We were tolerably savage at being let in for this _fiasco_, and should probably have explained to the feckless one with energy how remiss it was of him not to know the country five hundred yards away from his own front-door; but when we set foot again on the lake-shore below the house, these thoughts of war were swept from us by a feeling of wonder and surprise. Another caravan had arrived from the direction in which we were going, and the principals of it were walking in even then to take possession of the dairy-bedroom. Their carriers sat outside the house-door on the sloping-way of planks. There were three of them: two sturdy down-country Finns, and a weird Lapp with lank, black hair, and yellow, pock-marked face, and a square Lapp's cap of dead-black cloth.
These were the first travellers of any sort we had met in all Arctic Lapland, and we marvelled at what could be their business. Presently the two principals came out of the dairy-bedroom and talked with us. The elder was a huge man, deep-bearded and heavy-paunched, with a frown on his face and few words to spare. The younger was aged perhaps thirty, had a cut-away chin, and brimmed with words. We tried one another in a whole continent of languages, and finally pitched upon Latin as the only one we had any working knowledge of in common. It was on both sides schoolboy dog-Latin of the most canine variety, and because of the difficulties of pronunciation we could not interchange ideas even through this medium by word of mouth. So every syllable of our chat was scrawled with a stub of pencil upon the rough-hewn door of Scurujärvi farm.
"Potesne nobis dicere," we wrote, "si possibile est invenire equum nos portare de Kittila ad mare?"
And the man with the cut-away chin replied; "Currus est in Kittila."
It was quite a delightful exercise conversing through the rags of this dimly-remembered tongue. But we did not talk for long, and we only learned some vague facts about our future course. Theirs was only a temporary halt. They were soon on the march again, and our curiosity concerning them grew high. The two principals started off first, the carriers following them; but when these last were just on the move, one of them, a Finn, turned back to us and pointed to his Lappish companion. We looked, and for the first time saw strapped outside the Lapp's pack a pair of leg-shackles, bright and ferociously heavy. The Finn laughed and pointed to the big man with the heavy beard ahead, and then he turned away from us and set off on the march.