We got these preliminaries settled, and squatted in a ring round the fire watching the roasts--all, that is, except the wrinkled old woman. She, good soul, was engaged upon a much more tedious ceremony. Out of a skin knapsack she had taken a small skin bag. From this she extracted some twelve green coffee-beans, which she proceeded to roast one by one in a small iron spoon, to the accompaniment of vast care and solicitude. When all were cooked to her taste, she bruised them to coarse fragments--and be it well understood she did not grind them--between two stones, and put the result with water into a kettle of copper, which had one lid in the usual place, and another on the end of the spout to keep out smoke and feathery wood-ash.
[Illustration: HERDER LAPPS' ENCAMPMENT.]
In the kettle the whole mixture was boiled up together into a bubbling broth of coffee fragments and coffee extract. She cleared it by an old trick which is known to campers all the world over. She put into the kettle a small splash of cold water, and the coffee-grounds were promptly precipitated to the bottom. Then she poured the clear, brown, steaming liquor into a blackened bowl of birch-root, and handed it to the good-man, her husband.
We had finished our two lemmings apiece by this time--exquisitely nasty they were, too--and here was after-dinner _café noir_. The host took the bowl in his fingers, and the old woman, hunting in the leather knapsack, produced a block of beet-sugar wrapped in a careful fold of skin. The host bit a chunk off this, and lodged it in his teeth; then he lifted the bowl to his lips and drank.
In a more civilised man this would have been rudeness, in a savage it was an act of simple courtesy. It was a plain assurance to all who beheld that the bowl contained no poison. Then he handed it on, and we drank in our turn, and I do not know that I have ever tasted more perfect coffee. The two girls and the half-grown boy went off to attend to their business with the herd, and we others sprawled back where we were, and smoked, and dropped off to sleep when we felt so inclined.
The summer herding of reindeer by these mountain Lapps is more active work than the pastoral life of an English shepherd. A sheep, of course, requires some management, and even a flock of lumbering Southdowns can at times stampede and do themselves considerable damage. But a reindeer herd of (say) 300 head, maddened by mosquito bites, and once well on the move, is a force which it requires more than the ordinary bucolic science to deal with. They may easily take a month to recollect after a successful break like this.