The community hinges on the parsonage, the largest house in the place, the only house which has an upper story, which is weather-boarded without, and which has the nakedness of its logs covered by a ceiling within. Here are the brains of the place, the Law of the place, the post-office, the only library. At the parsonage they had two hundred books; and English literature was not neglected. There were translations of Messrs. Stanley Weyman, Fergus Hume, and W. Le Queux, in sumptuous pictured covers. It was there we got our Russian roubles changed to Finnish marks. It was outside the parsonage that a flag flew from the head of a tall, white-painted mast to show that Holy Russia held the land. At the parsonage dwelt the cooper who made the shallow tubs in which milk is set to cream in the dairies, and there also was the Herr Praest, who married every one of the Lutheran Church who wished for marriage within a circle of 200 weary miles; who baptized all those who were admitted to the faith; and who buried all those who were brought in the nailed-down sledges in their own private plot of Christian ground. And if the time was winter, and mother-earth was fast locked in frost, the Herr Praest would see the sledge put into the common grave which was always open, there to lie snugly iced till spring brought a thaw, and let the spades delve out its more proper niche.
One of our great notions in wandering through so dismal a place as Arctic Lapland was to revel in sport which was unattainable elsewhere, and for a good many miles we had seen no living thing except mosquitoes and frogs. We had more or less given up the idea of fishing, but we still held on to the theory that there was game to be found, and, in fact, calculated on it for food to see us across the country. And with these theories still strong within us we began to push inquiries about the shooting, in deadly earnest.
The account was dismal enough. There was no rigorous close-time here, as in Norway, and game was very scarce. Probably there never was much, but by vigorous hunting all the year round there has come to be less. Now, it is not worth one's while to carry a gun in summer. There are rype, willow grouse, and capercailzie, which are fairly in evidence during the courting season, but as soon as family cares begin, they keep well to cover; and since the capercailzie cock has no taste for chickens, and bolts off _solus_ so soon as ever the honeymoon is done, his haunts are in such far depths of the forests that man seldom gets so much as a glimpse of his wonderful plumage. Bird-shooting as an industry is not worth following in Lapland till the leaves have gone, and the snow makes everywhere a staring background.