156 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



to track, bear, and I have also waited by calves and lambs 

 tied up, but all without result ; yet I have invariably been suc- 

 cessful when I have found any quantity of angelica in a suitable 

 country, and have watched it with glasses from a distance. 



On August I, 1873, my wife and I started from Pechinka 

 Fiord with a fjeld Lapp, and rowed up a little river which runs 

 into it till we could not use our oars ; we then landed and 

 tracked the boat as far as possible, and finally carried her 

 bodily half a mile through the forest of birch, carpeted with 

 quantities of yellow globe flowers, wild geraniums, red campion, 

 and other flowers, to a large sheet of water, called by the Lapps 

 St. Trefan's Lake. We pulled right up this lake to the extreme 

 end (about seven or eight miles), trolling for trout on our way. 

 To keep out in the lake as we did, in a small boat composed 

 of four planks and a bottom sewn together with reindeer 

 thongs, was, as I afterwards found out, an extremely risky 

 experiment ; for on a subsequent occasion, while crossing in 

 the same boat, we were caught in the middle of the lake by 

 a thunderstorm, accompanied by very heavy squalls of wind, 

 which soon raised such waves in the fresh water that we had to 

 bear up and run before it, the Lapp pulling all he knew, and 

 my own strength being fully exercised with the steering oar to 

 keep her dead before the wind, as the slightest coming to on 

 either side must have inevitably ended in a capsize — no joke 

 with a lady in the boat, in the icy waters of a lake 3° north of 

 the Arctic Circle. However, I kept her straight until near the 

 shore, which was rocky, when, seeing the water had shoaled, 

 and that if we ran on at the pace we were going we must 

 inevitably smash the boat, I caught hold of my rifle, sang out 

 to everybody to look out, and turned her broadside on about 

 six yards from the shore. We were swamped at once, but in 

 water not much above our knees, so that we managed to catch 

 hold of the boat, and carried her safely out. 



However, on the date I am writing about we had no such 

 adventure ; the day was bright, and the scenery beautiful. At 

 the end of the lake a huge terrace, covered with grass, extended 



