Morris was different. He plugged away in the bows with never a grunt and never an easy. He rowed about thirty strokes to the minute, just in the water and out again, with a bent arm and without much pretence at a swing. One of us gauged these matters with a professional eye, but we did not feel inclined just then to set to work and reform the rowing style of Lapland. He was a whimsical fellow, this same Morris, always grinning at something, and always shaking back his wispy black hair from the front of his eyes. We tried to tempt him into travelling up-country with us, but he shuddered at the idea of getting out of touch with his birthplace.
We turned out of the Syd Varanger into Bogofjord and crept up by the flank of gray walls of naked upright rock against a strong ebb-tide, and amused ourselves by taking occasional compass-bearings, and marvelling at the inaccuracy of the published maps. Once we put ashore on a shelving rock covered with mussels, and the crew lunched off kippered salmon, which they ripped from the family joint in pieces with their fingers as they required it; and afterwards they sought recreation by scratching themselves thoroughly for half an hour. Then Morris put on a pair of fingerless, brown-skin gloves to keep his delicate paws from blistering, and we started again. A brown team of eider duck rustled past us, _ventre à l'eau_, heading for the sea, and then a school of porpoises surged by the canoe in chase of a shoal of flickering silver fish.
Swarms of mosquitoes accompanied the canoe in a noisy biting cloud, and it was some gloomy satisfaction to note that the Lapps suffered equally with ourselves. Feodor indeed suffered so much annoyance that he actually knocked off work to tie a grimy kerchief carefully round his head, which it took him twenty minutes to accomplish before he had managed it to his complete satisfaction.
Broods of duck, some familiar, some strange, began to flight, and we sighed and broke the tenth commandment. But the gun perforce had to stay in its mackintosh housing. The Norwegian Government (very properly) keeps a fatherly eye on all the game within its marches, and has appointed vigorous close-seasons for all except the outlaw wolf, the bear, the lynx, the fox, and wild cat. And they ram home the edict by a good healthy fine for wrongdoers, and a reward for the informer. Once over the Russian border it would be different. There are no game laws in Arctic Lapland. There is very little law of any description. We could bag there whatever came in our way. In fact, Feodor assured us with an impish grin that we might shoot a Laplander should we feel so disposed, provided always we ate him afterwards so as to conceal the carcass from a possible public view. Feodor, the one-eyed, was occasionally rather grisly in his ideas of wit and humour.