THE HIGHLANDS OF THE SWEDISH DIVIDE. 265 
duties while we, perforce, lay smoking on our backs in 
our bunks ! 
Grsesaamoen Sseter appeared to be populated by one 
woman—a Swedish Lapp, who ferried us, trembling, 
across the surging torrent of Luru. Some dilapidated 
sheds hard by appeared at no distant date to have been 
the residence of cows, and a quantity of cheeses in our 
hut corroborated the conjecture. How these cheeses 
could ever reach a market, seeing that they lay twenty- 
eight miles beyond the nearest road-end, appeared to 
present a knotty problem ; but we did not pursue the 
inquiry, and devoted our attention to the sporting 
features of this new territory. 
Rising in a dreary, treeless waste, encircled by 
higher fjelds, the Luru river flows westward through 
belts of pine-forest stretching upwards from either bank 
some three miles to the limit of timber-growth. To our 
intense chagrin we found that the upper mosses, whence 
issued the river, were already occupied by our old 
scourge, the Lapps. While crossing Hykel-fjeld, we 
had sighted a distant herd of deer, and the first object 
viewed in the Luru valley was a Lapp , with dog and 
gun, who fled at sight, like a wild beast, though full 
a mile away. Our first day’s hunting showed that elks 
in some numbers had been frequenting the upper woods, 
but had quite recently moved off westwards, down the 
river. Thither it was necessary to follow. 
This brought us in face with a new difficulty. For 
six weeks (since mid-August) rain had fallen incessantly, 
and the innumerable streams which, descending from 
* the mountains, traversed our forest-belt at right angles, 
were now well-nigh impassable. It may read like 
