It takes a man of much more recklessness, or ignorance of the consequences, than the average Lapp hunter to go into a cave of the rocks and deliberately invite a rough-and-tumble with a live brown-bear.
But the hunters do their best to irritate him from a distance. They fire single shots into the darkness in the hope of riling him sufficiently to make a rush, so that the other guns which remain loaded may drop him when he comes into the open. They do this from every direction on which the cave mouth opens, so as to give him every chance of feeling a shot. And finally, if this method fails, they light a bonfire on his front-door step and stand round on their ski to await results.
It is by no means certain that the smoke will reach him, for there may be quite possibly an outward air-current, and the Lapps have produced their Rembrandtesque effect for no practical return. But if they have luck, and the stinging reek is too strong to be endured, then they have to stand by for quick shooting. The bear bolts like a rabbit, out of the firelight into the gloom, and in a matter of seconds he will be absorbed amongst the tree-stems of the forest. There is something uncanny, something almost devilish in the way a Northern bear can adopt invisibility.
[Bear hunt]—Smoking him out.
On the whole, then, when a bear is shot it is a day worth remembering, and all involved congratulate themselves on being incomparable hunters. There are plenty to listen to and envy them. Few men can say that they have not been concerned in a hunt. But in all last year head-money was only paid on seven bears in the whole of the Enare district, and that covers some 150,000 square miles. So, whatever can be said against the Lapp as looking on hunting as a business, it must be granted that it comes to him as sport and enjoyment as well, or he would not embark in a trade which brings in such extremely frail dividends for so large a percentage of outlay in risk and exertion. If further proof were needed, it was there plain in Enare Town. The majority of the Lapps lived in snug wooden houses, tilled the ground, tended cattle, lived prosperous lives. The professional hunters were like the hunters of the States, practically outcasts—men of the outer air, it is true, and rare fellows, but in the riches of this life they were un-acquisitive. When one of the rare windfalls came they were generous, and it quickly went; and between whiles they and theirs knew the grip of an empty belly. In Enare Town they lived in peat gammer, eyesores amongst the comely houses. Their wives were slatterns, their children ragged, their homes ringed round by squalor and poverty. They lived the free life of the forests, which is the best life of all, but they had to pay its price.
[Viking] Boats on Enare See