Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

Now, to give a full account of the exasperations of Scurujärvi would be quite impossible in this place, because some of the remarks which we felt compelled to make to that lanky, feckless Finn who owned the place were intended for his private ear alone. We had to tell him exactly what we thought of him many many weary times.

In the first instance, further progress by carriers was obviously out of the question, because, except for the feckless one himself, there was not a man about the place. But there were sledges. There were no horses or reindeer available, but something in the cow line would serve our purpose, and we demanded therefore a sledge and a cow. Upon which there fell an avalanche of talk. The limp woman with the new-born baby stood in the doorway of the dairy-bedroom to listen, and the gaunt midwife came inside and added her clatter to the rest. It seemed that for a thousand reasons a cow and a sledge were unavailable.

We ceded the point; we had an alternative plan. Our romancing map depicted a lake before this town of Scurujärvi, and our eyes showed us that the lake was there. This propped up the map’s credit. It also showed a stream running out of this lake and joining the main river at Küstula, which drained into the Gulf of Bothnia. So by way of discovering whether this linking stream did really exist, we boldly demanded a canoe, which should take us down to Küstula by water.

The feckless Finn seemed struck with the idea; it had not occurred to him before. He said we should start immediately, and after the trifling delay of three more hours, and by dint of unremitting exertions on our part, we did start. There were four of us in the canoe: ourselves and our baggage amidships, Huckleberry forward with the paddles, and Tom Sawyer aft, with solemn importance on his face, and the steering paddle under his arm. The two boys had provisioned the canoe with a pyramidal keg of buttermilk, and evidently looked forward to the perils of this expedition through the unknown with keen and gloomy pleasure. Huckleberry wore a sheath-knife two feet long dangling from his belt, and Tom by way of armament had by his side the most enormous wood-axe I ever put eyes upon. The accuracy of their get-up would have delighted Mr. Mark Twain wonderfully.

We started in style, and a mob of tow-headed children came down to the edge of the shallows as we pushed off. Huckleberry paddled us across a small bay of the lake, and then Tom, with set teeth, steered the canoe into the mouth of the six-foot-wide stream which drained it. The water was too narrow for paddles here, and so they stood up and punted, insisting on our keeping our places; and really the sight of those two boys solemnly playing at being explorers, was one of the funniest things we had seen for many a long day. If it pleased them to do the work, we did not mind. We had gone through enough toil recently to make us glad of the rest, and later, when they got tired, and the stream grew wider and swifter, we could take over the canoe from their charge.

In fact we formed a quite appetising dream of what the voyage would be down the Scurujoki to Küstula, and so it came all the more unpleasantly to us when we found that this river-passage was impracticable. First we arrived at a tree fallen squarely across the stream, and we got out and lifted the canoe across this by main force. Then the Scurujoki widened into mere trickling shallows, and we waded and lifted till we were tired. And then, lo! the stream vanished altogether, being absorbed into a vast green quagmire which filled all the valley-floor. So we sat down on the baggage and stated exactly to one another what we thought of the feckless Finn who owned Scurujärvi farm, and then with toil and weariness set about to work the canoe back to the place from which she had come.

We were tolerably savage at being let in for this fiasco, and should probably have explained to the feckless one with energy how remiss it was of him not to know the country five hundred yards away from his own front-door; but when we set foot again on the lake-shore below the house, these thoughts of war were swept from us by a feeling of wonder and surprise. Another caravan had arrived from the direction in which we were going, and the principals of it were walking in even then to take possession of the dairy-bedroom. Their carriers sat outside the house-door on the sloping-way of planks. There were three of them: two sturdy down-country Finns, and a weird Lapp with lank, black hair, and yellow, pock-marked face, and a square Lapp’s cap of dead-black cloth.

These were the first travellers of any sort we had met in all Arctic Lapland, and we marvelled at what could be their business. Presently the two principals came out of the dairy-bedroom and talked with us. The elder was a huge man, deep-bearded and heavy-paunched, with a frown on his face and few words to spare. The younger was aged perhaps thirty, had a cut-away chin, and brimmed with words. We tried one another in a whole continent of languages, and finally pitched upon Latin as the only one we had any working knowledge of in common. It was on both sides schoolboy dog-Latin of the most canine variety, and because of the difficulties of pronunciation we could not interchange ideas even through this medium by word of mouth. So every syllable of our chat was scrawled with a stub of pencil upon the rough-hewn door of Scurujärvi farm.

“Potesne nobis dicere,” we wrote, “si possibile est invenire equum nos portare de Kittila ad mare?”