Two deserted villages did we pass through on this march, with their few mouldering remnants of huts and clearings almost blotted into forest by the second growth. In one of them there was an especially picturesque bit, and we came to a halt, and Hayter sat himself on the wreck of an old reindeer sledge and tried to sketch it. He was prepared for annoyance from the mosquitoes, and he got it. He battled with them bravely for a long time: he smoked like a chimney; he slapped himself with frantic industry; and at last he gave it up in despair. He had covered three pages of his sketch-book with blood—his own blood—and pencil scratches, and dishevelled insect corpses, and he certainly did get three good impressionist sketches of the atmospheric condition, but he carried away no intelligible note of the ruined huts and the clearing.
The carriers shouldered their loads again, and we knocked out our tobacco into the grass; but the caravan did not start till the two Lapps had come up and carefully stamped out any smoulder which might remain.
All trails which might at one time lead out of that village were long since grown up. The forest is always greedy to take back any territory of which man has robbed it. So we had to make our own path as we progressed, and pressed on through clinging undergrowth. The dim roar of the foss down in the valley rumbled through the air, but no birds lightened the march with their songs. Occasionally the straining ear thought it caught the cry of some feathered creature, but it always turned out (on seeking deeper) to be tree-branches grinding together in imitation of bird sounds.
Ant-hills, built of pine-needles and clay, perched under the trees on the steep hillside, with gallery entrances into them of the bigness of peas, and a marvellous insect busyness pervading all their neighbourhood. They were not so large as those pine-needle ant-hills one meets with in north-western Norway, and of course were dwarfed by the huge ant-mounds of Africa, but they ran to a goodly size here in the Enare district, often reaching to a four-foot height above a seven-foot base.
We had passed the noisy falls by this time, and when we could catch sight of it through the trees, we could make out that the farther side of the valley was moving away from us. We were working downwards all the time, and presently we stepped out from the cover and stood on the sand beaches of Muddusjärvi.
It was necessary to cross this lake before we could get any farther, and the packs were thrown down, and we proceeded to telegraph our need to a tiny farm on the other side. The Finn did not help. He was driven half mad with the mosquitoes, and he lay on the sand, with his head wrapped in his coat, writhing with the irritation of his bites. But we others dragged some dead wood to the extreme water’s edge, and shredded it with our sheath-knives, and set it alight, and coaxed it into a goodly flame. And then we added more fuel, and still more. There is always plenty of dead wood ready to hand in these austere forests, which no one but Nature herself cuts or cares for, and we dragged down whole trees to dedicate them to the flames.
The lake was dim with mist, and a clear signal was imperative; and Johann, the eccentric, must needs climb trees and dance upon dead branches, crooning music to himself, till he and the branch came crashing down to the ground. He was a weird creature. So we made this beacon of ours no niggling flicker. We had got to make our presence known and our needs understood; so we built us a royal blaze which roared, and writhed, and rose high into heaven; and then we ranged ourselves in the valley of smoke which drifted to leeward (to keep out of the mosquitoes’ reach), and one by one stepped out and hailed at the upmost stretch of our voices, that some one, we did not know who, might bring across a boat.
It was a good opportunity to experiment for the best travelling note of sound. The Echoes from their perches on the frowning hillsides across the lake appointed themselves judges, unasked, and we mortals began the contest.
First Johann coughed the wood-smoke from his lungs and ran forward as though he were going to throw a cricket ball, and set back his shoulders, and yelled out a sort of dog-yap on two high notes. He scored, but not heavily.
The other Lapp lifted up his head and emitted a melancholy howl like a wolf’s. We listened. Yes, that certainly carried farther.