We were getting very bad horses on these stages, and the crudest possible vehicles. As I have said, the short trace on the horse-collar is joined to the shaft with a toggle, and the backhand of the saddle is fastened to the trace, and so if this toggle falls out, down go the shafts on to the ground, and nothing short of a miracle can save a bad spill. We saw ten such miracles in one day.
We crossed the river by a wire-rope ferry just below a chain of booms set across to intercept log-rafts, and fetched up that night at a farm post-house which was almost luxurious. The sun went below the pines as we sat down to sup, and the after-glow scattered reds and dull yellows and crimsons far and wide over the landscape. The great river below the house looked like a stream of ice, which glittered in its smooth parts, and lay heaped with drifts and whorls of snow where the currents raised their mounds of eddies over the hidden rocks below.
And then there dawned our final day for the road. We zigzagged back and forwards across the river as the road came upon the ferries, and we passed log-booms, and log-rafts innumerable. The air was sweet with the scent of hay. Wild raspberry trees grew by the wayside with the fruit set but not yet ripe.
At one place where the river broke into noisy rapids, we got down to look at some fish-traps. Great trestles built of trunks straddled out over the roaring water, their lower ends notched in the rocks, their tops ballasted by heavy stones. They were fenced in below by whole birch trees, with here and there gaps in which were placed the wicker traps. There were trestles on either side built to suit all heights of the river, and the catching was brisk, for the fish were many. Silver-bellied salmon jumped by the hundred in the tawny cataracts, and a bevy of pock-marked Finns gathered the harvest from the traps to pack in ice and send down to Stockholm to be kippered.
Once and again did we cross the river by ferries, and changed horses and karres at the post-houses, and then left the Ounasjoki behind us, and set off across the sandy delta to the other great river on which stand the twin-towns of Torneo-Haparanda, through masses of harebells which made the ground as blue as a sky.
The Torneo River lay before us, broad, solemn, and deep. A great sailing-ferry lay beside a wooden wharf. The karre was unhorsed, and, with two other vehicles, was run on board. The horses followed. Then a mixed company of six nationalities took their places, the sprit-sail was sheeted home, and we drifted off. The twin-towns lay on the opposite bank: Swedish Haparanda trim and red to seaward, Finnish Torneo notable for the minarets of its Russian church farther up-stream, and at the back, the slim black spire of the Lutheran church. And the sunset bathed it all with an impartial glow.
Slowly the clumsy ferry-boat drifted across the river, amongst firewood, carrying schooners, and rafts, and the boats of fishers, and at last she landed beside a fussy launch which did a passenger traffic with the villages up-stream. We drove off at speed through sandy streets between great blocks of wooden houses, and then we left Torneo and turned inland, circling round the head of a lagoon from which mist wreaths were rising like rolls of cotton wool.
By the wayside there loomed out a square pillar adorned with a split crow, elaborately gilt. It was the boundary of Holy Russia, and it stood there grim and cold and deserted.