Finally, after wallowing painfully through another quagmire of still more horrible wetness and filth, we came upon a river, deep, swift-flowing, and two hundred feet from bank to bank. And this, unless the map was crowning its petty perjuries by the most cruel, colossal lie ever scratched upon paper, was the Repojoki.
Ivalomati, if it existed at all, was obviously on the farther side, and it behoved us to cross with as little delay as might be. But here came another difficulty. We proposed to build a raft to carry our goods piecemeal, and swim it across to the other side. But the Lapps, with the usual contrariness of those who live in a country of water-ways, could not swim a stroke, and refused flatly to be towed over, floated by a log. So there was nothing for it but to build a raft which would carry passengers, and to this pleasing business we set our hands without further talk.
It had been my fortune to make a whole armada of rafts before. I built one in the days of youth to navigate a local duck-pond. I made another in more mature years for the easier fishing of red char in a certain lake of Northern Norway, and another in North Carolina as a lazy way of travelling down the French Broad River; and in the course of writing story-books for the young I must have turned out quite a respectable fleet of rafts—paper rafts—under every conceivable circumstance of theoretical difficulty, with glibness and ease.
But building that raft to cross the Repojoki was very different from all these previous excursions into carpentry. They had been amusement; this was a horrible nightmare. Because we wanted wood, no wood was near the river. The handiest tree lay at the farther side of the last swamp we had waded through, and quite half a mile from the bank. We had to wallow painfully back through this slough, haggle down our trees, lop them into portable lengths, and drag them back through the quaking ooze. We were hungry, we were weary, we were bitten half mad by the hateful insects, and our one utensil for cutting was a small American axe, more fitted to split kindling wood than to swing against a tree.
Two logs we laid upon the bank of the Repojoki, seven feet apart; five others we laid upon these; and then, putting two more parallel to the first two, we made withes from the shoots of Arctic willow, and bound the whole into place. And all the time that we worked, the sun beat upon us, and the mosquitoes covered us in dense, biting clouds. We were like men toiling in a delirium.
We hacked out something that would serve as a paddle, and slid the raft into the swift water. As a vehicle it did not look encouraging. It floated deep, and each log wobbled independently. But we were in no mood for niceness then. The packs were piled on and laboriously paddled over, following a diagonal course in the grip of the racing current. The raft was brought back again, and made the bank some two hundred yards farther down-stream. With a passenger on board besides the paddler, it sank very nearly out of sight, and between each trip it had to be docked for repairs. It was a moist method of making the passage, but it seemed effective.
On the last trip, the ninth, Pedr was passenger with an Englishman for his Charon; and in mid-stream the beautiful Pedr objected to the water swirling round his waist, and began to get nervous. Worse still, he commenced to wriggle, and promptly the raft began to wriggle too. The withes with which it was lashed together untwisted gaily. The paddler paddled for dear life, and Pedr, now solidly scared, embraced him from behind. A log detached itself from the raft and bobbed off in a pas seul down-stream, and on the farther bank Johann and Pat held out branches alluringly over the stream, whilst the other Englishman with them laughed. But still the paddler paddled on.
Then the logs of the raft opened out like the sticks of a fan, and reared up on end, and “Rari nantes in gurgite vasto” chuckled the foreigner on the bank, who knew something about his countryman’s capabilities in the water. He had not calculated upon the clinging nature of Pedr, however, and when the pair of them vanished below the swirling surface of the Repojoki—and stayed there—he began to get a little scared himself and to strip off his coat.
However, there is a recognised course of treatment to follow under these circumstances, and the swimming Englishman took it with vigour, and some hundred yards lower down-stream came to bank with his charge. The beautiful Pedr had a big red lump over one eye, which probably explained to him then, and will make him remember in the future, that it is inadvisable to wrestle with a swimmer who is wishing for free use of his limbs in deep, rapid water. I fancy we had, on the whole, a good educational effect upon our Lappish carriers.