XII
XII For us, home in the tent, life went on as usual. Comforts grew fewer, as the darkness and cold increased. The moon shone in the middle of the day, the northern lights flickered, and everything froze between your fingers . The knife at your belt froze fast in its sheath, and if you wanted to eat with a knife or spoo’n, it had to be warmed next to the fire so it wouldn’t stick to your lips.You couldn’t take hold of any iron objects,like the handle of a kettle , without gloves. When you washed your hair and brushed it in front of the fire, it froze stiff and the water fell from the comb in the form of snow. (The Lapps, both men and women, often wash their hair; they never brush it when it’s dry, only after they wash it. It’s not so much for the sake of cleanliness as to comb the lice out of the wet hair.) All the food was frozen—meat, bread, butter, fish, and milk. The bread was warmed by the fire and the frozen lump of butter smeared out with a warm thumb. Frozen meat goes into the stew pot; the reindeer milk for coffee is chopped up with an ax. The water kettle froze solid during the night, so it woke you with its crack. It snowed steadily. In calm weather the snow drifted thick and fine down through the tent poles and melted on the fire. If the snow drifted like that, it could soon form smaller piles, and in the morning you could lie, nice and cozy, with a beautiful solid fifteen centimeters of snow over your legs or along the sleeping place, as if the wind had been there. If it blew in the night, the door was open like as not, and the sky’s wind and wet weather entered freely. If it was really snowing hard, it could be very uncomfortable in the tent. Sara told the story of how once it snowed so intensely for a couple of days that they continuously had to shovel snow out of the tent, and when she woke in the morning there was a large, thick pillar of snow from the fire circle up to the smoke pole. She couldn’t get a fire lit. Since it had snowed quietly, the sleeping places were snow free. However, Sara used her hands to chip away at the “thick man” and tipped the snow over to the opposite side, where her son-in-law and Biettar lay soundly sleeping. The first one jumped up, confused and groggy with sleep, shouting Vuoi neavri, mii dát lea!“What the devil is this!” They had to wait a long time for their coffee that morning. It took a long time before the snow was gone, since almost the whole tent was snowed-up and the door was impossible to get open. One of the other tents was so completely drifted over that neighbors had to dig them out. With the Lapps in the High Mountains But when the snow and cold isn’t quite so intense, nothing prevents daily work. The Lapps seem to almost ignore the weather. The women sew, do band-weaving, patch old skin clothing, and so on. Patching is continual work, and when Sara tackled the repair of her everyday fur one day, it needed it badly.“I’m so tattered I could fly,” she said. Sara had an excellent disposition; her favorite expression was Ii daga maidege.“It doesn’t matter.” With that she got the better of hardships and troubles,when they weren’t of a serious nature, that is. Now it was “the dark time.” When Sara woke in the morning, around five or six,and woke up Inga with her oft-repeated Daga dola,“Start the fire,”it was blackest night.To get the coffee kettle boiling quickly and the tent warmed up, the morning fire was always a big one. The many twigs crackled hard and blazed. Long thin fire-snakes traveled in sinuous lines from the fire up into the dark sky through the tent pole opening.The first cup of coffee Inga drank herself—whoever makes the coffee always drinks the first cup—after which Sara and Nikki drank. Then whoever got out of their sleeping sacks first had a cup. We used only two cups in wintertime, and they went...
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