We started off from Murtola next morning in an even worse karre than the one we had driven up in. It did possess springs, it is true, but as they were venerable, and tender with age, and had been reinforced by a pine log, the motion of the karre on the road was, to use the Chinese phrase, “bumpy, bumpy, all-e-same ridy gee-gee.”
For the whole of that stage we drove between forests of slim, straight pines, absolutely without undergrowth higher than six-inch grass. All the big trees had been cut from near the roads, and only the second growth was left. Heavy timber for exportation has to be sought now on the more distant hills, sent down log by log by a specially dammed stream to the main rivers, and there chained and lashed and spiked together in long, sinuous rafts to float down to the winches of the shipping on the coast. Acres of these rafts did we see new-cut in the rivers, huge bristles of logs did we come across stranded in angles of dried-up tributary streams; and yet so small a part did they make of the whole growth of the country that one could look from across a valley at the hillside from which they had come, and never find the spots which the axes had weeded. A fire of a day can do more in the way of forest destruction than the work of a dozen logging camps in a year.
Water is the one and only means of transport on which the woodcutter has to depend upon for bringing his wares to the rim of those seas which carry them to the markets of the outer world. And at one time he only cut trees which would fall directly into deep rivers, which would carry them without further ado; but as the harvest of the river-banks and the accessible parts got reaped, he had to go with his axe farther back amongst the fastnesses of the mountains, and amplify his methods of transport. The logs have to be floated somehow, and as he has no river ready-made to his hand, he manufactures one. He picks upon some gully in the wilderness of the hills with a streamlet trickling through its mosses, and throws a dam of logs and turf and stones across its lower end, with a broad gate of logs in its middle. Axe in hand he goes down the hill-flank beyond, notes the direction which a sudden gush of water would take on its journey to the nearest stream, and clears the way of all the larger obstructions. And in the meanwhile the trickling streamlet above is with infinite slowness beginning to fill his dam.
When these preparations have been made, he goes back to his gully in the wilderness, and starts felling in real earnest. The great pines crash before his axe; their heads are lopped of; and they are rolled down the slopes into the tediously-filling dam. For the whole summer this work goes on, till all the trees which can be rolled or dragged there are jostling one another in this artificial lake, and the water of the streamlet no longer collects, but squanders itself over the top of the log sluice-gate. And then comes the moment for the realisation of his labours, and the moment to see whether the engineering of the work has been true. The sluice-gate of logs is knocked away; the water gushes out with a solid flood, carrying with it a prancing, lancing, dancing bristle of trunks, and roaring along with them at galloping speed down the slopes of mountain. It is no little thing which will cause a jam then. Obstructions are sheared away with infinite violence; the ends of the logs splinter themselves into paint-brushes; great trees crack off like reeds; and when the torrent, with its convoy of timber, ends its mad gallop in the river for which it has been aiming, there is a swathe ploughed across the green face of the country unsightly as the new cutting of a railroad.
But if there has been a jam, tedious pains must be expended before the logs can be sent along their journey again; another and a greater artificial freshet has to be created; and it is very often more remunerative to leave one of these knotted tangles of trunks to rot where they have stuck, and to start work again ab initio. So that, on the whole, the tapping of one of these mountain dams, and the subsequent half-hour’s voyage of the logs, is a matter of pretty vivid excitement to all those concerned.
Again we had to cross the Ounasjoki, this time in a square ferry-boat rowed by a woman and a man, and steered by a solemn, small boy. Our progress was not swift. One of the wheel tyres of the karre was loose, and every few hundred yards some one had to get down to hammer it into place again with a stone. A gray-backed crow showed interest in the proceeding, and followed us for a couple of miles to find out what it was all about. But we came upon a hen capercailzie and her family dusting themselves in the road, and the gray-backed crow forebore to follow us farther. Still I do not think there was much in his line to be got out of them. Eggs of course were his speciality, but the egg season was long past, and the capercailzie chicks were as big as partridges.
At Juopperi, the next post-house, the only available horse had thrown a shoe, and as we had to wait till it was re-shod, we joined the community in the big farm-kitchen and watched them at work. It was a room twenty feet square with a big white stove that had cooking niches and drying racks and a ladder to reach its top. Strings of rye cakes hung from the rafters. Two pairs of antlers were nailed on the walls for hooks. A woman worked at a clacking hand-loom; a travelling cobbler was putting the finishing touches to a pair of yellow top-boots with a bone pattern-punch; and a couple of men carpentered at a table in the window. These were the workers: there were a dozen drones, flabby women and slack, corn-stalky men, who did nothing, without intelligence, and wearied themselves in the process.
Take the average Finn farmer of the North, and you will find a man who never works if he can help it, a man with an inferior liver and a chronic grievance. He hates his country, hates himself, hates his unobtrusive Government. If he were ruled by a committee of archangels, he would hate them equally. He will never create an insurrection; he could never summon up the energy. He will never make a Nihilist: he has not sufficient brain to be a plotter. It is only in the days of youth that his discontent ever simmers over. Then it is that he sometimes gets so sick of everything that he scrapes a few marks together, puts them in his high boots, and tramps down to Torneo-Haparanda, and takes steamer for the States or Canada. As a rule, unless he dies, he does not stay there long. In North America they do not appreciate men with a distaste for work, and they are quite willing to let any one starve who does not choose to toil. They are a very practical people over there, and, unlike the English, have no taste for collecting useless human lumber. So unless the Finn manages to die there, which he not infrequently does, his great object from the moment he sets foot in the Land of the Free, is to get away from it again as soon as he can collect a steamer-fare.
Still, unpleasant as he is in his ways and his personal appearance, he does at times contrive to make his homestead outwardly picturesque. He does it by accident, to be sure, but still the result is there. The architecture of his house is not produced by studying after effect: it is the only species of architecture which occurs to him. The red dye with which he colours it is merely daubed on as a preservative. Yet these dark red houses cuddling down in the green landscape make very beautiful pictures, and they seem, moreover, to have an emblematic significance. Red is the official colour. Even the stones at the roadside are red with some queer lichenous growth as if in deference to the huge, invisible power which steers the country.