Dogs are also used as draft animals in Lapland. On the borders of the scanty forests of Lapland and Siberia, the inhabitants of these barbarous countries may often be seen gliding rapidly by on a sledge drawn by dogs.
The usual life of the nomadic Laplander is about as wretched as can well be imagined. A tent stretched on four uprights is his abode summer and winter. The fire-place is in the middle of the tent, and the smoke escapes through an opening in the top. Five or six reindeer skins stretched round the fire form the beds of the whole family, to which the surrounding smoke serves as the only curtain. Their furniture consists of an iron pot and a few wooden pails. The Laplander carries in his pocket a horn spoon and a knife. He often, instead of wooden pails, makes use of the bladders of the reindeer. In them he carries the milk mixed with water which is his daily beverage. Whenever he sets out on a journey, he harnesses a pair of reindeer to his sledge.
This nomadic race, which formerly occupied a part of Sweden, is now much diminished in numbers. Thirty years ago their number, counting all that could be found in Russian, Norwegian, and Swedish Lapland, only came to twelve thousand.
The sedentary Laplander is usually some poor reindeer proprietor, who having ruined himself, and being unable to continue the life of a wandering herdsman, becomes a beggar or a servant. If he has still a little money left, he settles down on the sea coast, and turns fisherman, while his wife spins wool. His existence in the midst of men of a different race is then a solitary one. He is a regular pariah, despised by both Swede and Norwegian. His hut, his dress, his customs, are all different to those of the people amongst whom he has taken shelter. His children are not allowed to marry into any of the neighbouring families, and he is utterly and entirely alone amid strangers.
In his “Travels in the Scandinavian States,” M. de Saint-Blaize tells us how he suddenly fell in with an encampment of Laplanders in the night time. A hundred deer, whose immense antlers, interlaced the one with the other, produced the effect of a little forest, were grouped around the camp fires. Two young Laplanders and some dogs watched over the safety of the whole. Hard by were the tents. An old Laplander and his wife offered the traveller some reindeer milk. It was very oily, and reminded him of goat’s milk.
The same traveller tells us that when on a journey a Laplander’s wife gives birth to a child, she places it in a piece of hollow wood with the opening fenced in with wire to give play to the baby’s head. This log with its precious contents is then placed on the mother’s back and she rejoins the rest. When they halt, she hangs this kind of wooden chrysalis to the bough of a tree, the wire protecting the child from the teeth of wild animals ([fig. 91]).
91.—A LAPP CRADLE.