The banks came closer together as we paddled on, and the river increased in pace, and the way of the canoe grew less. Johann, with his mouth open and the sweat dripping from his chin, tugged manfully at the sculls in the bows. Pedr, who was squatted aft with the steering paddle, had his work cut out to keep clear of rocks round which the water swirled noisily, and occasionally there was a bump-bump-bump as we dragged over some submerged boulder which he had not seen.
The little old canoe strained and shivered in the stress of the stream, and leaked so abundantly that Hayter, who was labouring mid-ships with the baler, could barely keep the water under; and presently, as she showed a disposition to swamp altogether, we had to run into the bank and lighten her burden. Pat, much to his disgust, was ousted from his rest among the baggage, and made to force his way through the tangle of shrub and swamp and grasses which made the river-bank; and we two foreigners went ashore with him. The two Lapps unshipped their paddles, and punted cannily up the rapids with eight-foot poles. They had hard work, but we on shore did not exactly find it easy going. Back-washes branched off the stream, sown with yellow lilies, and some we jumped across, and some we jumped into; and when the rapids came to an end some half mile higher up, and we were able to get on board again, liquid mud oozed from us into little black pools.
Half a mile of smooth brought us to another set of rapids, and once more a land party of three had to press its way through scrub and morass. Johann and Pedr punted the light canoe cleverly. One took the stern, the other perched in the bow. They stood up to put the pole in, and dropped it vertically. Then came a violent shove, and a sudden sit down at the end of the thrust. The canoe danced about like a twig in the rapids, and the waves slopped bountifully over her sides, and every now and again she had to be brought to the bank to be baled clear and ship a fresh crew. And finally the rapids got too bad for poling at all, and we made fast thongs of reindeer hide to the canoe at bow and stern and towed her empty up-stream with these, pressing through the scrub on the bank when we could, wading in the river-edge when it was too thick. It was the only way we could get her along. The river-banks were too swampy and overgrown to make a portage possible.
As a reward for labour we got some mile of easy water to finish up with, and then we left the flimsy little canoe finally, and set off once more on the solid tramp.
Again we came across the winter sleigh-track, a broad swathe cut from the forest, and left for the snows to smooth down into a road, and in a couple of miles this led us to a vast, quaking swamp set with a line of white, bleached crosses to make the trail. But till the frosts of winter came to harden it, the swamp here was quite impassable; it was a mere floating quagmire, and we had to skirt it tediously. Acres of cloud-berries, still unripe, lay upon its surface. The air was musical with the cries of curlew and other marsh fowl. And from above, the sun beat upon us with brazen power. Take away the Lapps, take away our sure knowledge that we were still far within the Arctic Circle, and we might have been tramping across some primæval land at the back of the Gold Coast or the Congo.
The ground rose as we toiled on, and for once the mosquitoes were almost entirely absent. It was bliss to be alive. There was a fine country all around, and we lazed off for an hour, and made a temporary camp to enjoy it. Beside us was a pool swarming with tadpoles, and we lay over the edge and searched and searched in hopes of finding a juvenile frog in the intermediate stage. But as usual we could not do it.
It was a subject which interested me. At an early age I was taught that from frog-spawn grew tadpoles, and from these grew frogs. Being of an inquiring, or a sceptical turn of mind, whichever way one likes to look at it, I used to catch the little black tadpoles, incarcerate them in pickle-bottles, and inspect them diligently; but never did the wished-for result arrive. It may be that a watched tadpole never changes; and certainly tadpoles do seem to suffer from nerves, because if one disturbs the surface of a pond where they are occupying themselves, away go the whole crowd like a lot of animated commas. But I am inclined to think that nervousness is not the reason of their coy refusal to do their advertised change-act in public view. It is beginning to grow on me that they cannot do it. Of course science says flatly that they do change; but when it wishes, science can lie like photography or a newspaper; and for the future the tadpole metamorphosis is eliminated from my private creed. If I am wronging tadpoles as a nation, I am sorry.
By this stage our Lapp carriers were all very foot-sore, though we ourselves were quite sound, which does not say much for the theory that it is always advisable to adopt the foot-gear of the country you are travelling over. At every halt one or other of them would take off his boots, extract the grass, spread it out to dry, and add more grass from the store each carried in his personal knapsack. It was the same grass which is used for the same purpose in Norway—crisp, dry, green, fine stuff, without knots, and without seeding tips. It has to be twisted up and kneaded between the hands to break the fibre; but once so prepared, it is much like a pad of soft horse-hair in texture. However, as I say, it chafed badly, and for summer work the bare foot inside the shoe would probably have been better. That was the way I was going myself; as the lower extremities of my stockings had long before worn away, and my feet had grown as hard as a nigger’s.