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Updated: June 3, 2025
The following day a great snowstorm swept over the land, and during that time the Lapps were much in fear that prowling wolves would get into the midst of their herds and that we should be unable to see them on account of the storm.
We passed three Lapps, with heavy hay-sleds, drawn by a reindeer apiece, and after a time issued from the woods upon a range of hills entirely bare and white. Before us was the miserable hamlet of Lappajärvi, on the western side of the barren mountain of Lippavara, which is the highest in this part of Lapland, having an altitude of 1900 feet above the sea.
Her nurse, moreover, was a Lapp woman, carried off in some pirating foray, and skilled in all the sorceries for which the Lapps were famed throughout the North.
The old herder warned me, "No Lapps, no deer"; but I thought too much in terms of Mission finances, the Government having withdrawn their grant toward the herders' salaries. Trusting to the confidence in their own ability of the locally trained men, I therefore let the Lapp herders go home. The love of the Lapps for their deer is like a fisherman's for his vessel, and seems a master passion.
Turnips are the only vegetables that can be raised, with, here and there, a few potatoes. As you go further north, the timber becomes more and more stunted, consisting chiefly of birchwood, till you reach the open tundra, which is clothed in moss and low-growing shrubs. The Lapps lead a semi-nomadic life.
Here I had a clean room and bed. The place was a great rendezvous for nomadic Lapps, and I found many of them. The farmer extended to them unbounded hospitality, and spread as many reindeer skins on the floor at night as the room could hold, for them to sleep on. The Lapps liked the place very much, and came there to rest for a few days, bringing their food with them.
A hundred other herds were prospering, and the Eskimo and Lapps were full-cheeked and plump with good feeding and prosperity. A third of a million reindeer were on the hoof in Alaska, and the breeders were exultant. Pretty good, when compared with the fact that in 1902 there were less than five thousand! In another twenty years there would be ten million.
The former Länsman arrested the most prominent of the offenders, and punished them with fine and imprisonment. This begat feelings of hatred on the part of the fanatics, which soon ripened into a conspiracy. The plot was matured during the summer months, when the Lapps descended towards the Norwegian coast with their herds of reindeer.
Witches and wizards operate and prosper among the Hottentots and negroes and barbarous Indians, among the Siberians and Kirgishes and Lapps, of course. Everybody knows that they are poor ignorant creatures! Yes: but are the French and Germans and English and Americans poor ignorant creatures too?
Twice in one summer he came across the hills, and Os-Anders, it should be remembered, had no reindeer to look to, but lived by begging and quartering himself on other Lapps. As soon as he came up to the place, Oline left her work and fell to chatting with him about people in the village, and, when he left, his sack was heavy with no end of things. Isak put up with it for two years, saying nothing.
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