Muddusjärvi is narrow here, and contracts still more farther on, till one could well set it down as a mere currentless river. It sits quietly between its low banks, and is fed from the low, hummocky hills on the northern side, and by the higher hills beyond them. There is thick cover in beyond these banks, but no sign of game anywhere.
Reed grasses which scraped against the canoe's tarry side were beginning to grow in the shallows, and then, just as the lake was beginning to widen again, we landed before a cluster of three huts, and tried for carriers. Johann and the melancholy Lapp went up to do the negotiation, and we foreigners got out of the canoe and stretched our limbs. A flock of ten diminutive sheep, two of them black, sauntered up and nibbled at my legs. The farm was small, but it seemed fertile and cared-for, and by no means poverty-stricken. There was a grass-field, enclosed by split-rail fence, and manured. And good grass it was, too, well cleared from weeds. But there were no carriers available here, which was what we were particularly interested in just then, so we went back to the canoe and once more got her under way.
We opened up broad Muddusjärvi after this--a fine sheet of water, bordered by wooded hills; but presently we turned due north again, and paddled up a narrower arm of the lake, and landed at another Lapp farm.
This was certainly the most prosperous place that we had come across since entering the country, and it was marvellous to think that such a spot could exist so far inland and so deep within the Arctic Circle. There were store sheds and outhouses running right up from the lake beach, in all abundance; and the big, log dwelling-house itself, on the top of the rise, was a place of mark. It had yellow window frames and a shingle roof. Its big kitchen living-room measured twenty good feet by five-and-twenty, and it had no less than two separate bedrooms, not to mention the usual combined dairy-bedroom, each with a separate door of its own.
But then this estate was no one-man farm. It doubtless had called one man owner sometime during history; but he had begotten sons, who shared the land between them, _more Hibernico_, and then in the recent past these amalgamated into a sensible partnership. By dyke and axe they had added a few more acres to the ancestral plot from the forest swamp at the back; but only a very few: mere husbandry is of small account in this far Northern clime. What they did was to increase the number of nets, and build more fishing canoes, and more drying sheds in which to cure the catch. It was from the lake they got the more important harvest. The milk and the cheese, and the rye and the meat of sheep and oxen, were good, but they could not be depended on. It was the fish that never failed. No Arctic storm, no broken summer, could kill the crop of the lake or deny it leave to ripen.