At first the one-eared man refused to understand what we needed. He went on with his work upon the birch-root. He had a long-handled felling axe, and his sheath-knife, and he used them both, and was rapidly evolving a shapely bowl out of chaos. But we had no special wish just then to watch him carpenter, so we gently but firmly took the utensils away from him, and backed him up against a wall, and spoke to him in a language which he could understand.
He admitted that he knew of our needs, but protested his inability to supply them. He said that all available males were far away from Pokka on one errand and another, and he alone was left as protection of the women and children. We pointed out that failing other carriers, we should impress him into our service himself, whether he liked it or whether he did not. And upon that he remembered where there was one man, and set out there and then to find him.
We accompanied him into the lobby. Pat was there with the squinting lady, making a purchase of butter. The butter-store was pressed down into a tub without salt, and emitted a fine rancid scent. The lady with the squint gouged it out with her delicate fingers and packed it in a birch-bark box, which she afterwards weighed on a steelyard. Pat in the meanwhile was helping himself from an ancient cask of evil-smelling buttermilk, in which the grimy dipper hung ready for all who chose to thirst.
It is curious to note how the Lapp and the Northern Finn contrives to make his food unappetising. Of course a constant diet of fresh milk would entail constant biliousness; milk curdled, or slightly acid buttermilk, is much more wholesome. But they go to the far extremes of decomposition. They never eat fresh fish: they split, gut, and partly dry the produce of the river, and then allow it to go half rotten, and then they eat it. They prepare their reindeer meat and their cow meat in the same way. A French peasant, even if he were as slack and lazy as the Finn, would out of the Finn's provisions live deliciously. But this slouching fisher-farmer of the North prefers to feed on carrion, and any luckless foreigners who come into his country must accept his diet (if indeed they can persuade him to sell them food) or else they must starve.