Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

The neat, rectangular, canvas-covered box was eliminated first. We had looked upon it as an ideal “load”; in Africa there would have been a vigorous scramble for it; but the Finns said it was impossible to tackle anyhow. They scouted all suggestions of slinging, or carrying it hammock fashion, and fetched out another sack and made a re-stowal. Naturally the bundle so contrived was about as impossible to carry on human shoulders as a live porcupine would have been. So a blanket was taken out of one of the sacks and used as a pad. And next the sacks were objected to, and their contents split up, till finally our possessions were made into seven bundles of much fragility.

They worked hard over making this muddle; they took two mortal hours over it, and frequently called upon us for assistance; but finally they limbered up with the help of abundance of thongs of reindeer hide and rope, and we put backs to the river and set off on our march.

The first halt came at the end of the first three hundred yards; a load had very naturally began to shift, and they all sat down to readjust it. The second halt came at the quarter mile, and then the stoppages became more frequent. We came to a standstill eight several times before we had covered the first mile, and expended exactly two hours and a half of time in doing it. And as during all this time the sun was blazing upon us with scorching force and the mosquitoes were biting like dogs, we were not unspeakably happy.

This start up to the fjeld was over sandy river-beds, through streams, swamps, and neck-high scrub. A month earlier the country had been under snow; a week before the tree buds had not burst; and here were dwarf birches and the Arctic willows in full leaf, and barely so much as a patch of white left even in the crannies of the distant hills. The Arctic summer has a great deal of work to get through in a very short space of time, and rushes its climatic effects. But, worst of all, the mosquito season had opened ten days before, and was in full swing. And such mosquitoes! Their cousins of Africa and the Southern States were nothing to them. They came in their milliards, gaunt gray fellows, without one grain of fear for death. They got their trunks inserted in some unlucky pore, and presently their bodies, from the wing-sockets backwards, would grow into transparent scarlet blobs. We were covered with blood splashes from slaying these vampires, and sore with slapping at them; but it was some selfish consolation to see that the men of the place suffered equally. Each of the Finns carried a bottle of brown Stockholm tar, which dangled from the waist-belt against his knife, and with the contents of this he liberally anointed both face and hands. But this did little more than convert the wearer into an animated fly-trap. We employed tar for the complexion ourselves till we were nearly through to the other side of the country, and then we gave it up and used it for the boots alone, and noted no difference in our discomforts. We had veils each of us, but these were not often available. They got entangled by passing shrubs; the enemy would get inside once every minute or so, however carefully the edges were tucked in, and this entailed a hunt and a blood splash, and, finally, the mesh blurred the view, which was a fatal objection.

There was no vestige of path to guide our caravan, and the man with a squint who led was more than once at a loss, and we had to give him hints from the compass. This ground is never travelled over in summer, and but rarely in winter. The Enare district is entered and left by the Pasvik Elv. The going was very rough. Occasionally we got out on to dry ground and scrambled over tumbled boulders, or groped our way down slippery rock faces; but for the most part we trod quaking marsh, which either swung under our weight, or let us through into brown tarns of slime. At the outset we were inclined to envy the Finns, who, in their national boot, which reaches to mid-thigh, went over a good deal of swamp dry-shod; but when first one and then another got ducked to the middle, we began to see that there were advantages in less defensive foot-gear.

That first stretch across the fjeld was a typical piece of primeval ground. No one except nature had tampered with it since the beginning of time. Even where the surface was dry there was often a liquid substratum, and little mud volcanoes rose from dessication cracks which were a mile away from the nearest open swamp. But the desolation of the place was cruel. There were no birds, no animals, nothing but the humming insects. Only once during that day did I hear a solitary curlew’s scream, and that seemed wafted to our ears from an infinite distance.

We crossed the Russian frontier in the middle of a lake-pitted moor, and thought with some grim amusement of the foreign office passports with their hieroglyphical visés, lying packed with the tobacco in the middle of the humpback’s load. The marches of Holy Russia are not so carefully patrolled as the stay-at-home blood-and-thunder novelist would have one to suppose. And just about there we halted for perhaps the fiftieth time that day and made a temporary camp.

[Finn] Carriers Crossing Russian Frontier.

These halts live in the memory more than any other feature of the country. The sitting down to wait perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps an hour, in a stew of insects, and then repacking the loads and starting off again at a gait which rarely amounted to the pace of two miles an hour, was indescribably wearying. When we had Lapps for carriers all this was changed; they were willing, cheery, and active creatures who always did their best—but more of them later. With these high-booted Finns, however, it was almost always the same. They were weak, unwieldy, unhandy. They could not keep a footing on rock; they were about as helpless as camels on soft ground; and they always made a point of getting as badly bogged as possible in every swamp. They were sullen boors without an ounce of pluck, and if one attempted to hurry them at all they collapsed at once.