Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

A Lakeside [Camp] on Enare See.

After the meal, the fire is carefully quenched with water, and then comes sleep, and then once more away in the canoes. These lake-fisher Lapps think no more of sleeping in the open than do birds or deer, and perhaps the untemptingness of their headquarters has something to do with this.

In the course of our cruise down Enare See we came upon several of these settlements on the coast and on the islands, but they did not strike us as appetising for a prolonged residence. The gamme (house) itself, which is usually some dozen yards beyond high lake-mark, has walls of stones and mud, or turf, with a roof more or less flat, made of turf laid on birch rafters. A chimney is a rarity, and in summer a nuisance. In a land which swarms with mosquitoes, it is always pleasant to have a wood-fire on the floor which will fill the atmosphere with “smudge,” after the fashion adopted by the Floridan cracker in his palmetto shack. But the hut is not without luxury. The floor is paved with stone, and round the walls are layers of young birch shoots, which make a springy mattress. In the better gammer the front-door opens on to a sort of lobby, which is used as a store, with a room on either side; but in the generality of these dwellings there is a single chamber, where the family, and the fleas, and the dogs, and a reindeer calf or so, and possibly a sheep, all pig it together, much as Noah and his friends did at their famous convocation.

But besides the one or more gammer, there are buildings at these settlements of almost greater importance, and these are the storehouses where the dried fish are stacked for winter sustenance. In nearly all instances these are made solidly of logs (whatever may be the structure of the gamme) roofed with birch-bark shingles, and well raised from the ground on piles, so as to keep the contents as dry as may be. There are racks, too, for drying the fish out of reach of the dogs, and the mortal remains of what were once fishes’ internals lie trodden into the grass in every direction. The lake-fisher Lapp is not a cleanly person in his disposal of items which he has no particular need for.

The pine forests thicken along the shores as one walks south down Enare See, and the lines of the tree-changes are very clearly defined. The shores are for the most part low-lying, and in many places the trees stand up gaunt and dead for miles at a stretch. For a stranger the navigation here would be a thing impossible. The islands twist and turn and crop up in every direction. Reefs spring up from deep water, and stay just awash. We would frequently run down to a line of creaming surf, open up some passage and slip through it, and then haul our wind and stand along between two lines of reefs with not a dozen inches of water under the keel. In places the great lake was a regular stone-yard.

Our boat was wonderfully handy. In build she was well rockered, with a good beam, but had very fine entrance and a clean run aft. She was of the regular viking build and rig, and from the English ideas of spars and canvas, it was a matter of wonder how she could sail at all anywhere except dead before the wind. A casual onlooker might have classified her as belonging to the lug-sail type, but that emphatically she was not. Her mast was stepped amidships, well set up by forestay, and by a couple of shrouds on either gunwale. When the sail was hoisted, the halliards and the down-haul were brought well aft and made fast to a thwart to serve as backstay. But it was this sail which was the wonderful part of her. It was not a lug at all, but a true square-sail with the halliard bent on to the very centre of the yard, with tack and sheet interchangeable, and with braces to each yard-arm. It was just such a rig as the Northman used when he came to ravage the English coasts. It was the sail which drove the Roman galley. It was the identical sail which the Phœnicians were using when the Londoner went out to dinner in a suit of neat blue paint, and brought his own stone axe to crack the bones.

Going free, and with sheets well-started, this sail had enormous lifting and driving power; and with tack bowsed down to the weather hause-hole, and the sheet flattened aft, our boat would look up to it as close as Norfolk una. The tiller worked with a joint so as to clear the stern-post, and pushed fore and aft after the manner of a single yoke-line; and every time we went about, this tiller was shifted over to the weather side. The gear, too, was of necessity cumbersome, and on no sort of day could she be called a one-man boat. But she was splendidly dry, and we were not without giving her one or two stiff tests. We carried a breeze with us all the time we were on the lake, and once or twice, on the large patches of open, we met that short, steep sea, common to this class of waters, which for a small boat is the wettest sea on earth. She went over it like a cork—she had magnificent lifting power—and at the same time she did not lose her way.

Once, in a heavy rain-squall, we got blown very nearly out of the water; the reefs were blotted out of sight; and the boat showed her one weak point in declining to lie-to. But in Enare this fault did not matter. The skipper luffed up under the lee of an island, Olof ran down sail, and ten minutes later the kettles were singing over a fire in a sheltered cranny of the rocks. The squall swished and boomed overhead, thunder with it and abundance of rain; the camp-fire sent out darting, twisting snakes of flame, which hissed at the wet; and the two Finns squatted beside the blaze like some queer trolls, each working with knife and teeth at a stringy rib-bone. I remember it was at this camp we came upon a piece of chocolate about as big as twelve sixpences (the last of a very slender store), and made a present of it to the skipper. He took it with a twinkle of thanks, and popped it in his mouth. Then he set his jaws to work, and spat with solemn regularity. He believed the gift to be some new form of chewing tobacco.