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The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. Afterward, some beast or other, following the faint tracks over marsh and moorland, wearing them deeper; after these again some Lapp gained scent of the path, and took that way from field to field, looking to his reindeer.
The ptarmigan also, a species of grouse, turns white during the Bear's Night." I asked the Lapps, "Why do you call the winter months the 'Bear's Night'?" "Because," one replied, "in this land the bears sleep all through the winter months." "Goodness!" I exclaimed; "then the bear has a sleep that lasts five or six months, and even more?" "Yes," the Lapp replied.
Roasting on one side and freezing on the other, with smarting eyes and asphyxiated lungs, I soon forgot whatever there was of the picturesque in my situation, and thought only of the return of our Lapp guide.
Now I should like to know whether these people, who come from that country, have laws as we have, and whether they live as comfortably." So saying, Isaaki Anderinpoika Niemi departed. No sooner had he gone than the old Lapp woman, Elsa, who had been sent for, drove up in her pulk, behind a fast reindeer.
Of the tundra it is enough to say that all depends on the reindeer. This animal is the be-all and end-all of Lapp existence. When Nansen, after crossing Greenland, sailed home with his two Lapps, he called their attention to the crowds of people assembled to welcome them at the harbour. "Ah," said the elder and more thoughtful of the pair, "if they were only reindeer!"
He will find them not, like the deer in Richmond Park, waiting to be looked at, but timid and restless, and ready to take flight at the slightest provocation. Only the Lapp herdsmen and their dogs are able to control these wild children of a wild land. What a place Norway must be for birds'-nesting!
The animal reached the bottom, and before I knew it made a sharp curve to prevent the sleigh striking his legs. I gave a shout of joy. I had not upset. I felt quite proud. At the next hill I was more proud than ever, for Pehr Wasara upset and I did not, but I had never seen a Lapp get quicker into a sleigh than he did. Further on Pehr stopped and waited for me.
Thereupon Ola gave a beautiful description of how brave the little girl had been, and of how she had won the admiration and sympathy of everyone. "Is that the girl you want to take into your tent?" asked the fisherman. "Yes," returned the Lapp.
Others, again, maintain them to be Ugrians; while a few pretend to discover a relationship between the Lapp language and the dialects of the Australian savages, and similar outsiders of the human family; alleging that as successive stocks bubbled up from the central birthplace of mankind in Asia, the earlier and inferior races were gradually driven outwards in concentric circles, like the rings produced by the throwing of a stone into a pond; and that consequently, those who dwell in the uttermost ends of the earth are, ipso facto, first cousins.
Now Inger was a monster and a deformity to look at; 'twas all wrong, of course, but she swelled with pride for all that. Even a Lapp can gladden a mother's heart. "If it wasn't that your sack there's so full, I'd find you something to put in it," says Inger. "Nay, 'tis more than's worth your while." Inger goes inside with the child on her arm; Eleseus stays outside with the Lapp.
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