The Squire ran the canoe ashore, and we got out and climbed a steep forty-foot bank. The farm lay before us, trim, orderly, and prosperous, and the usual fishing implements lay spread about on the bank. The Finn farmer came out and invited us inside his dwelling. It was probably an accidental resemblance, but in personal appearance he might have passed for twin-brother of the estimable President Krüger, of African ill-fame, in clothes, beard, and everything, with the trifling detail of steel-rimmed spectacles added. He accepted us first of all as a joke; but when he heard we had come across from the Arctic Sea, he looked upon us as a pair of barefaced liars, and regarded us with more respect. He gave us milk, and then brought all available members of his household into the farm kitchen, and preached them an improving sermon with us as text. To the casual observer then we certainly must have looked a pair of “awful warnings.”
In the kitchen a woman was working a hand-loom, and except when a thread broke in the warp, and demanded repair, the machine clacked away industriously during the whole of the excellent Krüger’s sermon. She was weaving a checked blue-cotton cloth, and beside her a couple of old crones span yarn industriously from humming-wheels. Hayter, callous to the sermon, sat down to sketch the hand-loom weaver. Ever and again a small fluffy-headed girl edged across into his line of vision, and was ruthlessly dragged away again by the farmer. She was rather pretty in a scared sort of way, and at last she got her desire, and was faithfully depicted in black and white on a page of the sketch-book. Her name was Edla Dahlgren.
We left the farm at eleven o’clock by the timepiece in the kitchen, and put out once more into the river. We were in the broad Ounasjoki now, a river as wide as the Thames at Richmond, but vastly swifter.
On the way to [Kittila].
The canoe ran away down past the shores, and once more forests hedged us in above the high banks. The river was all swirls and grinding pools, and oily overfalls, and noisy rapids. At the foot of the banks were camp-fires sending up trails of thin blue smoke from tiny crumbs of flame. Filmy mist rose from the tangle of waters, and amongst it here and there were men and women in canoes, fishing. From behind the pines on the western bank the sun sent a glow like new-tapped blood.
We passed close to one of the canoes. A woman was in the bow, poling. Five rods were trolling from the stern, and a man with a calico mosquito-cowl about his head tended them. The rush of the river drove us past, and the canoe faded into a black dot amongst the mist. It was the likeliest looking fishing-water I ever saw.
More fires came up on the banks, winked redly, and disappeared. From bank to bank the rapids shouted, and the yellow waves spurned us on to pools of black, sliding water, and the oily rocks sucked us towards them as we tore past. The dew came down more heavily and the mists closed in; the river slacked in speed again, and the canoe rode with an easier motion; and when we looked back, the fishers and their fires were blotted out against the black background of the pines.
It was midnight. Astern, wrapped in thin blue mist, there loomed up the great wooded mountains we had voyaged round so long. Ahead, the river widened out into a still lake, and reflected into it was a cluster of red and ochre houses above a bright green bank, which made up the outskirts of straggling Kittila. Well-derricks sprawled amongst the houses, and the smell of farms and agriculture hung on the air. The sun was coming up egg-shaped and blood-red from out of the mists and the pines. It was midnight, and all Kittila slept.