Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

When the sleigh traveller, driving along through the dark twilight, comes across one of these places where a deer herd has been digging down to food, he generally has plenty of occupation before he has crossed it safely to the farther side.

The reindeer, by the way, is identical with the cariboo of Northern America, and at one time, though long ago, it certainly existed in these islands of Great Britain and Ireland. It lingered longest in Caithness, and certainly was not extinguished there till the middle of the thirteenth century. But although the American red man, and the trapper, and the pre-historic Scotchman, have all, at one time or another, made their living out of the deer, none of these ever bred them as a domestic animal—that is an occupation parochial to the Lapp alone.

Here is a very interesting proposition. Where has all the money gone to for which, during so many weary centuries, these herds have been exchanged? The Lapp does not spend it upon himself, that is evident; and if he hoards it, where is his strong room? Legend alone deigns to tell: the Lapp himself preserves a massive ignorance.

It was a Norskman of Namsdalen who taught me all I know upon the subject, and what he said was too much like a fairy-tale to be taken very seriously. He was my hunter at the time. We were after elk, and he was moved to speech by the finding of the despoiled carcass of a cow-elk which had been slain by poacher Lapps. It seems he had once been enamoured of a Lappish woman (Fin-ne, he called her) himself, and under pressure she had shown him the hoard of her tribe.

It lay in a narrow glacier which trickled its frozen stream down a bleak pass in the mountain. At one place a spur of the rock had canted away the moraine stones into the centre of the stream, and behind the spur was a little bay of rock filled, as it were, with a backwater of clear green ice. At the edge of this they knelt, and stabbed and dug with their sheath-knives, and as the pit deepened round their feet they heard the muffled groans which poured from the heart of the glacier. These were the ghosts in the ice, the Fin-ne woman told him—clammy, resistless ghosts, who strangled thieves, as they had done through countless thousands of years. And when at last their knives had slashed a way to the lip of the cave, which lay below, my superstitious Norsk hunter almost believed her.

The woman herself would not go inside—she dared not. But the Norskman, though full of shrinkings, slid down over the glittering ice fragments into the cold, black cave beyond. And there, in the half gloom, lit only by the few rays which struggled in through the hole they had dug, and the cold green light from the ice, what a sight it was that met his eyes! He was in the treasure-house of the Lapps, a regular Aladdin’s cave, crammed with the plunder of centuries.

In ordinary sacks of skin were the kroner of recent years, and the national silver coinage which obtained before that. There in heaps were the heterogeneous coins of past ages and every country. And beyond was a curious litter of pewter candlesticks, jewelled sword-hilts, a gold Communion chalice, a rusted iron mace, a bone crucifix, bowls, chains, ladles, knives, some of precious metal, some mere valueless relics: and outside, the ghosts of the ice creaked and rustled incessantly.

Here, then, was the tale of how those old sea rovers, who stormed Scarborough, and burned the Humber villages, and ravaged the coasts of England and France, obtained meat to victual their galleys. Here was the plunder they had brought back from their distant piracies, peddled away to buy deer meat for fresh expeditions. But the man who looked on it all did not stop to make more than a hasty catalogue. The whispering ghosts of the ice scared him, the cold darkness of the place chilled his blood, and without, in the daylight, the Fin-ne woman incessantly whimpered and cried out that he should come back to her....

This is the tale as it was told to me beside the relics of that murdered cow-elk in Namsdalen, and this is all I know about the matter. A glow for treasure-hunting warmed in me. I wanted to set off at once and see that cave by the glacier for myself, and finger its contents. But the hunter was not to be persuaded; he said he had forgotten its whereabouts. That, of course, was absurd for a man who knew every tree and every rock on the fjeld. But I rather think the Lapps had scared him into holding his tongue about the matter. He had a very real terror of their powers of sorcery, as I had learned already, and I was inclined to credit his tale about the hoard—he had not got the necessary power of invention to have made it up. Besides, the viking “local colour” which he gave me (and which I have forgotten) was clean beyond him.