Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

The log bridge had looked neglected enough, but its reason of being soon began to get apparent. We came upon a clearing full of old-cut stumps; wood had been taken from here for building. Then we passed some quarter-acre patches of rye growing amongst unkempt weeds, enclosed by rail fences. Then came more patches of clearing and more stumps, sprawling over two miles of ground. And then, from the top of a knoll, a high well-derrick rose into view, and directly afterwards we saw beneath us the scattered settlement of houses which made up the village of Pokka. Three houses were in sight, sprawling over a square mile of ground, and each house had its attendant barns and cowsheds. A streamlet ran between them, broadening out here and there into sedgy lagoons. And beside the lagoons were nets, with birch-bark floats and pebble sinkers, hung out to dry upon weather-bleached rails.

We marched up wearily enough to the front of the nearest house, and then arose a difficulty which was new to us. Our Lapps did not march straight inside. They did not even knock at the door. They dumped their packs on to the ground, and hung about near them, three perfect images of bashfulness.

Johann’s [Acrobatic] Failure.

Presently the mystery was explained: the house belonged to Finns, an alien race. We two foreigners, however, were not troubled with any qualms of inferiority. The wandering Britisher seldom is worried that way. He is a very complacent animal over questions of nationality, and is rather apt to thank God in his prayers that he is not as other men are, “even as this German, or this Chinaman, or this Finn,” or whoever he may have had brought under his lordly notice last. So we knocked at the door of the house, and presently a man came out. He shook hands limply with us; he even shook hands with the three Lapps. He was a long, slack-jointed Finn, with one ear missing and a face as unemotional as a slab of board. He gave us one of the two rooms his house contained, the sour-smelling dairy-bedroom; and better still, on pressure, he sold us food.

A woman brought it in—rye-cake and a double handful of small pieces of raw fish, semi-dried, and a tub of thick, sour milk. As an after-thought she produced a wooden spoon, which she thoughtfully licked clean, and set beside the repast.

With regard to that brown rye-cake of Lapland, I brought a piece home to England, which my dog saw and annexed. He is a fox-terrier of lusty appetite, and he tried to eat it. He tried for a whole afternoon, and finally left the cake alone on a lawn, very little the worse for the experience. His master, at Pokka, did better. He was sick with hunger, and devoured two great slabs of the cake, and with it a handful of the stinking fish.

Looked back at from a distance, those rye-cakes of Lapland do not carry pleasant memories. The grain from which they are baked grows with little tending. It is sown; and it is suffered to come up as the weather and the weeds permit. When it is as near ripe as it chooses to get, it is reaped, and with the husks, the bran, a larger part of the stalk, and a fair percentage of the companionable weed, it is chopped into meal. It is not ground; it is more hay and bran than anything else. Baking days come seldom, and a large supply is made at once. The dough is pawed out into discs a foot in diameter and some five-eighths to three-quarters of an inch thick. Each disc has a hole in the middle, and when they are baked, the cakes are strung on a stick and hung up on the rafters for use as required. Age neither softens nor hardens their texture; years could not deteriorate them.

There are two varieties of these delectable cakes. One sort was like india-rubber, and on this we could make no impression whatever. But with the other kind, which was of the consistency of concrete, we could, as a rule, get on quite well, if we were given time. It was more or less flavourless, unless it had been packed with stale fish, and it was not stuff to hurry over. It was not strengthening either, as the system could assimilate but very little of it. In fact, of all the foods that ever got past my teeth (and in rambling about the back corners of this world I have come across some uncanny morsels) the bread of Arctic Lapland carries the palm for general unsatisfactoriness. But still there is no denying that the cakes did fill the stomach, and for this purpose we employed them ravenously whenever they came in our way. There is no ache so bitter as that of empty belly.