We beached the canoe before the little farm, and went up to the hut there and took possession as a matter of course. There is an entire lack of formality about quartering yourself in your neighbour’s house in Arctic Lapland.
The old woman, with her latent housewifely instincts aroused, pottered about with a burning green branch to drive away the intruding mosquito. There were two rooms to the hut—a general living-room, and a tiny cupboard-like chamber which held two box-beds. There was a pet reindeer calf in the larger room, a frail, stilt-legged creature of the bigness of a greyhound, with a hoarse, dog’s bark. It had an amazing knack of getting into every one’s way, and sucked without invitation every finger that dangled within its reach. Of food about the place there was no single scrap. Milk, fish, bread, were all unprocurable. And so we were reduced to “killing a tin” from our scanty store, and making a sketchy meal off preserved dainties, which seemed to provoke the appetite rather than appease it. Ours was the smaller room, and we lit a fire on the stone hearth, and brewed milkless, sugarless cocoa, and finished up with a dessert of that and cigarettes.
The warmth grew in the little chamber, and there was a dry floor of boards beneath us. The mosquitoes, too, seemed for the moment to have left us. Here seemed an opportunity for taking off our clothes, the first for many days. The scars on the vulnerable parts beneath them were cruel. Hayter’s legs and knees were so swollen with the bites that he could not rid himself of his breeches until he had slit the bands of them with his knife. Our arms were tight in the sleeves of our coats; our hands were the size of boxing-gloves; we were both of us bloodied and blotched all over with the treatment we had undergone.
Personally I got on to one of the beds and fell asleep there in the act of filling a final pipe. But Hayter did not get so far. He was seated on the floor when I saw him last, reeving a new lace in one of his boots; and when I roused in the morning, he was still upon the floor, with the lace in one hand and the boot under his head. I fancy we must have been a trifle worn out when we finally reached the shelter of that little farm on Muddusjärvi.
We were woke by Johann at 5.30 the next morning (after three hours’ sleep), but did not make a start of it much before eight. We were bound up the lake, and as a paddle had been broken in the landing overnight, another had to be hacked out of the solid tree with axe and knife before we could leave. You may use another man’s property if you find it lying about in Lapland, but you are expected to make all damage good. As Johann pointed out, it is sometimes a profitable move to leave an old paddle or a battered pair of ski where the chance, needy stranger can lay hold of them, as by that means he does the breaking, and one gets provided with brand-new implements free of trouble. And there is no fear of being taken in by some one who is incompetent to do the requisite carpentering. Axe and knife, and more rarely a saw, are the only tools in the country, and within all its marches one could not find a grown, sound man unable to use all three with deftness.
We paid off our Finn carrier at this point, and gave the old lady of the house two marks, at which she nearly bowed herself in two. And then we embarked in the canoe again, with the two Lapps paddling, one the bows, and one aft, and set off up the lake.
Muddusjärvi is narrow here, and contracts still more farther on, till one could well set it down as a mere currentless river. It sits quietly between its low banks, and is fed from the low, hummocky hills on the northern side, and by the higher hills beyond them. There is thick cover in beyond these banks, but no sign of game anywhere.
Reed grasses which scraped against the canoe’s tarry side were beginning to grow in the shallows, and then, just as the lake was beginning to widen again, we landed before a cluster of three huts, and tried for carriers. Johann and the melancholy Lapp went up to do the negotiation, and we foreigners got out of the canoe and stretched our limbs. A flock of ten diminutive sheep, two of them black, sauntered up and nibbled at my legs. The farm was small, but it seemed fertile and cared-for, and by no means poverty-stricken. There was a grass-field, enclosed by split-rail fence, and manured. And good grass it was, too, well cleared from weeds. But there were no carriers available here, which was what we were particularly interested in just then, so we went back to the canoe and once more got her under way.
We opened up broad Muddusjärvi after this—a fine sheet of water, bordered by wooded hills; but presently we turned due north again, and paddled up a narrower arm of the lake, and landed at another Lapp farm.