Even in the ordinary way of Nature, the reindeer moss is a crop requiring delicate management. Deer cannot be set to graze on it indiscriminately year after year. It demands its regular rotation of rest. In some districts four years, in others five, have to be given to a piece of fjeld to recover after a herd has grazed it for a short three weeks. And here, then, is the secret of the migratory life of the herder-Lapp of Northern Europe, which has endured down so many countless hundred years with scarcely a trace of change. To live, his beasts must live; and to find food for them he has constantly to move about over large desolate areas of the country; and so it is the scheme of his life which has divorced him from the idea of fixed abode, and not the mere relish for vagabondage. We had not seen him in Arctic Lapland yet, this pastoral wanderer; the fishers and the farmer Lapps we had come across were only his refined descendants; and we were keenly anxious to get into his neighbourhood, and watch him herd his deer, and see the life he led in summer under the conical shelter of his la-wo. It was this kind of Lapp I had lived with once before on a bleak fjeld of north-western Norway; it was this nomad aboriginal we had both read of in the improving books of childhood; and because we had come so far and gone through so much to renew his acquaintance, and still not met him face to face, we felt that we had been in some vague degree imposed upon. Well, we were to see enough of him very soon; but more about that in its place.
We came across traces of the nomads, however, on this very march. Johann, from the head of the caravan, halted till we came up to him. He pointed with outstretched arm down an aisle of the tree-stems. “La-wo,” said he, and showed us a cone of birch-stems set round the ashes of a hearth. This then was some reindeer-herder’s temporary rest. The vadmal cloth which made the tent-cover was gone, the fire was cold, the deer were driven away to other pastures, the Lapp herders had followed the deer. Only the tent-frame was left amongst the scent of the pines and the juniper, and beside it one human utensil. It was a “screw” of birch-bark, like those coils of paper in which the country grocer at home puts up sweetmeats for children—a flimsy vessel such as Adam might have used to scoop up his morning drink. It was new, and its edges were unfrayed; a thing made in a minute, and cast away when camp was struck to save the labour of portage. It was typical of the nomads’ ménage. They are a people who have reduced the list of “things which one can do without” almost to the vanishing point.
We were skirting now by the side of another ample lake, about one-quarter the size of Menesjärvi, but we did not tramp along its winding beaches. We kept on through the pines, and saw the blue water only now and again through the trim paling of their stems, and the sun sailing high overhead warmed us as though we had been tramping through some wood of the Engadine instead of this grim forest so far within the Arctic Circle. But no birds sang or sent their calls through the trees; the air had been filtered clear of all feathered creatures; the swarming insects peopled it alone, and pestered us with their ravening attentions.
But if we suffered abominably from this plague of flies, it was some slender pleasure to know that they in their turn did not carry on a life of unfettered delight. They had their enemies. At one halt, on a small oasis in the middle of a two-mile-wide morass, I saw a loathly horse-fly, which had marked me for his next meal, get checked in mid-career as he flew towards my sleeve. He had blundered into a spider’s web, and lay there struggling manfully. The whole net swayed and swung; the juniper twigs on which it hung actually buckled under the strain; but not a mesh gave. And presently the proprietor, a huge, orange-bodied spider, appeared from his private residence, and laid out along a warp, and (so to speak) threw off his coat and got to work.
From a seaman’s point of view that orange-bodied spider was a marvel of dexterity. He threw bowlines over the buzzing wings of the horse-fly, got a purchase on them, hauled them home against its body, and made them fast there with clever hitches. One by one he disentangled the horse-fly’s legs from the mesh, and roped them up too. And then he marled the victim’s body up into one helpless bundle, and carried it off to eat alive under a thatch of the juniper leaves.
Pat, to secure a longer rest at this halt, must needs change the grass in his boots, to do which entailed pulling it out, spreading it abroad to dry, and then packing it back again with one hand whilst he used the other as a last. Inserting the naked foot into the nest thus made was a matter for niceness and accuracy, and it was not usually managed at the first attempt. And then the coarse flannel trouser—which was very much like the trunk-hose of our own ancestors—had to be carefully brought round inside the mouth of the boot, and snugly made fast there with five feet of red, embroidered, inch-and-a-half-wide bandage, which sported the two orthodox thongs for tying at its outer end.
The other two Lapps filled in time by capturing horse-flies and mosquitoes and “taking it out of them,” after the manner of the story-book naughty child at home. I suppose we ought to have taught them better; but we did not: we felt that a little cruelty was justifiable.
On through more forests of pines we went, and through more swamps, with cloud-berries tantalisingly unripe beside our feet. We had visions of cloud-berries from other days,—plump, yellow, juicy fruit, ice cold, and slightly acid,—and with the fever of the bites constantly upon us, and mouths like dried leather, they were visions which made us sigh. Verily in this world—especially in the Arctic part of it—man cannot get all he wants, even though he offer in exchange much fine gold.
We sheltered under a new kind of roof at the end of that march—a regular Arctic casual ward. It was a rude house of logs twenty feet square, furnished with fixed bunks and a table set against the wall, one movable bench, and a fire-hearth in one corner built of rubble stone. The nearest human habitation was the squalid hut with the hump-backed woman we had left behind us at Menesjärvi. We were in a place of shelter built for the benefit of the sleigh traveller should he be caught in one of the whirling storms of winter. It was the distant finger of Holy Russia, showing how even the least-considered of her subjects is not left without some paternal care.
We filled the room with wood-smoke and prepared to enjoy ourselves. The Lapps undressed to their shirts, and squatted on the floor, and dined off reeking fish and strong rye-bread. We also ate from our poor store. And then we had a solemn palaver over the arrangement for the morrow, and then we lay down where we were, and slept.