The life these aboriginal people lead in Arctic Lapland is undoubtedly hard, and at times they rub shoulders very closely with starvation. But they have got constitutions, built up through countless centuries to endure the privations and (what to a more delicately nurtured race would be) the hardships of their life; and from the number of very old people we saw everywhere through the country, it was plain that the orthodox threescore years and ten was by no means the average limit for the life of an Arctic Lapp. Children there were, too, in all abundance. It was a notable fact that scarcely a woman did we see of child-bearing age without a babe at breast; and though a large percentage of this progeny did not endure the chills of a second or a third winter, enough pulled through to keep the race on the steady increase in numbers. This weeding-out process also obviously did much to counteract the evils of consanguineous marriages, and so maintain the standard of physique. It was one of Nature’s balances. Without it the Arctic Lapps would increase for a while abnormally, and then they would dwindle, and in a few centuries they would be gone.
We should have liked much to stay on in that Arctic casual ward, to which Marie guided us, for a day or two to recruit. We were both of us getting very hollow-eyed, and not a little fagged. The mosquito-plague had something to do with this state of things, because when a man has got a constant fever about him, he can scarcely be called healthy. And the want of food was telling on us. We had barely had a decent meal since leaving the Windward, and many of our meals were as much like the Barmecide’s as a diet of plain water could make them. But it was this very scarcity of food which drove us remorselessly forward. Our own store of those miserable tinned dainties was dwindling, and the carriers’ provisions had already been dragged out beyond their calculated time. We had no help for it but to press on to Ivalomati, which was the nearest human habitation.
So we started, and promptly there arrived another difficulty: we lost the way.
In a populated country this is a hard thing to do. Given the general direction, one can always there hit upon a town or a village if one takes sufficient time about the search. But in a land where the town consists of five houses, and a village can earn a name on the map with one roof and a haystack, it is very easy to wander on day after day and never sight anything but sheer wilderness.
In this particular instance it was Johann who failed us. The excellent Johann had never before journeyed West beyond the squalid hut which figured geographically as Menesjärvi; but as at that place we had been unable to get either fresh guides or carriers, we had induced the three who had brought us to come on farther, and Johann had guaranteed (for a consideration) to find the way. He had laid under contribution the entire topographical knowledge of Menesjärvi (which perhaps did not amount to much), and had imbibed it noisily for three solid hours. He had started off with confidence and brought us to the first rest-house in style. Pat and Pedr had found their way from there to the second shelter, where we, with Marie’s help, joined them. But before we had been travelling a mile on the final stage, it was clear that the loud-voiced Johann was completely “bushed.”
He would not own it at first. We were tramping through a burnt-out forest with gaunt gray-and-black skeleton trees hedging us in impenetrably on every side. Growth and decay is slower up there, deep inside the Arctic Circle, than it is in the Tropics. In a hot, moist country a fallen tree may be blotted out of sight by vegetation in a week, and crumbled into primitive dust in less than a year. But up in the cold North, Nature does not strain herself to work with such fevered speed. A tree dies; and, erect or prone, it may survive for years as a gaunt, dry corpse. There is no jungle to hide it from the air; there are no creepers to bore into its bones and leave openings for the tearing fingers of the weather; there is only the short, crisp moss underfoot, and that rather helps than hinders its preservation. And so for years upon years these dead forests endure, as eyesores to heaven.
Mile after mile we tramped through the winding aisles of these dead trees, the acrobatic Johann waddling stolidly on in the lead. From time to time we looked at the compass, and more than once we had doubts about the direction. But we did not interfere. Johann under the stress of advice was apt to get flustered, and Johann flustered would be a very useless guide indeed. He was all we had got, and so we agreed to let him have his own way.
But at last when he calmly led us back over our own tracks which we had made not half an hour before, and still would have gone complacently on waddling through the wilderness, we called a halt and made him face the situation. He owned up at once to having wandered, which was a confession he could not very well avoid, seeing that our old tracks were by no means microscopic; and after a little more pressure, admitted that he had not the vaguest notion of where he was.