He was a fellow of infinite thews and a boundless appetite for hilarity. He always had the heaviest load foisted on him, and received it with a joke and a grimace; and after the most wearisome march he could always tell funny tales, and laugh uproariously at his own excessive wit. In his personal habits he was an irresponsible savage; but in a land where everybody was accustomed to do everything for themselves, he was surprisingly thoughtful and attentive. For instance, after he had been drinking at a stream, he frequently offered his wooden cup to one of us that we might drink with niceness also, instead of being forced to lap the water up like a dog; and more than once, when our kettle and the carriers' were heating together on a camp-fire, he has burnt his own fingers that he might take our kettle off and hand it to us. Indeed in these little attentions he distinguished himself above all his countrymen we met, and perhaps it was partly for this reason along with the others that we grew so much to like him.
Two deserted villages did we pass through on this march, with their few mouldering remnants of huts and clearings almost blotted into forest by the second growth. In one of them there was an especially picturesque bit, and we came to a halt, and Hayter sat himself on the wreck of an old reindeer sledge and tried to sketch it. He was prepared for annoyance from the mosquitoes, and he got it. He battled with them bravely for a long time: he smoked like a chimney; he slapped himself with frantic industry; and at last he gave it up in despair. He had covered three pages of his sketch-book with blood--his own blood--and pencil scratches, and dishevelled insect corpses, and he certainly did get three good impressionist sketches of the atmospheric condition, but he carried away no intelligible note of the ruined huts and the clearing.
The carriers shouldered their loads again, and we knocked out our tobacco into the grass; but the caravan did not start till the two Lapps had come up and carefully stamped out any smoulder which might remain.
All trails which might at one time lead out of that village were long since grown up. The forest is always greedy to take back any territory of which man has robbed it. So we had to make our own path as we progressed, and pressed on through clinging undergrowth. The dim roar of the foss down in the valley rumbled through the air, but no birds lightened the march with their songs. Occasionally the straining ear thought it caught the cry of some feathered creature, but it always turned out (on seeking deeper) to be tree-branches grinding together in imitation of bird sounds.