Late that day I saw a splendid sight, two herds were approaching each other in opposite directions. The bulls of each herd advanced to charge the others with great fury and began a terrible fight, advancing and retreating, then charging again, butting furiously. The horns of two combatants sometimes became entangled, and it took a long time for them to disengage themselves. Mikel said: "Sometimes they cannot be separated and have to be killed." In the mean time, the Lapps and dogs went after them, and with great trouble they were parted and made to go to their respective herds. I noticed, as I went further south, that the twilight was not so bright as it was in the North—for in that northern land, the daylight comes from the direction of the pole.
The darkest part of the day or night was somewhat after eleven o'clock p.m., but even then I could read, and as we travelled only Jupiter and Venus looked at us—no other stars were visible, and towards half-past one these two disappeared, for daylight was so strong; and when the weather was clear after that time only the pale blue sky of the North and its fleecy white clouds were to be seen above our heads. How beautiful it was!
CHAPTER XXXVI
Variable Weather.—Snowy Days.—An Uninhabited House of Refuge.—Animals Changing the Color of their Fur.—Mikel Tells Me about a Bear.—Killing the Bear.—Hurrying on over Soft Snow and Frozen Rivers.—The Ice Begins to Break.—Pass the Arctic Circle.
ONWARD we went, sleeping one day in the tent of a nomadic Lapp, another day in our bags, at other times in the gamme of a river Lapp. The weather was very changeable; one day it was clear, the next day the sky was gray. Snowy days were not uncommon.
Midway between Nordkyn and Haparanda the snow was of great depth. Only the tops of the birch trees could be seen, and strange to say the branches were in bloom, for the trees felt the heat of the sun, and the snow had prevented the freezing of the ground to a great depth. The snow must have been eight or ten feet deep in some regions.
When we reached the summit of the plateau, the watershed that divided the rivers falling into the Arctic Sea and the Baltic, the weather was very stormy. Though it was the 13th of May, we met a furious snowstorm. This was dangerous for us, and Mikel attached my sleigh to his by a long rope, so that we might not become separated. The snowstorm seemed, however, to give new strength to the reindeer, and they went faster than usual, and besides the cold weather we had had the two previous days—the thermometer marking 15 to 18 degrees of frost—had evidently invigorated them. For a while there was a lull in the storm, and we were glad when we came to a house of refuge.
The house was small and uninhabited, but clean inside. Some food was hanging from the ceiling, belonging to some Lapp or some wanderer like ourselves, who had left it to have it on his return journey. The food was sacred and safe. No one would have dared to touch it, no matter how hungry he was, for it did not belong to him, and the one who had left it perhaps depended upon it to sustain his life on his return. We peeped into the parcel—there was some hard bread, reindeer cheese, and a smoked reindeer tongue, a coffee kettle and some coffee, and a few small pieces of wood tied together, to make a fire to cook the coffee with. This was one of those houses of refuge used only for shelter, without people to keep them, built especially by the government for that purpose, in case of sudden storm.