Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

Up to this point the ground had been slowly rising all the way, and the air was growing cooler. As we went on, the swamp grew more rare. The water collected in little lakes, and under foot we trod for the most part on rock pavements worn smooth by a thousand centuries of water and weather. There were fewer birches, but here and there an abortive pine twisted and squirmed some five or a dozen feet above the naked stone, to hint at the vast forests of his giant fellows which lay only a few hundred miles to the southward. And underfoot, between the outcrops of rock, were here and there patches of ivory-yellow reindeer moss.

But when we reached the divide, and looked down over the country on the southern side, the reindeer moss had taken full possession. The pale sulphur tint was everywhere, but still the fjeld was deserted. There was not a deer in sight. All that rich lichenous growth was left to run to waste. Only one living animal did we see on the whole day’s march, and that was a tiny black-and-tan lemming, which I caught in my hand and (to his surprise) let go again. The country round here is, however, used largely as a camping-ground by Lapps during the winter, and the yellow moss, though crumbling and dry as sand, feeds the deer till they are rolling with fat. It is a very deep snowfall or a very hard frost which makes these pastures inaccessible. In winter the deer break the snow-crust with their great splayed fore-hoofs, and then dig down like terriers, till they are often browsing at the foot of a pit which completely hides them from any one on the surface.

For cold weather the migrating fjeld-Lapp comes to more permanent moorings, and sets up for himself a domicile more suited to the climate than his flimsy conical tent. We came across one of these on this day’s march, in the forks of a growing river. It was a hut of peat and sods, shaped like a West Greenlander’s igloo, and some dozen feet in diameter. Birch-stems were used inside to support the roof and prop out the walls, but these were falling in. One well-cleaned rib-bone and some charred embers were all that remained of furniture. The herdsman Lapp does not build for futurity; it is a concession to his principles when he builds at all; and when he quits his turf mansion in the spring, he does not look to find it still standing in autumn. He is content to waste a day and build another.

We were fortunate enough to come upon the two-roomed log-hut of a Finnish farmer to sleep in that night, and thought ourselves in luck’s way. We had to wade a river to reach it; rain had commenced to fall in torrents, and we were wet and very weary.

The farmer had but one cow, and she was not in milk; the agricultural part of the farm consisted of a small garden of unenergetic potatoes, set in drills three feet apart; and they could give us nothing whatever to eat for love or money. Presumably when times were good they lived on fish, for there was the disused head of a four-pound pike near the mouth of the draw-well; and at other times they apparently subsisted upon water. The water was good; it was sheathed in ice for more than half-way up the well; and we drank a bucket apiece with gusto. But our appetites demanded something more; so with much grudging we “killed a tin” out of our very scanty store, and then lit a fire and topped up with cocoa by way of dessert. One of us slept that night with his head upon the stone hearth. We were deadly tired, and though the rain dripped on to us through the roof, we neither knew nor cared.

The rain had cleared by morning, and we set out with better hopes. We were getting down towards Enare See, and expected to come across some duck; also we had managed to pick up an extra carrier, and so hoped that the pace would improve. The addition to our strength was a boy of sixteen whose leg had been broken and then set locally, and so had acquired a limp for life. But for a Finn he had a humorous face, and occasionally he did manage to instil some life into the proceedings.

The mosquitoes met us punctually at the door and got to work at once. The man with the hare-lip explained at some length that they would not be so bad now that the rain had passed over; but though we had grown to be connoisseurs, we could not notice any difference in their attentions. And, moreover, as those exasperating halts came with regularity each six hundred yards, we had every opportunity to get thoroughly maddened with their bites. We could watch them settle on us in their millions, waddle along with their ungainly walk one shoulder at a time, and probing with their long clumsy trunks at every chink. And we saw them flying away crimson-bellied with blood which we ourselves had a prior claim to.

There was underground drainage in many parts of the fjeld which we passed over here. Hollows abounded like those one sees on the limestone hills of Yorkshire, where cave-roofs have fallen in. But we found neither pot-holes nor cave-openings. Lakes were many. We frequently had to climb round their sides at the foot of steep, smooth cliffs of sandstone, and then again to scramble over hard outcrops of the same rock on the dry ground beyond. The birches were gone. Instead a forest began to grow of weedy, straggling, dishevelled pines, bare in stalk, and showing but little greenery. And always where stone was not, the ivory-yellow moss covered the ground with its dry, crisp carpet. Occasionally, too, sprouts of mountain-ash appeared, but these were rare, and they never grew thicker than a finger, or taller than a grown man’s waist. And still the birds kept off: we saw old spoor of reindeer here and there in the softer ground; but of four-footed creatures in the flesh and fur, nothing but tiny lemmings.

Meanwhile the lakes were growing larger, and the rivers which linked them more deep and broad. Enare See as it appears on the maps—even on the best map, which is that of Russian survey—is large; but Enare See as it exists in Arctic Lapland is larger by one half. It is no great sheet of open water like Michigan or Ontario; there is barely one stretch of unbroken water twelve miles square in all its hundred and twenty miles of length; and it is hard to say where the lake ends and where it begins. There are islands all over its great expanse, and the mainland round is cut up by lakes and water channels. In fact, just as some one once defined a fishing-net as “a lot of holes tied together with string,” so Enare See might well be described as a collection of land patches made into islands by water.