  Huckleberry Finn announced our coming, and after we had taken toll of the ice-well, we went into the house. Inside the door was a huge room strewn with sleeping men and women. At one side was a stove with cooking-places; at the other stood a hand-loom with a piece of chequered blue-cotton fabric in the course of manufacture. Beside it there straddled a couple of spinning-wheels. The room we were given for ourselves, after what we were used to, seemed an actual palace. It had two windows, a table, a white stone-stove, and hung on one of the walls was the picture of a gorgeous young lady working a Singer’s sewing-machine. There were two box-beds in the room, and one of them possessed a mosquito-bar. Ye gods! think of the luxury of it! Beds and a real mosquito-bar! The man who received us was the Squire of KÜstula, and a great man indeed. He was a Finn, and yet he was civil and kindly. He set before us for our entertainment a great bowl of curdled milk, The noise of the housework roused us, and we got up, very swollen and stiff from the bites. The tub of curdled milk was on the table, and we ate it thirstily. The Squire heard us moving, and paddled in on his bare feet, and grinned affably. His name by the way was Johann Sanmelli Myal, but we called him Squire from the first, as that name seemed to suit him best. We mentioned that we wanted a canoe and men to take us to Kittila, and he said he had guessed it already, and we could set off whenever we chose. Here was thoughtfulness and civility! It seemed marvellous to find such qualities and such a house within a day’s march of that dreadful, listless savage at ScurujÄrvi. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry were hanging about waiting to be paid, and we gave them what we had bargained for with the feckless one, and a douceur over for themselves, and then we went out and strolled about in the open air. The settlement was very different from any we had seen before, and I only hope for the sake of the civil people who live there, that it was as prosperous as it looked. Viewed from a distance, so that one could not tell whether the green crops were rye and barley, or lanky maize, it might have been a settlement in North Carolina or the Western States, except for one thing—there was no litter about. There were none of those heaps of disused meat, and yeast, and tomato tins, so inseparable from new American civilisation. All was trim. There were a few Lapps about the place it is true, but they were merely in KÜstula as dependants. Not one owned a farm. The people of KÜstula, however, had dealings with the aboriginal in another way. For all winter traction and transport they used reindeer, but when we visited the village there was not a single one within its boundaries. Each farmer had an agreement with a Lapp, and sent away his ear-marked deer to be pastured under the Lapp’s charge on the distant uplands of the fjeld and tundra. We made no long stay in KÜstula. For the first time since we had set foot in the country, transport was made ready for us without a weary haggle of words; and the unaccustomed easiness of it was too delightful not to be taken advantage of. We limped stiffly down through the slip-rails of the fields, a bevy of men and children and women all accompanying us, The river here was young, being born of rills in the blue mountains only a few miles away, amongst their swamps and pines and comely birches; and it ran round bends and curves innumerable. Sometimes it widened into lagoons, sometimes the banks hemmed it in to narrows, and the waters spouted with waterfalls and rapids. On the short grass of the bank lay a new canoe, bottom upwards. I sat down on her, and discovered also that she was newly tarred. She was eighteen feet long, and built in the usual way, with two stakes aside, coming to highest points forward and aft. The Squire himself came with us as skipper; we ourselves and our baggage were stowed amidships on a green cushion of springy birch-shoots; and in the bows was Nilas Petrie Karahoola, a tall, clean-made young Finn, who owned a bottle of smuggled cognac and a natty little liqueur-glass. When we were all on board, the canoe showed just seven inches of free-board. We shoved off, and the population of KÜstula on the high bank above, waved their head-gear and wished us God-speed. But we ourselves could not The Squire wiped the perspiration from his face and sat down; Nilas brought out his cognac-bottle and handed a nip all round; and then the pair of them settled themselves to steady paddling. We ourselves were glad enough of the opportunity for far niente. We had come through a surfeit of ill-usage, over-exertion, over-biting, and under-feeding, and as regards personal appearance we were a couple of gaunt, blotched, hollow-eyed wrecks. So we lay on the baggage and the springy green boughs, and watched the banks go by in luxurious idleness. Comely banks they were too, laid out by Nature with grasses, and planted with birches, hazels, and pines. They were like bits of the Thames at Mortlake, or the Dee above Chester. It was hard to realise Now and again we passed a fisher’s camp by the water-side—just a fire, some drying nets, and a piece of cotton cloth which served more as mosquito-bar than tent; and now and again we met a woman paddling a boat whilst a man in the stern fished. Some were Lapps, but most were Finns. We would pass mile after mile of river-bank which had never been touched by man since the river carved its channel, and mile after mile of forest which had never felt the axe; but still there was not wanting occasional evidences that we were getting into a country less sparsely populated than the aching wilderness we had so wearily tramped through, and the idea made us think back at some of the halts where we had stayed. Those at the farther end were already growing faint and hazy: we seemed to have gone through so much since we had left them. “I can dimly recall,” said one of us, “that years ago we came up to the Polar Sea in a canoe called the Windward. But where was it from? I forget.” “A settlement called ‘London,’ wasn’t it?” said the other. “Which was that? I’m getting mixed.” “The place where we got something to eat.” “Ah, I remember, sour milk, wasn’t it, and that dog-biscuit stuff? And the natives came to see us off.”... We were talking half seriously too. All those early stages of our expedition seemed so distant and nebulous. We had lived a good many years in those last few weeks. From all that toil and starvation and strain this river-journey came as a delightful revel. The paddles cheeped against the gunwales, and the water trickled musically. Cuckoos called to us from behind the woods. We took our eyes from one beautiful picture on the shore, only to drink in the pleasures of the next. And then the Finns would take their paddles out of the water altogether, and we would drift down the stream and bask in the sweet, warm silence. The river would widen out into a still lagoon, walled in by mysterious pines, a dancing-place for dragon-flies, and we would drowse off almost into forgetfulness. And then of a sudden the lagoon would empty over a fall into a narrow gut, and the canoe would leap upon the backs of sleek brown waves, and frisk through spray, and grate over shoals, and shave black-fanged rocks by a hand’s-breadth. It was work which required the skilful navigator. Once, after we had gone ashore to boil up the kettles for a meal, the Finns changed about when we got on board again, and Nilas at the steering paddle took us down the next rapids and half filled the canoe with water before she reached their foot. We had to pull ashore again to bale after this, not because our own sodden properties would have hurt in the Other streams joined us as the canoe paddled on, and the river grew in bigness and use. Hay barns became quite frequent on the banks, on spots where some distant farmer came to cut the rich grasses, and dry them on wooden racks and rails, Norwegian fashion, till they turned into scented hay. This would be sheltered in the rude houses of logs against autumn rains, and in the winter months, when the river was ice, he could come with sledge and reindeer and drag the hay home to his farm across the frozen surface. Nilas paddled and the Squire steered. There was high ground ahead, and always on our left-hand side was a great wooded bulk of mountain. The river scenery changed like the setting of a play: we shot down noisy rapids with the speed of a running fish; we paddled across leisurely lagoons; we saved journeys round wide bends by forcing the canoe through narrow “cut-offs,” like those one meets with on the Mississippi; but always close above us the mountain remained, grand and vast and immovable. On the hills ahead there were snow patches. On our mountain there were none. From the waters where its feet were bathed, to the billowy clouds which Nilas put leather gloves over his fingers and paddled on, and the Squire steered tirelessly. The scenery grew wilder as we drew nearer to Kittila, and flights of small duck whirred past us down the stream. The grass was gone from the banks, and the river was hemmed in by arid bluffs, and walls of rock, and lines of tumbled boulders. The trees were sterner in shape and colour, and grew into thicker and more gloomy forests. Then abruptly it changed again. The forests disappeared. A natural clearing began, and man had taken advantage of the gap to set up a farm. The Squire ran the canoe ashore, and we got out and climbed a steep forty-foot bank. The farm lay before us, trim, orderly, and prosperous, and the usual fishing implements lay spread about on the bank. The Finn farmer came out and invited us inside his dwelling. It was probably an accidental resemblance, but in personal appearance he might have passed for twin-brother of the estimable President KrÜger, of African ill-fame, in clothes, beard, and everything, with the trifling detail of steel-rimmed spectacles added. He accepted us first of all as a joke; but when he heard we had come across from the Arctic Sea, he looked upon us as a pair of barefaced liars, and regarded us with more respect. He gave us milk, and then brought all available members of his household into the farm In the kitchen a woman was working a hand-loom, and except when a thread broke in the warp, and demanded repair, the machine clacked away industriously during the whole of the excellent KrÜger’s sermon. She was weaving a checked blue-cotton cloth, and beside her a couple of old crones span yarn industriously from humming-wheels. Hayter, callous to the sermon, sat down to sketch the hand-loom weaver. Ever and again a small fluffy-headed girl edged across into his line of vision, and was ruthlessly dragged away again by the farmer. She was rather pretty in a scared sort of way, and at last she got her desire, and was faithfully depicted in black and white on a page of the sketch-book. Her name was Edla Dahlgren. We left the farm at eleven o’clock by the timepiece in the kitchen, and put out once more into the river. We were in the broad Ounasjoki now, a river as wide as the Thames at Richmond, but vastly swifter. The canoe ran away down past the shores, and once more forests hedged us in above the high banks. The river was all swirls and grinding pools, and oily overfalls, and noisy rapids. At the foot of the banks were camp-fires sending up trails of thin blue smoke from tiny crumbs of flame. Filmy mist rose from the tangle of waters, and amongst it here and there were We passed close to one of the canoes. A woman was in the bow, poling. Five rods were trolling from the stern, and a man with a calico mosquito-cowl about his head tended them. The rush of the river drove us past, and the canoe faded into a black dot amongst the mist. It was the likeliest looking fishing-water I ever saw. More fires came up on the banks, winked redly, and disappeared. From bank to bank the rapids shouted, and the yellow waves spurned us on to pools of black, sliding water, and the oily rocks sucked us towards them as we tore past. The dew came down more heavily and the mists closed in; the river slacked in speed again, and the canoe rode with an easier motion; and when we looked back, the fishers and their fires were blotted out against the black background of the pines. It was midnight. Astern, wrapped in thin blue mist, there loomed up the great wooded mountains we had voyaged round so long. Ahead, the river widened out into a still lake, and reflected into it was a cluster of red and ochre houses above a bright green bank, which made up the outskirts of straggling Kittila. Well-derricks sprawled amongst the houses, and the smell of farms and agriculture hung on the We had been carried three-and-sixty miles from KÜstula by the tireless fingers of the river. We got out of the canoe and turned our backs on it. Beyond us lay fields gleaming with dew-diamonds. Beyond again, lay the dwellings of Kittila. The Squire led us up to a house and woke the inmates. We were given a room with walls actually papered—with newspapers. A sleepy woman shuffled off her bedclothes and put on a second garment; but she brisked up when she saw the strangers were curious people from a far country. And in a while supper was set before us: the dog-biscuit of the country, the shell of a Dutch cheese, and thirteen bay-leaf anchovies in a tin. And then we were given beds with sheets. Here was refinement: we actually undressed to do justice to it. A road fit for wheeled vehicles runs through Kittila, and another road, though a bad one, intersects it lower down and leads to Sodankyla. The houses of the little town are scattered picturesquely on either side of this road, and are for the most part stained dragon’s-blood red, or turmeric yellow, with white window-sashes. They have a fine taste for colour in Kittila. All the better houses are enclosed within their own neat fences, and of its sort it would be hard Every house has its well or wells, straddled over by a huge hoisting-derrick, of the same construction one may see in Spain, or Southern France, or elsewhere. No house is very large. The risk of fire is always in the air, and a man as he grows richer, or as his family increases, does not add an annexe to his original home, but builds a second house a few yards away, and then others, following a rectangular plan, till at length he has made himself a courtyard, walled round with barns and dwellings. A marvellous tidiness pervades everything. All is kept in good repair. Not a shingle is displaced from the neat brown roofs, not a scrap of the farm middens is allowed to straggle. There is no litter anywhere. And yet these people are Finns of the same race as those squalid, listless savages we had been living amongst only a few days before. The country Finn and his long boot are inseparable; even the Squire and Nilas wore them, although they had telescoped the tops almost down to their ankles; but in Kittila the high boot was no longer de rigeur. Lace boots were the ordinary wear. Even shoes were not uncommon. The two largest buildings in Kittila were a big, square schoolhouse with a high, red stockade, and a large, high-spired church. The school was having holiday when we were there, and does its business during the bleak, black months of winter. The church, in magpie black and white, was hideous. But it was an elaborate building for all that, with granite foundations, an interior of grim massiveness, and shutters in the belfry of its wooden tower, opening and closing like a swell-box of an organ. At the back of the church was a cemetery, grass-grown and neglected, with wooden and cast-iron crosses and devices at the grave heads, most with all inscription quite obliterated. One, over a new grave had the formal hic jacet scrawled in pencil. Another, which was practically a log-built mausoleum, had crumbled in places and fallen in, till the dry bones of the dead shivered at the draught from the crevices. It seemed as though the Finn once out of life dropped out of memory also, and all care for his resting-place ceased. It was a utilitarian trait, perhaps, but it was not quite an amiable one. There is a chemist in Kittila with whom we foregathered and drank lemonade, and I do not think it is maligning him to say that he had a greater liking for winter sledge-exercise than for the mere compounding of drugs and prescribing for human ailments. He owned six driving-deer, did this Arctic chemist, which of course, when we were there, were running When the snows fall, and the time comes for driving, then the little chemist begins to find life worth living. With pride he showed us his gear: the smartest outfit imaginable. First, there was a pulling collar for the deer with two wooden hames bound with iron. Then there was a saddle of leather, most elaborately worked and embroidered with red. For the middle of the deer’s long neck was another red collar, decorated with a fine brass bell. The trace was of raw hide, plaited square. There was one single-tree of bent wood, with a looped thong made fast to its middle. This thong was passed through a hole under the forefoot of the sledge, and the loop was slipped over the bit on the stem-head, so that the deer could always be cast adrift from the sledge at a moment’s notice. The boat-shaped sledge itself was a miracle of light-blue paint, but a cranky thing for a beginner to sit. It would roll forty-five degrees without capsizing, but it was apt to exceed the forty-five. There is a pole We saw that the little chemist was a man of taste from the trimness of this turn-out; but when he showed us his own personal attire for winter journeys, we saw that he was a man of luxury also. Everything was cut after the mode of the Lapps, and cost was a neglected detail. He put on his winter rig for our gratification, and we admired him from head to foot. On the top of him came the lapinlakki, the heavy, square-topped Lappish cap, with the crown made of bright scarlet cloth, and the band round the head, of otter’s fur. Round his neck was the sieppura, a collaret of bear’s fur, with the bear’s mask hanging over his breast. The matsoreo (or peski) which covered his trunk was of soft gray-brown reindeer skin, with the hair exquisitely dressed and finished. The fingerless gloves (kinteaat) on his hands were of white reindeer skin, with the hair outside. He had short, hairless, leather breeches underneath, but these were joined in mid-thigh by the s?p?kkeet, which were reindeer-skin leggings that reached down to the ankles, where they were made fast to the leather boots, the kallakkoat, by narrow, red cloth paulat, which may be defined as bandages. The day happened to be blazing hot, and the little chemist almost melted under the weight of his furs, The little chemist was a fisherman at times during the summer months, and being somewhat of a naturalist besides, he had collected on paper the names of his possible catch. He had not succeeded in finding a specimen of each in the Ounasjoki so far, but the fish were undoubtedly in the country, and some day he hoped to complete his basket. I give the list here, in case somebody may find them interesting:—
He warmed up when the talk got on fish, and took us across to the house of a neighbour who made his living out of fish-catching as an industry. The neighbour gave us spruce beer, a flat decoction, which we found somewhat insipid, and then he started to talk. We warmed as we heard him; it was quite like being at home again. I have only met one man Verily fishermen are quaintly alike all the world over. There must be some sort of bacteria in fish which infect the catcher and impel him to expand facts whether he will or not. I knew an eminent bishop once—but perhaps he does not count. He was an Irishman as well as a votary of the fly-rod. Drinking |
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