[CHAPTER VII]
INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES—(Continued)
We had small appetite for breakfast next morning after that horrible night, and this was a fortunate thing, for there was little enough provender available. We could not buy so much as a crumb of bread or a shred of fish. The wretched people had none to sell. Johann showed a pleasant piece of thoughtfulness. He came into the dairy with a blazing bundle of green twigs in his hand, and filled the room with clean, fresh wood-smoke, so that we might have the early morning in peace. Even the sour-milk smell fled before that billowing wood-reek.
A mark paid our poor night’s lodging, and for another mark we chartered a good canoe to take us down the lake and up the Menesjoki, with a limp, small boy to bring her back. The hump-backed woman and her brood came down to the lake-shore and stared drearily at us as we paddled off.
That morning voyage down the lake lingers in the memory as one of the seven pleasures of life. The sun was bright and glorious in a blue sky overhead; a breeze fanned the fever from our hands and faces; and the canoe carried us as though it were the delightful vessel of a dream. The water tinkled and the paddles cheeped against the gunwales. We drank deep of the ease and gentleness of it all.
All around the lake were hills, pine-covered and highish, but, as usual, many patches of the forests were dead, and the tree skeletons stood out gray and naked amongst their feathered comrades. Only one green patch was visible on all the shores, and that was Menesjärvi, where we had come from. The eye should have dwelt on it with pleasure, but the horrors of the night we had spent there were still big in us, and we turned from it with shudders.
We got into the Menesjoki after three times grounding on the shallows, and paddled pleasantly up between its banks. Here indeed was surprising scenery. We might have been rowing by some river-side park on the Thames, the cultivated growth of ages, the daily care of a hundred gardeners. There were graceful foliage trees, and trim, well-favoured shrubs, and clumps of flowers, and lawns of the pleasantest green, all repeated faithfully in the still mirror of the water. It was hard to keep in mind that human foot did not tread these banks once in a dozen years.
Fish rising at flies dappled the water mirror with dainty rings, and now and again the swirl of a foraging pike gashed it with a rippling fan. Even the mosquitoes, those insects of the devil, seemed to respect the sanctity of this paradise, and acknowledged that they were too evil to sully its delights.
The river wound into countless curves, and the Lapps paddled on at a steady gait. A brood of duck appeared in the water ahead of us, black in body, with a white bar across the wings. Leenoot was their country name. There was no drake; he was away from family cares. But Madame was fully alive to the unpleasantness of our neighbourhood. Away the whole crew of them went, splutter and splash, paddling lustily. The old lady led the way and quacked out directions, to which her family were fully obedient. One by one they left her, some diving, some swimming direct to the cover on the banks; and then she herself, with a final quack of defiance, got in the air and flew away through an alley of black pines.