Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

The rain had come first, and so the squall did not last. The mists dropped, and the sky showed up blue and white, with the sun hanging in it, round as a coin, and red as a soldier’s coat. The gaunt pines of the island and the ivory-yellow moss were lit with the glow. It was after midnight. We stood up and watched in silence. A stray duck, the only fowl we saw on all Enare, came flying across—a clean black silhouette against the brightness.

Once more we quenched a camp-fire and mastheaded the brown sail, and once more we left the open lake and dived in amongst another maze of its islands. We had seen our fill of the northern and eastern reaches of Enare See, and were heading now so as to reach Enare Town in the quickest reasonable time. The wind hardened as the sun climbed higher into the sky; and the boat flew south and west with a swirl of sound. The lake-floor rose and sank beneath her, and the surf leaped up from a thousand reefs. The pines roared at us as we drove past a wooded point. Here and there a house of logs showed against a clearing on the shores.

The lake was deserted of man and fowl. The canoes of the fisher Lapps had run into shelter, and the birds were not. The loneliness of the place chilled one like the hour before the dawn.

Then we saw houses of red and gray and ochre standing on a low bluff, and we made for them, ran down sail, and put the boat’s nose on a beach of sand. We had arrived at Enare Town, the chief city of the Lapps, and it was three o’clock in the morning. We were deadly tired. The rest-house lay at the top of the bluff, and we climbed to it with yawns and drooping eyelids. There are no locks in Lapland, and we went inside and announced ourselves. A young Lapp and his wife were asleep in the guest-room bed, under a calico mosquito bar. They rose, silent and blinking, and began to clear away their bedding. In a cradle lay a child with its face all blotched with bites, and this also they took away. But what other preparations they made then for our comfort I do not know. We lay down on the floor in our oilskins as we were, and dropped off on the instant into the deadest of sleep.

Up there in the North, where the day lasts bright all round the clock, they set down no arbitrary hours for work and sleep such as are forced upon us here in England. One may often see children winding up their play at 4 A.M., or their elders starting a day’s work at six in the afternoon. In our journey which followed, across this country down towards the Arctic Circle, we marched quite as frequently by night as by day. On that special occasion at Enare we breakfasted at twelve midday, and found most of the town outside to welcome us.

We held a levee inside first, because Olof had advertised the wonders of Hayter’s Marlin rifle, and the bear-hunting section of Enare (which comprised all the males) could not rest till they understood all about the repeating mechanism. And then we went to present a letter to Herr Praest Hinkola. It turned out that he was away, and was not expected home for some days, but Fru Hinkola and her brother, the postmaster, took us in charge, and strangers in a strange land were never more hospitably entreated. We had all our meals at their table, and if we did not sleep under the parsonage roof, it was only through our own refusal to trespass farther on their kindness.

They were not cheering, however, about our chances of getting through across the country to Kittila. It was never done in summer; there were no roads; the mosquitoes and the swamps were almost impassable; horses or reindeer were utterly out of the question; lakes and rivers lay in the way, over which it was very doubtful if we should find ferriage even for ourselves; and, finally, it was distinctly improbable that we could get carriers to pack our goods beyond the first stage or two. In winter the route was practicable enough, for then the river and the lakes were frozen, and the swamps were covered in snow, and a sledge with relays of deer could get over the ground with ease. But even in winter that way was little traversed. It was from Helsingfors and Uleaborg they got the supplies, and the route to those towns lay through Sodankyla. That was quite practicable even in summer, though of course not for horses or reindeer. We could travel by canoe nearly all the way.

And we should see, what? Well, we should have an excellent view of several hundred miles of river-bank. And we could post onwards with horses either to Kittila or else directly down to the sea, in comparative luxury and comfort.

We had not journeyed that far, however, to exploit future tourist-routes; our business was to visit the Lapland farmer and fisher and herder on his native heath; and we were not going to spare ourselves pains to carry this out. So we announced with a sigh that Sodankyla would not do, and that we were going to worry through the other way somehow; and forthwith the postmaster shook his head, and sent word round the houses that carriers were wanted for the morrow.

In the meantime we looked about us. There are twelve hundred people in Enare, but as the town-limits are some seven miles across, a stranger looking at it from the landing-place might reasonably put down what he saw from there as a small straggling village of new log-houses set down near a spired, red church. The houses were closer once and older, but one of the periodical fires broke out during a gale a few years back and swept the whole place away, so that it had to be entirely rebuilt. Given a sufficient frost to freeze the water, a good breeze, a house afire on the weather side, and one of these Northern wood-built towns will blaze itself to ashes in a dozen hours if it is at all closely built. So the more modern idea is to leave at least a hundred yards between every house, and as the intervening spaces are cultivated, the towns are now going back to the old scheme of being merely clusters of farms. And every building, from the red church down to the smallest fish-barn, has a broad, slanting ladder which leads permanently to its roof, with a great iron hook at the end of a pole, always hung there ready to tear away blazing shingles or smouldering roof-turf.