We came across a great stretch of marsh after this, with logs laid down over the worst parts, and at the farther side we made a midday camp with a fire which would cook the kettles and provide us with a smoke-shelter at one and the same time. And at this camp it was that Johann told us a very curious tale. He was not diffuse in his telling, because he had no long powers of description, and I do not think he lied over it, because he lacked the requisite power of imaginativeness. If Pat, for instance, had told the tale, we should have taken it as a piece of genial fiction, and thought no more about it; but as it was Johann's tale, told perspiringly, with many awed shrinkings, and mostly in pantomime, it weighed upon us sufficiently to provide us with conversation for the next several days, and then we received a sort of confirmation of it which--but that will be mentioned in its place.
Briefly, and without Johann's gesticulations, the tale was this:--He was out one day in a canoe on Enare See, fishing--following his usual vocation, in fact. Suddenly in the sky there appeared to him a fish, a huge fish, a green fish, a fish eight times as long as his canoe. He put up eight fingers, and we counted them. He looked up by chance and saw it, and where it had come from he did not know. It floated quite easily in the air about the height of--of--he pointed out a black pine--about so high above his canoe. It had a tail which could move, and a great ring round its neck which whirred when it went ahead. Finally it left him and flew towards the mountains of the southward, and there was lost to view.
We attempted to get more out of Johann, but that was all he could tell. We gave him pencil and paper and told him to draw the fish; and he tried, certainly, but without any useful result; but then sketching is not a spontaneous art. And in the end we gave up trying to extract any more information on the subject, and talked over what we had got.
"Is this some sort of a legend?" said one of us.
"_Phe-ew!_" said the other. "This may mean something pretty big, if we can only come in touch with it." And so here we were provided with a topic of talk which involved the fate of navies, the policies of nations, and indeed the government of the whole wide world. It was a god-send to us. In many a camp, on many a weary march when of ourselves we should not have been able to rise above the depression of circumstances, it was enough to begin: "Touching that air-ship of Johann's, I've been thinking--," and there would start up a whirl of talk which lifted us clean away from the insects and the domestic worries of Arctic Lapland.