It was a subject which interested me. At an early age I was taught that from frog-spawn grew tadpoles, and from these grew frogs. Being of an inquiring, or a sceptical turn of mind, whichever way one likes to look at it, I used to catch the little black tadpoles, incarcerate them in pickle-bottles, and inspect them diligently; but never did the wished-for result arrive. It may be that a watched tadpole never changes; and certainly tadpoles do seem to suffer from nerves, because if one disturbs the surface of a pond where they are occupying themselves, away go the whole crowd like a lot of animated commas. But I am inclined to think that nervousness is not the reason of their coy refusal to do their advertised change-act in public view. It is beginning to grow on me that they cannot do it. Of course science says flatly that they do change; but when it wishes, science can lie like photography or a newspaper; and for the future the tadpole metamorphosis is eliminated from my private creed. If I am wronging tadpoles as a nation, I am sorry.
By this stage our Lapp carriers were all very foot-sore, though we ourselves were quite sound, which does not say much for the theory that it is always advisable to adopt the foot-gear of the country you are travelling over. At every halt one or other of them would take off his boots, extract the grass, spread it out to dry, and add more grass from the store each carried in his personal knapsack. It was the same grass which is used for the same purpose in Norway--crisp, dry, green, fine stuff, without knots, and without seeding tips. It has to be twisted up and kneaded between the hands to break the fibre; but once so prepared, it is much like a pad of soft horse-hair in texture. However, as I say, it chafed badly, and for summer work the bare foot inside the shoe would probably have been better. That was the way I was going myself; as the lower extremities of my stockings had long before worn away, and my feet had grown as hard as a nigger's.
We seemed to be passing away from the birdless region which lay inland from the Arctic coast. But still there was no great abundance of feathered creatures. On the swamps one could usually see a pair of curlew, but seldom more; from behind the forest trees one sometimes heard the cuckoo's hoot, though from one side of the country to the other we never saw the bird itself in the actual flesh and feather; and once, a little ringed dotterel came out into an open space before us and went through its pitiful pantomime of being wounded, just as one may see it on the shingle of a Shetland tarn. It was the breeding season for all of them of course, and even if we had possessed a gun, and from sheer stress of hunger been willing to slay nursing parents, we should have got little for our pains; certainly not enough to live on.