"Look at Gerda!" whispered Birger suddenly.
Gerda sat on the ground with her back against the hut, and she was fast asleep. "Poor child," said her father, as he carried her into the hut and put her on a cot, "she has been awake all night. When she has had a little rest we will go back to Gellivare and look up your friend Erik. After we have all had a good night's sleep, we shall be ready to make a call on his family and their reindeer."
CHAPTER VII
ERIK'S HOME IN LAPLAND
"This is the best part of our trip," Gerda said, two days later, as she was standing in the shade of some fir trees at one of the posting-stations a few miles from Gellivare, waiting for fresh horses to be put into the carts. "I have been reading about Laplanders and their reindeer ever since I can remember, and now I am going to see them in their own home."
"Perhaps you will be disappointed," Birger told her. "Erik says that his father's reindeer may wander away any day to find a place where there is more moss, and if they do, the whole family will follow them."
"Where do they go?" asked Gerda.
"There is a treaty between Norway and Sweden, more than one hundred and
fifty years old, which provides that Swedish Lapps can go to the coast of
Norway in summer, and Norwegian Lapps can go inland to Sweden in winter,"
Lieutenant Ekman told the children.
"Yes," said Erik, "when the moss is scanty or the swarms of mosquitoes too thick, the reindeer hurry off to some pleasanter spot, without stopping to ask permission. Perhaps we have been in camp a week, perhaps a month, just as it happens; but when we hear their joints snapping and their hoofs tramping all together, we know it is time to take down the tent, pack up everything and follow the herd to a new pasture."
"I am glad we are out of sight of the photograph shops in Gellivare, anyway," Birger told Erik, when they were seated in the light carts and were once more on their journey. "If I could take such good pictures myself, I shouldn't care; but all my pictures of the midnight sun make it look like the moon in a snow-bank."