We came across traces of the nomads, however, on this very march. Johann, from the head of the caravan, halted till we came up to him. He pointed with outstretched arm down an aisle of the tree-stems. "_La-wo_," said he, and showed us a cone of birch-stems set round the ashes of a hearth. This then was some reindeer-herder's temporary rest. The vadmal cloth which made the tent-cover was gone, the fire was cold, the deer were driven away to other pastures, the Lapp herders had followed the deer. Only the tent-frame was left amongst the scent of the pines and the juniper, and beside it one human utensil. It was a "screw" of birch-bark, like those coils of paper in which the country grocer at home puts up sweetmeats for children--a flimsy vessel such as Adam might have used to scoop up his morning drink. It was new, and its edges were unfrayed; a thing made in a minute, and cast away when camp was struck to save the labour of portage. It was typical of the nomads' _ménage_. They are a people who have reduced the list of "things which one can do without" almost to the vanishing point.
We were skirting now by the side of another ample lake, about one-quarter the size of Menesjärvi, but we did not tramp along its winding beaches. We kept on through the pines, and saw the blue water only now and again through the trim paling of their stems, and the sun sailing high overhead warmed us as though we had been tramping through some wood of the Engadine instead of this grim forest so far within the Arctic Circle. But no birds sang or sent their calls through the trees; the air had been filtered clear of all feathered creatures; the swarming insects peopled it alone, and pestered us with their ravening attentions.
But if we suffered abominably from this plague of flies, it was some slender pleasure to know that they in their turn did not carry on a life of unfettered delight. They had their enemies. At one halt, on a small oasis in the middle of a two-mile-wide morass, I saw a loathly horse-fly, which had marked me for his next meal, get checked in mid-career as he flew towards my sleeve. He had blundered into a spider's web, and lay there struggling manfully. The whole net swayed and swung; the juniper twigs on which it hung actually buckled under the strain; but not a mesh gave. And presently the proprietor, a huge, orange-bodied spider, appeared from his private residence, and laid out along a warp, and (so to speak) threw off his coat and got to work.