Wolf
By A. C JENKINS CROSS-LEGGED we squatted op the deeply piled birch- brushwood that formed the floor of the guottar of striped blanket-cloth. The air seemed to drape us about like an evil-smelling rag, and the smoke from the fire of juniper-twigs, built on stones in a clear space of the floor, clawed at our eyes before veiling out through the hole in the apex of the tent. We had, with varying appetite, partaken of the broth of dried rein- deer-meat, dipping our bowls into the communal black pot that swung from a sooty chain over the fire ; we had enjoyed the excellent char, fresh-caught in the near-by lake and baked on spits ; we had wished secretly for more of the delicious dessert of lakka, the yellow cloudberries with their fine, slightly fermented flavour ; we had politely turned down our coffee-cups in their saucers, to indicate that we had had sufficient—indeed, if the truth were admitted, more than sufficient—of that formidable brew, for the coffee bad received a generous admixture of salt and slivers of goat-cheese, with sundry white hairs attached to the latter to vouch for its authenticity.
Now, the Lutheran grace pronounced, we could relax, light our tobacco or take our snuff, and listen to the news the stranger brought. He came from the sitje of Paivionkyla, where three frontiers meet under the shadow of the mountains, and he wore the gay red pom-pommed hat of the Swedish Lapp, instead of the mediaeval-looking neljautuulenlakki, the cap-of-the-four-winds, with its bunch of ribbons and trimming of black-cat fur, that our hosts wore. Ten days ago there had been a wolf-hunt, in which men of his sitje had tracked down a she-wolf and her whelps. The newcomer told his tale greyly, without embroidery or motion. Such and such had happened ; 'such and such he recounted. ted.
He shifted the lasso on his shoulder, fumbled in his satchel of birch-bark and brought out a small bundle of reindeer-skin. Phlegmatically he untied it. and thrust it before us as one might exhibit a 'kerchief full of mushrooms. On the strip of skin lay a gruesome collection of paws, the paws of three wolves. He was taking them to Muonio, where he would register them with the Finn sheriffi and claim the wolf-bounty, the equivalent of £5 for each animal, for which the paws must be produced as evidence. To us in these snug islands where, according to Charles Edward Stuart in his " Lays of the Deer Forest," the last one was slain two hundred years ago by MacQueen of Pall-a'-chrochain, the wolf is a cosy figure in folk-tale and silly symphony, got up in the guise of a grannie or threatening terrified little pigs that with a huff and a puff he will blow their house in. But to the Lapps he is still a grim reality. With dogs and rifle they keep guard over their herds, maintaining a ceaseless ski-watch in winter. Sometimes they are obliged to smear their animals with evil- smelling paste to disguise their scent Sometimes even aircraft patrols have to be ordered out to help them. In some years mail- drivers report large packs blatantly crossing the main " high- ways " in broad daylight, if such a term can be applied to the cadaverous twilight of the northern winter.
The enemies of the reindeer are legion. Fox and golden eagle harry the helpless fawns. In spring, waking hungry from his winter sleep, a bear will occasionally raid a herd, though later on he is Content with wild berries and the fish that teem in the Lap- land rivers at spawning-time. When the snow is soft and deep the hated glutton will pursue a reindeer and, leaping up at its throat, hang on until its victim drops. But above all it is the wolf which the Lapps still fear, and it meant much to these herds- men to see tangible evidence of the death of three such scourges of their " cattle," the reindeer which are everything to them, their food, their wealth, their bed-gear, footwear, transport.
During the previous winter this family had suffered much from wolf. On a single night they had lost nineteen reindeer. They had been sitting round the hearth in their winter hut, mending nets or splitting reindeer tendons for stitching, when one of the herdsmen came ski-ing down from the forest to raise the alarm. On ski and by sledge the menfolk of the sitje had hurried out into the bitter night, while the veils and streamers of the northern lights rippled overhead and the trees cracked like rifle-fire. But it was of no avail. Carrying out their favourite tactics, the raid- ing pack had circled to windward of the herd, so that the dread scent stampeded the thousand reindeer and made it impossible for the herdsmen and their dogs to control them.
" They burnt like fire that night," the matriarch of the family joined in, sucking at her nubbly pipe. Under her neat poppy-red bonnet with its curving earflaps and little frill, her face was a wrinkled parchment, a palimpsest indeed, to which sun and smoke, blizzard and autumn rain, and all the stark privation of Arctic life, had added their scribblings. The younger women of the household squatted in shy silence in the background among the wooden food-chests and birch-bark utensils. One of them suckled her child, swaddled in its birch-log cradle slung across her shoulder ; another mixed broth of dried reindeer-blood for the curly-tailed dogs. But the old woman spoke on equal terms with the men by the sanction of her years. She was in a discur- sive mood. The wolf had a fire-tooth and a budding-tooth. If -he bit with the former, the herd was doomed ; if with the latter, then good luck would follow. The wolf possessed one man's strength and nine men's cunning ; he could assume human shape. could lull a herdsman to sleep and magic away his voice. Some wolves could only be killed with a silver bullet, and even then you must aim first with the butt of the rifle and then with the barrel.
Nobody smiled at these old superstitions. Even I, listening to the conversation at second-hand, felt a strange atavistic stirring at this talk of the " beast " which, for untold ages, has symbolised all the terrors that man has had to face on his journey through the forests of time. Outside on the rolling fells the Arctic summer evening diffused its magic glow. The curlew keened his liquid plaint, voice of the wilderness. The dotterel uttered his friendly call. Yet into that smoky guottar a breath of primaeval winter seemed to have been wafted that chilled us for a moment, and later, when we tramped down to the road, it was with a feel- ing of astonishment that we came suddenly upon the twentieth century once more in the form of a Ford truck bouncing along towards the frontier. We had made our way back through mans cep
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