[CHAPTER IV]
FROM THE NEIDEN ELV TO ENARE SEE, WITH PUNGENT
COMMENT ON THE HABITS OF FINNISH CARRIERS
The salmon fisheries of the Neiden River are jealously guarded assets. Some are held by riparian proprietors whose rights go to the imaginary line of mid-stream. These are Norwegians and Finns for the most part, though they might be Hebrews from the carefulness with which they strive not to be defrauded of a single fish. And the balance is State’s land, rented out in the usual way. Nets are abundant, set out to stakes, with one end on shore; but rod-fishing is growing commoner. The local rod-fisherman, however, is but a crude production. His “pole” is comely enough, though heavy, but he persists in fishing a colossal fly of the “Jock Scott” order, ten times too big, and he uses it as though the water were a gong and the salmon could be attracted only by noise. Once hooked, the fish either breaks him or is jerked skyward like a silver bird. He would not play a whale; he does not know that such a process exists.
The Neiden fisherman goes out in a canoe, and his wife or a friend poles him in or about the rapids. The fish do not run big—a twenty-pounder is rare—but there are plenty of them, and the local artist annexes just as many as a very green amateur has any right to expect. Salmon-fishing to him has much the same interest as mowing swamp-grass for his cows, or cutting cord-wood for the winter: it is part of the daily labour, and it never occurs to him to look upon it as a sport. In fact the item of “sport” has been left out of his education; he looks with suspicion on any one who hankers after it; and, as a consequence, asks prices for using a rod on his bit of a stream which would be dear on the Namsen or any other crack salmon rivers of accessible Western Norway. It is not that he is averse to fingering the kroner note. On the contrary, he has a very great affection for money. But he has an exalted notion of the value of things, and, moreover, he is woodenly conservative. He likes to handle the salmon himself. He splits it open and kippers it, after which he stores the worst specimens away for future personal consumption, and packs off the balance to some place on the Vavanger fjord, where a steamer calls which will exchange it either for coin or groceries. His father did this, and his son will do it also, unless by the son’s time no fish should be left in the river, as at the present rate of destruction may very well happen.
But even had the fishing prospects of the Neiden River been ten times more appetising, they would not have induced us to make a stay there. The interior of Lapland lay beyond—a place of great lakes and rivers, of vast deer-packs and nomad herders; and we hungered to be amongst it all. Over night—under the blaze of a twelve o’clock sun—we had commissioned a man to find us carriers, and in the morning we crossed the river below that lonely Russian chapel, we and our goods, and in ten minutes the real troubles of the journey had fairly begun.
Never were such carriers. They were all able-bodied Finns, though one (and he was the strongest) had a hump like a Brahmin cow, another had a hare-lip, and the headman possessed a most virulent squint; but they were the most impracticable creatures that ever slouched over the face of the earth. Our luggage was not heavy; two negro carriers on the Congo or the Gold Coast would have capered with the whole lot of it; but through a wish for long quick marches, we had made it up into three light loads. There were two sacks, and a canvas-covered box containing a few tins, some cartridges, and four pounds of cake tobacco.
Now we both knew something about packs and loads in other parts of the world; but the Finn carrier was new to us, and his ways were strange; and it is always dangerous to introduce customs from a distance for consumption in a country whose difficulties you do not understand. So although we made suggestions, we did not insist on them, and the carriers muddled on with the preparations in their own way.