We three others had to tramp wearily round the margin of the lake to Menesjärvi Town.
We started off across grassy swamp, and put up a pair of ptarmigan in the first two dozen yards. The cock was a lovely fellow, splendid in his summer plumage. He flew off at once; but the hen waited and glared. We beat about a little to find the chickens; but we did not trouble very much. We were wearily tired; and so we stumped on without seeing them.
We got out of the swamp soon, and walked through a dry, straight-stemmed, pine forest, hung with that melancholy, lichenous growth like the Spanish moss of the Gulf States which we had seen on the trees near Ischinlisvuoni. But here it seemed younger, or else was having less deadly effect, for the pines were few of them dead, and for the most part in sturdy health. Crisp ivory-yellow reindeer moss made the carpet on which we walked, and at times, through the tree aisles, we caught sight of deer feeding.
It was a weary march that, for weary men, under the shade of those gloomy pines, but we were buoyed up with thoughts of the entertainment we should get at Menesjärvi, which the map marked as a town, or at least a considerable village. And lo! when we did reach it, the place was nothing more than the squalid huts of one small family.
But what they had, they offered with the usual easy courtesy. A couple who were sleeping there turned out of their best room, the dairy, and we were ushered in and invited to take the vacated couch. We did not do this; we had had enough of insects of one kind and another that day; and we thought the floor would be good enough for us. And so on the floor we camped.
We dined first, sketchily. The room we were in was the dairy. Along shelves on one side were a couple of rows of wooden-hooped bowls, eighteen inches in diameter by four deep, in which milk of various dates and various stages of decomposition was set to cream and curdle. From time to time the good-wife came in from the farther room, and took up a horn spoon which lay handy, and skimmed a part of one of the bowls into a birch-wood piggin which she carried, and then licked the spoon clean so as to be ready for next time.
Hayter said he quite granted that the lady of the house was very neat and tidy in her habits, but he would not have any milk. I did. I ate a bowlful of the clammy, sour curd. I was far too ravenous to be nice about what I swallowed. And then we divided the contents of one of those unsatisfactory tins between us. There was not a scrap of anything else to be had for love, money, or blows.