HIS SPEED AND ENDURANCE. 221 



leg. A good deer is capable of drawing a burden of near 

 three hundred pounds ; but the greatest weight allotted to 

 him by the Laplanders, when performing their journeys, is 

 five Vaags, or about two hundred and forty pounds ; and the 

 Akja, from its construction, can only be drawn by a single 

 deer. 



The rein-deer is possessed of considerable speed and 

 endurance ; but what he is capable of performing when in 

 harness, seems not to be accurately known. Travellers of 

 late years have, with a single deer, accomplished a distance of 

 one hundred and fifty miles within less than nineteen hours 

 that is, at the rate of eight miles an hour. But this was 

 over a difficult line of country ; and the inference therefore is, 

 that under more favourable circumstances, the animal could 

 have got over much more ground within that space of time. 



It is on record, indeed, and there may be a good deal of 

 truth in the story for a portrait of the rein-deer, together 

 with that of the driver, is still preserved in the palace of 

 Drottningholm that on the occasion of a sudden irruption 

 of the enemy, an officer was dispatched, with the intelligence, 

 with a rein-deer and sledge from Umea, on the Gulf of 

 Bothnia, to Stockholm, a distance of nearly five hundred 

 English miles, which journey was performed within forty- 

 eight hours ; but the faithful animal, lamentable to say, 

 dropped down dead on his arrival in the capital ! 



The tame rein-deer are almost altogether confined to Lap- 

 land Proper. Formerly they were pretty common in parts of 

 Norway ; but at the present day to the south of Finnmark 

 at least only one or two herds are pastured in that country, 

 and that not far from the town of Roras, celebrated for its 

 copper mines. The disappearance of the Lapps and their 



