But even had the fishing prospects of the Neiden River been ten times more appetising, they would not have induced us to make a stay there. The interior of Lapland lay beyond--a place of great lakes and rivers, of vast deer-packs and nomad herders; and we hungered to be amongst it all. Over night--under the blaze of a twelve o'clock sun--we had commissioned a man to find us carriers, and in the morning we crossed the river below that lonely Russian chapel, we and our goods, and in ten minutes the real troubles of the journey had fairly begun.
Never were such carriers. They were all able-bodied Finns, though one (and he was the strongest) had a hump like a Brahmin cow, another had a hare-lip, and the headman possessed a most virulent squint; but they were the most impracticable creatures that ever slouched over the face of the earth. Our luggage was not heavy; two negro carriers on the Congo or the Gold Coast would have capered with the whole lot of it; but through a wish for long quick marches, we had made it up into three light loads. There were two sacks, and a canvas-covered box containing a few tins, some cartridges, and four pounds of cake tobacco.
Now we both knew something about packs and loads in other parts of the world; but the Finn carrier was new to us, and his ways were strange; and it is always dangerous to introduce customs from a distance for consumption in a country whose difficulties you do not understand. So although we made suggestions, we did not insist on them, and the carriers muddled on with the preparations in their own way.
The neat, rectangular, canvas-covered box was eliminated first. We had looked upon it as an ideal "load"; in Africa there would have been a vigorous scramble for it; but the Finns said it was impossible to tackle anyhow. They scouted all suggestions of slinging, or carrying it hammock fashion, and fetched out another sack and made a re-stowal. Naturally the bundle so contrived was about as impossible to carry on human shoulders as a live porcupine would have been. So a blanket was taken out of one of the sacks and used as a pad. And next the sacks were objected to, and their contents split up, till finally our possessions were made into seven bundles of much fragility.