In that sour-smelling dairy-bedroom however at Pokka, Hayter was in small temper for food. The bites of the preceding night were giving him the most abominable pain. From scalp to heels he had no sound square inch on all of his skin. The whole of his body was puffed and reddened, and each bite was its own centre of irritation. When he scratched himself he bled, and he had to scratch. He faced the poor meal with visible shrinkings; he was tormented with a furious thirst, but he could not eat; and finally, out of sheer weariness, he slid from his stool on to the floor and dropped off into some sort of sleep.
For the morrow, trouble loomed. Our host, the expressionless man who lacked an ear, came in and said flatly that no carriers were to be had. But for myself I heard the news without much stir. I had eaten; and with food inside him, a man is apt to let the morrow take care of itself.
It seemed good to me to go outside for a whiff of sweet air before turning in. I strolled across the short-grassed green in front of the house, and sat me on the well-platform, and stared sleepily at what was around. From the mistal behind my shoulder came the breathing and chewing of a couple of cows; from the little two-roomed house at the other side of the clearing there droned out the snores of the tired Lapps.
In front of me, the stream widened out into a lagoon, smooth as a sheet of gleaming metal. Just outside the weeds a fish was rising accurately in the same spot. The sun lit the forest trees on the opposite shore with a lurid glow. Mist, like miasma, was rising in gray billows from some of the farther creeks. I watched it drowsily, and imagined that somehow or another I was looking upon a sunrise in the Tropics, and that I had earned a touch of fever. And then I pulled myself together, and remembered that this was Arctic Lapland, and that it was midnight by the cuckoo clock in the Finns house, and that the insects were biting me to pieces. So I got heavily up from the well-cover, and went again to the sour-smelling dairy, and forgot all things in deep, unconscious sleep.
[CHAPTER XI]
THE WORST MARCHES OF ALL
One of the ladies of the house, a tall person with a vague squint, aroused us next morning by coming into the sour-smelling dairy to deposit the morning produce of the cows. We woke with evil-tasting mouths and went outside. In the kitchen, across the narrow lobby, the man with one ear was making a bowl out of a knob of birch, and as he seemed the person of most consideration available, we demanded from him that three carriers should be ready for us in a couple of hours’ time to convoy us and our chattels to Scurujärvi or Küstula. We did not request; we demanded. We understood the Arctic Finn by this time, and were quite aware that he only construes civility as weakness.
At first the one-eared man refused to understand what we needed. He went on with his work upon the birch-root. He had a long-handled felling axe, and his sheath-knife, and he used them both, and was rapidly evolving a shapely bowl out of chaos. But we had no special wish just then to watch him carpenter, so we gently but firmly took the utensils away from him, and backed him up against a wall, and spoke to him in a language which he could understand.