We filled the room with wood-smoke and prepared to enjoy ourselves. The Lapps undressed to their shirts, and squatted on the floor, and dined off reeking fish and strong rye-bread. We also ate from our poor store. And then we had a solemn palaver over the arrangement for the morrow, and then we lay down where we were, and slept.
The wood-smoke died away from the air, and the mosquitoes came back through the chinks; but they browsed upon us undisturbed. We did not wake.
IN TOUCH WITH THE GENUINE NOMAD, WITH SOME REMARKS UPON HIS DOMESTIC DEER, HIS TREASURE-HOARDS, AND THE DECAY OF HIS PRACTICE IN SORCERY
We roused after an uneasy sleep and stepped outside the rest-hut, and looked at the hot, round sun which hung behind a hilltop close at hand. Hayter guessed the hour as 6 A.M. I considered it to be six in the evening. We had no watch, and did not in the least know which was right, nor did we remarkably care. We were in a land where the daylight endured for each hour of the twenty-four on end, and we were setting off to visit those to whom the very name of hours was an unknown thing. We were going to seek the nomad herders in the deeper recesses of the fjeld.
We might be a week before we found them, we might be only a day. Their trail grows up after them, and no one but a herder Lapp himself should know his own whereabouts. To come across the deer pack, the only way was to quarter the country in great wide beats, and to do this quickly one must travel light. So we arranged to reduce our _entourage_ to the smallest possible limits.
The excellent Johann was to come with us as personal attendant, and for once in his life that cheerful person pouted and looked sad. We might get lost, he pointed out; we should probably find no herder Lapps at all; and even if we did, it was by no means certain that they would entreat us civilly. And finally--well, he did not want to go. He puckered up his face and nearly blubbered over it. He was a bit of a child, this loud-voiced acrobat in disguise. But in the end, when we did start, he had got his usual noisy spirits back again at the end of the first half-mile.
By way of baggage we had each of us a couple of tins of food, and though Hayter and I carried a tooth-brush each in addition, that was the end of our burdens. We were marching light, in the strictest sense of the word, and everything else that we possessed was left to the tender care of the other two carriers at the rest-hut. If we wished to drink, we must lift up fjeld water in the cup of our hands; when we slept, it must be _à la belle étoile_. No other methods are possible in the heart of Arctic Lapland.