When the sleigh traveller, driving along through the dark twilight, comes across one of these places where a deer herd has been digging down to food, he generally has plenty of occupation before he has crossed it safely to the farther side.
The reindeer, by the way, is identical with the cariboo of Northern America, and at one time, though long ago, it certainly existed in these islands of Great Britain and Ireland. It lingered longest in Caithness, and certainly was not extinguished there till the middle of the thirteenth century. But although the American red man, and the trapper, and the pre-historic Scotchman, have all, at one time or another, made their living out of the deer, none of these ever bred them as a domestic animal--that is an occupation parochial to the Lapp alone.
Here is a very interesting proposition. Where has all the money gone to for which, during so many weary centuries, these herds have been exchanged? The Lapp does not spend it upon himself, that is evident; and if he hoards it, where is his strong room? Legend alone deigns to tell: the Lapp himself preserves a massive ignorance.
It was a Norskman of Namsdalen who taught me all I know upon the subject, and what he said was too much like a fairy-tale to be taken very seriously. He was my hunter at the time. We were after elk, and he was moved to speech by the finding of the despoiled carcass of a cow-elk which had been slain by poacher Lapps. It seems he had once been enamoured of a Lappish woman (Fin-ne, he called her) himself, and under pressure she had shown him the hoard of her tribe.
It lay in a narrow glacier which trickled its frozen stream down a bleak pass in the mountain. At one place a spur of the rock had canted away the moraine stones into the centre of the stream, and behind the spur was a little bay of rock filled, as it were, with a backwater of clear green ice. At the edge of this they knelt, and stabbed and dug with their sheath-knives, and as the pit deepened round their feet they heard the muffled groans which poured from the heart of the glacier. These were the ghosts in the ice, the Fin-ne woman told him--clammy, resistless ghosts, who strangled thieves, as they had done through countless thousands of years. And when at last their knives had slashed a way to the lip of the cave, which lay below, my superstitious Norsk hunter almost believed her.