The river here was young, being born of rills in the blue mountains only a few miles away, amongst their swamps and pines and comely birches; and it ran round bends and curves innumerable. Sometimes it widened into lagoons, sometimes the banks hemmed it in to narrows, and the waters spouted with waterfalls and rapids.
On the short grass of the bank lay a new canoe, bottom upwards. I sat down on her, and discovered also that she was newly tarred. She was eighteen feet long, and built in the usual way, with two stakes aside, coming to highest points forward and aft. The Squire himself came with us as skipper; we ourselves and our baggage were stowed amidships on a green cushion of springy birch-shoots; and in the bows was Nilas Petrie Karahoola, a tall, clean-made young Finn, who owned a bottle of smuggled cognac and a natty little liqueur-glass. When we were all on board, the canoe showed just seven inches of free-board.
We shoved off, and the population of Küstula on the high bank above, waved their head-gear and wished us God-speed. But we ourselves could not linger long over the farewell. A dozen strokes brought the canoe into the swirl of rapids, where the brown water raced over and between a tangle of jagged rocks, which the Squire, crouching in the stern with the steering paddle, had all his work cut out to negotiate. A dozen times he bumped on some unseen boulder; and once the canoe grounded amidships, was caught by a swirl on her stern, and was within an ace of broaching-to and being swamped. But a lusty effort set us free again, and on we raced; and then after a final dive over a churning three-foot fall, we reached the deep and placid stream again, and were a mile below the last field of Küstula. It was quick travelling.
The Squire wiped the perspiration from his face and sat down; Nilas brought out his cognac-bottle and handed a nip all round; and then the pair of them settled themselves to steady paddling. We ourselves were glad enough of the opportunity for far niente. We had come through a surfeit of ill-usage, over-exertion, over-biting, and under-feeding, and as regards personal appearance we were a couple of gaunt, blotched, hollow-eyed wrecks. So we lay on the baggage and the springy green boughs, and watched the banks go by in luxurious idleness.
Comely banks they were too, laid out by Nature with grasses, and planted with birches, hazels, and pines. They were like bits of the Thames at Mortlake, or the Dee above Chester. It was hard to realise that in winter all this was a place of howling gales and tangled snow-drifts.
Now and again we passed a fisher’s camp by the water-side—just a fire, some drying nets, and a piece of cotton cloth which served more as mosquito-bar than tent; and now and again we met a woman paddling a boat whilst a man in the stern fished. Some were Lapps, but most were Finns.
We would pass mile after mile of river-bank which had never been touched by man since the river carved its channel, and mile after mile of forest which had never felt the axe; but still there was not wanting occasional evidences that we were getting into a country less sparsely populated than the aching wilderness we had so wearily tramped through, and the idea made us think back at some of the halts where we had stayed. Those at the farther end were already growing faint and hazy: we seemed to have gone through so much since we had left them.
“I can dimly recall,” said one of us, “that years ago we came up to the Polar Sea in a canoe called the Windward. But where was it from? I forget.”
“A settlement called ‘London,’ wasn’t it?” said the other.
“Which was that? I’m getting mixed.”