Of shootable game we came upon barely a trace. A whole day would pass without our seeing a single fowl either in the air, on the land, or upon the face of the waters. And the reindeer, of course, were like our cattle at home here—the domestic possession of the native. We saw these animals, it is true, in quantities. All the islands of Enare are laid down in deer according to their size, and solitary hermits peered at us from patches of ground smaller than a cricket-field, and I hope we cheered their loneliness. They were not very beautiful creatures to look upon just about then. They were very much out of condition. The snows had only just departed, and they were thin with the hard exertion of delving with their forefeet to reach the moss beneath, and worn with hard driving in the sledges. Their antlers were in velvet, and only partly grown, and their coats were very much in a transition state. In fact, they appeared to be clothed in a badly made patchwork of shades, which varied from dirty white to faded brown. These deer get little or no tending in the summer. They are not wanted for traction; they are put out to graze; and they do it industriously. Their owners permeate the neighbourhood in their canoes on fishing intent, and if they manage to cast eyes upon each individual deer once a month, it is a piece of unusual attention.
We came across these lake-fisher Lapps at intervals, and often sat and chatted round their camp fires. I remember well the first of these savage entertainments. Our eyes caught a slim blue drift of wood-smoke rising up from the farther side of an island. We ran down, hauled our wind, and sailed up to it. We were welcomed ashore with easy cordiality. There were three Lapp canoes nuzzling the foot of a black rock, and on the crown of the rock were their crews of four men and three round-faced, good-humoured women. They cleared the place of honour for Hayter and myself, and we sat down in the smoke drift from the fire, where the mosquitoes could only raid us with difficulty, and we listened to the politics of the lake: fishing was good here and bad there; this man had finished eating that lame deer he killed in the early spring; that man’s canoe had been beached in a gale, and smashed like an egg.
One lady indeed wanted to know about the outer world. She was a portly young person, whose globular red face beamed with a healthy animal cheerfulness. She had stubby hands, and a figure which resembled a corn sack, well filled, and stamped down. She carried a neat brass wedding-ring slung to her neck-handkerchief, and had a most educated taste in tobacco. She filled her pipe with shavings from my plug of negro-head, lit it with a brand from the fire, and then absorbed the smoke in an ecstasy. It was enjoyment to watch her pleasure: she puffed that pipe to the uttermost ash, and the vapour circled amongst her smiles. Then the spirit of inquisitiveness, and perhaps of envy, took her, and she wanted to know if this beautiful, this exquisite tobacco was the common smoke of my country.
To weakly avoid an hour’s complicated explanation, I admitted that it was.
And could English ladies have as much of it as they wished?
With distinct truth I answered that no stint was put upon them in the matter.
The patriarch of this group was a travelled man. His reindeer sledge had carried him in winter as far south as Sodankyla, where he had seen tinned anchovies and a Singer’s sewing-machine; and more than once he had boated down the Pasvik Elv to below Boris Gleb and caught glimpses of steamers out on the broad Varanger Fjord beyond. As some advertisement of all this experience, his head was capped with a battered yellow sou’-wester; but the rest of him was clothed in orthodox Lapp attire, and his tattered blue matsoreo was a miracle of barbaric ornament. His sardonic old face peered out from a calico mosquito cowl, which covered all the rest of the head, and his attention was very firmly fixed upon his meal.
In these lake-side camps every one cooks for himself. The lumps of meat (when there are any) are impaled on a piece of stick sharpened at both ends, so that the lower point may be pushed into the ground at an angle, and keep the meat in position whilst it is toasted. But the Lapp does not let his meat become over-cooked, and as a general thing he does very little more than take off the chill. It must be remembered, however, that everything is dried, more or less, and that fresh reindeer meat, or fresh fish, are things never used. Indeed I have frequently seen Lapps, and Finns for the matter of that, go home hungry in a boat half full of sweet, fresh fish, and then make their meal off semi-dried relics reeking of decay.
The coffee alone is a common brew, always made in a kettle of copper with a lid on the spout, and always drunk sweetened with cone beet-sugar after the rest of the meal is finished. And when it is strong enough, Laplander’s coffee is the best flavoured in Europe.