He was hinting to another girl that he would die for her, at our next halt. He was a most fickle swain, this india-rubber Lapp.
We paddled eleven miles to the end of Muddusjärvi—or at least the Lapps paddled; we two foreigners lay against the packs, basking in the sun, and smoked, and lazed, and admired the colouring on the hills. And at the end of the lake we disembarked and paid off the melancholy Lapp from Enare, who took back the canoe. Poor fellow, he had had his troubles and we should have pitied him. Moreover, he was intelligent, and strong, and willing, and we should have appreciated all these qualities. But as it was, I am afraid our principal sentiment towards him was one of dislike. We had sufficient worries of our own for all practical purposes, and that mournful face hanging between us and the sun did not tend to lighten them.
The caravan limbered up and stepped out down an avenue thirty feet wide, cut from the forest to provide for the winter sleigh traffic. The stumps were still in situ; rocks and boulders were scattered about everywhere between the grim forest-walls. An unmeddled-with undergrowth lay breast-high all down the clearing. A tiny winding ribband of track gave us just space in which to set our feet as we marched; and even this led into quagmires and morasses, which we were forced to wade through or circumnavigate. But all these obstructions would be blotted out by the winter’s snow, and the sleighs could travel briskly over the hard white crust. Scarcely a soul moved from place to place during the bright, soft, insect-ridden months of summer. Indeed this march was rendered memorable by our meeting another wayfarer. He was a man dressed in the Lapp clothes, but with a purely Tartar physiognomy, and he and we exchanged but the chilliest of salutations. Even the cheery Johann forbore to bestow on him his usual grin of greeting.
As though the mosquitoes were not sufficient plague (and their numbers, if it were possible, increased) we here passed into a belt that was peopled by still more insect horrors. Dragon-flies in millions rustled through the air, though these did not worry us. But they were accompanied by loathly great horse-flies, as thick as a finger, and monstrous blue-bottles, which were maddening in their attentions. The blue-bottle one could hear and avoid; but the attack of the horse-fly was stealthy. The beast would fly up without a sound, and alight like a piece of thistle-down, and one would know nothing of the matter until one was bitten. They could go through a coat as easily as one could push in a pin; even corduroy riding-breeches could not impede them; and on the place of each bite, there arose in the next half hour a great wen, which one wanted to tear out bodily by the finger-nails. That part of Lapland would be a lepidopterist’s heaven; but for any ordinarily constituted man it came very near to being the other place.
It must be remembered, too, that if we two foreigners suffered badly from this plague of flies, our carriers were ten times more tormented. A man with his hands free can thresh about, and to a certain extent beat the insects from him, unless he perishes with the exertion; but to a carrier impeded with a pack, this form of athleticism is necessarily limited. Our Lapps put calico cowls over their heads, which covered all except their faces, and their faces and hands they smeared with a liberal ointment of tar, and yet they suffered horribly. Still for all that they made no complaint. Johann would give out his great guffaws of laughter when things were at their worst, and the others would chime in merrily enough. They might be miserable, but they saw no reason to make themselves unhappy about it.
They were good fellows these two new carriers of ours. The younger one, Pedr, was a regular Adonis in his way, and certainly the only really handsome man we saw in Lapland. He had rare, fine features, perfect teeth, and a beautiful smile, which he laid on whenever conversation was demanded of him. He did not talk much; he seemed to find the smile much more effective.
The other addition of our force of a surety had stepped straight out of County Galway. It was true he wore a blue matsoreo piped with red and most dandily worked upon the shoulders. It was true he wore the Lapp shoe, and the tight white-flannel Lapp trousers (all of them rather shabby), and carried sheath-knife and tar-bottle dangling from his embroidered belt. It is true he talked only barbarous Qfinsk, but he spoke it with the softest, most insinuating brogue imaginable. His whimsical, humorous face, with its two days’ stubble of hair, was the most truly Irish piece of human furniture one ever put eyes upon.
He had a blue eye and a captivating grin—grin was the only word for it. He was always willing to do the larger share of the work, and—always did the least. He lied to one, and grinned without shame when he was found out. He tried brazenly and without the least concealment to swindle us over his wages, and grinned delightedly when we objected to paying him more than his just due. He provided us with free amusement the whole time we had him, and did it all deliberately. To have called such a delicious person anything else but Pat would have been an insult both to himself and to us.
We had a desperately hard journey of it on this march, and, moreover, passed nothing sufficiently interesting to note. The broad sleigh-cut continued all the way; the forest hedged it in on either side; the path underfoot was never level and seldom dry; and the insect plagues were a torment too horrible even to think back upon. In the end we came upon the swampy margin of a lake—the Menesjärvi we had heard so much about—and there, after some searching, found a canoe pulled up amongst the lake-side rushes.