In this same courtyard at Rantatalo the score of people who made the village were collected to amuse themselves with one of their number who had contrived to get drunk. How he had procured the liquor in this Prohibition State was a mystery apparently to them as much as it was to us. But drunk he was, and as specimens in that condition were rare, they made the most of him before he was sober again.
From out of this jeering crowd round the drunkard there came to us a battered, shaggy, half-naked, wreck of a man, who spoke “leetle Anglish.” He had been born in Rantatalo, and had tired of it; he had tramped to the coast, and had worked across the ocean; he had drifted on to a railroad somewhere in America, though he did not know whether it was in California or the Carolinas, and had there worked in a line-gang till home-sickness and body-sickness drove him back to Finland again. Poor wretch, it did not require much skill to diagnose consumption as his ailment. He said he was “mighty glad to see us.” It evidently gave him much pleasure to be thoroughly profane in English again.
The Ounas River runs in a tolerably straight course north and south from Kittila to the sea; but being a river it has some curves, and the road to cut these off has to make crossings at intervals. We came upon our first ferry, a flat and shallow boat, just outside this post-house at Rantatalo, and the wreck from America, and an ugly young woman with a pipe rowed us and our new horse and karre across.
We were out of the sphere of cultivation again in half a kilometre, and then the road led through a big burn-out of forest, which made a huge, unsightly scar across the country. In the first third, some of the trees were merely charred and left dead and standing; from the next third, the furnace of fire had mopped them up entirely, and the charred ashes had been swept away by wind and rain; and over the balance of ground which the flames had mowed, the stumps of the old trees were left, and young shoots were beginning to show beside them. A house had stood by the roadside in the middle of that ruined forest, but only the rubble foundations were left. The fire had driven the farmers away, and licked up their crops, and destroyed their woodwork, and they had no heart left either to rebuild or to recultivate. They had fled before the draught of the flames, and had returned no more.
The forest closed in again after this gap, and the road brought us once more in sight of the river, which ran here as a big, strong stream between high pine-covered rocks. A red-shirted Finn was poling himself about the rapids, with rods trolling over the stern of his canoe.
There was the post-house of Kakkonaara just beyond this point, and whilst the new horse and karre were being got ready, we went and looked at some brick-making in a field beside the house. The work was primitive. The clay was ground up in a barrel-shaped churn by a lethargic horse; a besplattered woman worked it with her hands into wooden moulds; a small tow-headed girl carried the bricks away and laid them higgledy-piggledy to dry; and a man with ear-rings, and a woman with a baby strapped up like an Indian papoose, took gentle exercise by standing still and looking on. A small pile of perhaps half a thousand bricks lay near, intermingled with wood ready for burning; and a few specimens, red, soft, twisted and irregular, lay here and there to show the fashion of the finished article. They use these bricks for stoves, and the demand is not large. A thousand would last a family a lifetime. All building and flooring and roofing is, of course, done with wood.
They were bringing new ground into cultivation just beyond this, by cutting dykes across it and throwing the subsoil of sand and clay over the vegetation. It was an old river-bed, thickly grown with heather and juniper, and I cannot say that it gave much promise of being speedily fertile.
At Lahiniva, the little wayside farm which made the headquarters of the next stage, we fell in with bad luck. The only available vehicle was a ramshackle wooden box, horsed by a worn-out chestnut stallion, which was pathetically incapable of dragging us. The road was deep with sand, and whacking the poor old horse (after the custom of the country) was sheer brutality without adequate return. So in the end we had to turn out and walk; and as the mosquitoes came out for the first time that day in full vigour, we had a pretty dreary time of it, and we did not get into Murtola till 1.30 ">A.M. We had posted eighty-four kilometres from Kittila that day, and, tout compris, it had cost us M. 14.
We could have managed very comfortably with a solid meal after this drive, but little enough was forthcoming. All the post-houses have a list put up on the wall, beside the oleographs of the Czar and the Czarina, on which there is set forth in Russian, Qfinsk, and Svensk, the lists of viands which are officially procurable, with the official price of each. But few of these were ever actually on sale, and at Murtola a little curdled milk, some adamantine rye-cake, and some scraps of fish so stinking as to be uneatable were all we could collect. So we fared poorly enough.