Now our two boatmen were Finns also, but the business on the waters seemed to have lifted them above the ruck of their race. They were civil and willing, and so far as their lights went, attentive. For instance, they had floored their craft amidships with a springy cushion of birch boughs for our special benefit. And moreover, conjointly, they were incomparable boat sailors. In the course of our voyage occasion came more than once when there was need for handiness and quick decision; and South-coast yachtsmen, bred in racers, could not have beaten these inland sailors of the North. The skipper was a little wrinkled man of sixty, grown old in the traffic of the lake. Man and boy he had sailed Enare See whenever it was free from ice for all of a lifetime, and what he did not know about the shoals, and the thousand islands, and the millions of unbuoyed reefs, and the places where the wind eddied, and the other quaintnesses of the place, could have been written large on a thumb-nail and still have been unimportant. He looked out upon his small watery world with a pair of bright bird's eyes, and knew every mood of it by heart, and neither knew anything beyond nor wanted to.
His mate was a man entirely different--a mere creature of thews, who could shift the tack when ordered, set up a backstay, eat, row, smile, or carry out any of these minor offices of life which do not require the effort of a brain. He had the good humour of a puppy, an ample sufficiency of strength, and the face of a prosperous publican. His name was Olaf.
We set off down narrow waters with a snoring breeze from out of the N.N.W. The red house and the well-derrick and the farm-buildings of Ischinlisvuoni quickly dipped from sight behind a bluff; the axe-marks left the trees on shore; and the black forests grew up untouched out of the carpet of ivory-yellow moss. But we were not in the open lake yet. A run of some dozen miles brought us to shallows where a portage was necessary. We had to unload and unballast and drag the boat painfully across a neck of land on rollers, which for the four of us was a full-weight job, as she was a stout, beamy, 25-foot craft, built to endure heavy lake seas and powdering squalls. But we got her nicely launched again, brought down to trim with boulders forward and aft, and once more under way. There were 3500 square miles of lake and island ahead of us; and the neighbourhood was comparatively unknown to any one except Enare natives; and we were anxious to sample as much of it as possible. Moreover, although the breeding season was on, we promised ourselves to shoot a sufficiency of duck for the pot.