Explore "Through Arctic Lapland" by Cutcliffe Hyne on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
One of the ladies of the house, a tall person with a vague squint, aroused us next morning by coming into the sour-smelling dairy to deposit the morning produce of the cows. We woke with evil-tasting mouths and went outside. In the kitchen, across the narrow lobby, the man with one ear was making a bowl out of a knob of birch, and as he seemed the person of most consideration available, we demanded from him that three carriers should be ready for us in a couple of hours' time to convoy us and our chattels to Scurujaervi or Kuestula. We did not request; we demanded. We understood the Arctic Finn by this time, and were quite aware that he only construes civility as weakness.
At first the one-eared man refused to understand what we needed. He went on with his work upon the birch-root. He had a long-handled felling axe, and his sheath-knife, and he used them both, and was rapidly evolving a shapely bowl out of chaos. But we had no special wish just then to watch him carpenter, so we gently but firmly took the utensils away from him, and backed him up against a wall, and spoke to him in a language which he could understand.