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Updated: May 3, 2025
In order to reach our room, we were obliged to pass successively through the family dwelling-room, kitchen, and a carpenter's workshop, but our windows commanded a full view of a grogshop across the way, where drunken Lapps were turned out with astonishing rapidity.
Winter, however, is the season when the Lapps are found at home, and when their life and habits are most characteristic and interesting. The population of Kautokeino is then, perhaps, about 800; in summer it is scarcely one-tenth of this number.
The Laplanders are the only very small-sized people in Europe, but they run from 5 ft. upwards, whereas the negrites and negrillos run from about 4 ft. to less than 5 ft. Some writers have supposed that the Lapps are the remnants of a small race which was formerly spread over the whole of Europe, and was exterminated or driven out by the larger races.
However this may be, the Highland second sight is different, in many points, from the clairvoyance and magic of the Lapps, those famous sorcerers. 'When the devil takes a liking to any person in his infancy, says Scheffer, 'he presently seizes on him by a disease, in which he haunts him with several apparitions. This answers, in magical education, to Smalls, or Little Go.
The Lapps generally treat their animals with the greatest patience and forbearance, but otherwise do not exhibit any particular attachment for them. They are indebted to them for food, clothing, habitation and conveyance, and their very existence may therefore almost be said to depend on that of their herds.
Early the next morning they lassoed some very fine reindeer, which had superb horns and had not been used for quite a while. I did not care now how fast the reindeer went, for I could keep inside of my sleigh. The men said: "We will meet on the promontory Lapps with their reindeer herds, and if it is very stormy we can go into their tent." Soon after we started.
This is daily confirmed by observation. The child is vastly more emotional than the man, the savage than his civilized neighbor. Castren, the Russian traveller, describes the Tartars and Lapps as a most nervous folk. When one shocks them with a sudden noise, they almost fall into convulsions.
I saw further on a poor reindeer in his death struggle with two wolves that had fastened upon his neck. Two Lapps had seen this also, and armed with their bludgeons they came at full speed, and as quick as the flight of an arrow they passed on each side of the poor reindeer and broke the fore legs of the wolves, which fell on their backs howling.
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.
We will smash their heads and break their legs." Towards dark, when they returned, they had seen no wolves nor their tracks. "The wolves are so cunning and their ways are so unknown to us that we must be on the lookout all night," said the Lapps to me. Then we partook of our reindeer meat, which had been kept between our clothing and our chests to prevent it from freezing.
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