AT BORIS GLEB
The Lapp in Lapland has his moments of personal cleanliness, as will be remarked in their place. The Russian Lapp, who resides outside Lapland proper, especially if he be of the fisher variety, scorns the outward application of soap and water. In summer a good cake of dirt, especially if it be well smeared in with tar, goes far to ward off the incessant gnawings of the mosquito; and in winter, when the mercury of a thermometer moves always sluggishly far below zero, what poor man would willingly strip off an extra coat of clothing?
The Russian Lapp indeed has few true and Lappish attributes. He resembles far more nearly the ordinary Russian moujik. He would even wear the orthodox knee-boot if he could afford it, but he is usually in a state of abject poverty, and attires himself in whatever rags may come to hand.
He is not in the least picturesque. Cover up his face and hair, and put him in a Bradford street, and he would pass for a British tramp, without work, or any inclination to find work. But his gipsyish face, with its black, beady eyes, and high cheek-bones, might betray him somewhat, and anyway the cut of his hair, which is worn along the eyebrows in front and fringing the coat collar (à la moujik) behind, would cause the more curious of Bradford wayfarers to turn round and stare.
The Lapp is not much in the reindeer business here on the Russian side. To begin with, the country is ill-adapted to the raising of deer, as it is mostly made up of lake and swamp; and as a further reason, the demand for venison here would be small, since the Russian orthodox church prohibits meat for quite half the year. So fishing becomes the Lapp’s chief industry, and by fishing he manages to wriggle along just beyond the grip of starvation.
He permeates the lower reaches of the Pasvik Elv and the shores of the Syd Varanger Fjord in considerable quantities, and there is a settlement of him at Boris Gleb, just below the falls of the Pasvik, round the white turreted church which we had seen from the Jarfjord road. At Boris Gleb he is at his best. He is under the direct eyebrow of Holy Russia at Boris Gleb, and has his place in statistics as an orthodox member of the Greek Church. His houses are of wood, raised above the damp of floods on curious three-foot piles, and the elements of sanitation are taught to him by official pressure. He is not obtrusively sanitary, even in Boris Gleb, which is by way of being a model village, with a rather high-class patron saint, whom the devout from afar honour with pilgrimages; but he wears there a kind of official “company manners,” and he is quaintly ready to be stared at by the foreigner.
In the Elvenaes neighbourhood he is known as a Skolte, or bald Lapp, because though in the present year of grace he wears an ordinary head of hair, at one time a skin disease ran through the community and made the heads as bare as a boulder of ice-worn rock.