“Not it,” said the other.
“Then what do you think of it?”
“Seems to me to spell air-ship.”
“Looks like it, and a good one at that.’
“Russian?”
“Who’s else?”
“Phe-ew!” said the other. “This may mean something pretty big, if we can only come in touch with it.” And so here we were provided with a topic of talk which involved the fate of navies, the policies of nations, and indeed the government of the whole wide world. It was a god-send to us. In many a camp, on many a weary march when of ourselves we should not have been able to rise above the depression of circumstances, it was enough to begin: “Touching that air-ship of Johann’s, I’ve been thinking—,” and there would start up a whirl of talk which lifted us clean away from the insects and the domestic worries of Arctic Lapland.
To the stranger accustomed to bivouacs in other lands, it is wonderful to see the care with which the Lapps extinguish every grain of flame before leaving one of their camp-fires. The fire itself is always built close to a stream or pond of water—an ordinary necessity of camping when there is a kettle to be filled—and, if possible, on a flooring of rock. When the camp is struck, all remaining embers are tossed into the water, and then the extinguishing fluid is scooped up and soused over the hearth till not the faintest smoulder remains.
To the stranger, I say, coming raw into the country, all this laborious care seemed excessive; but before we had travelled a hundred miles into Lapland the reason became very apparent. If a breeze gets up, smouldering embers will rise from the place of fire and travel like birds down the wind. In a million cases they do no harm. But in the million-and-first they will drop upon some patch of reindeer moss, and then the mischief begins. The dry lichenous growth, crisp as cigar-ash, will carry the fire along like a train of gunpowder. Dead resinous branches of pine are licked up by the tongues of flame, and in an hour’s time the whole forest will be blazing, and a mark has been daubed across the country which will endure a hundred years. In Africa or America this would not matter. It would mean so much more ground cleared for the game or cultivation. But in Lapland it implies that valuable acreage of reindeer pasture has been taken entirely away from that generation, and human existence will be correspondingly harder; and so the man who sets the forest ablaze not only injures his neighbours, but he inconveniences that much more important personage, himself.