Juhani found himself far behind his little friends. He was not so good a shot, and he lacked their quickness in making the balls. But he kept on trying.
In the afternoon when it grew too dark and cold to remain longer out of doors (it was thirty degrees below zero), two of the children went with Juhani into the unventilated hut, and sitting down near the fire took out their knives and began to carve. Juhani watched the older of the two, a boy about his own age, and soon saw that he was making a running reindeer on the handle of a knife. Great was his surprise next morning to have this presented him. The mother, in the meantime, had just laid down some reindeer intestines that she was making into gloves.
"How many reindeer have you?" Juhani asked the Lapp boy.
"Oh, nearly a thousand," the latter answered carelessly.
"What a number of uses you put them to! I wish you would tell me all of them."
"JUHANI WAS LISTENING TO THE MOST MARVELOUS TALES"
The Lapp boy smiled. "To tell all would take me all day. I will tell you a few though. We make butter and cheese from their milk, eat their flesh as food, make our beds and tents, of their skins; their tendons give us our thread and many of our eating utensils are made out of their antlers."
"It must be much trouble to milk the reindeer every day," Juhani remarked.