A kettle of reindeer meat is always boiling over coals on rocks in the center of the hut. The Lapps get food from the kettle whenever they feel hungry and eat it with spoons made of reindeer horn from rude bowls or plates of wood or bone.
LAPPS TRAVELING WITH REINDEER
Day and night some Lapp and his dogs watch the herd of reindeer as they wander on the mountains. A few reindeer are kept near the hut to furnish milk for the camp.
The reindeer not only furnish the skins for clothes and covers and milk and meat for food, they are also the Lapps’ horses. The Lapp children like to go sleigh riding behind a reindeer. But sometimes the ride is rough. The children may be thrown out into the snow. The reindeer wears but little harness, so the driver cannot hold him if he cares to run.
Several families of Lapps go every summer from Sweden across a body of water to a place in Norway where the moss on the mountains is very good. The reindeer swim across the water. The Lapps go in boats and join the reindeer on the other side.
One Lapp family that crosses the water from Sweden has built a hut of timber for its summer home in Norway. It is no larger than the skin or sod huts. Both the mother and the father have to stoop to enter the house. But the little Lapp girl and her dogs can run in and out easily.
But, even though the Lapps move about from place to place, the Lapp girls and boys go to school. The law of Sweden requires these children to go to school for six years. They begin their lessons when they are seven years old and go to school until they are thirteen. Each settlement has its own school. The schoolhouse is just another Lapp hut. In the summer the children study their lessons sitting on the ground in front of or in the hut. The teacher lives in the hut and moves when the camp moves. Many of the teachers are Lapps who have been educated to teach; but some of the teachers are Swedes or Norwegians.
A LAPP HUT