‘Chamaemorus’ [Cloudberry] was now flowering abundantly, its petals varying in number from 4, 5, 6 to 7, and what is remarkable is that I saw it flowering just as prolifically in shade on the tops of mountains. This was also true of ‘Ernpetruni’ [Crowberry].
I found again the same insect with half-sheathed wings that feeds on fish. Also a different insect, black and spotted. The former runs around among the scales on fish, the latter is always to be found in the chaff on hut floors. The latter smells like ‘Ruta’ [Common Rue].
The women’s tunics have a piece of brown cloth inset in the back.
4th June. By a hut I saw some black, rough, roundish pieces of pitch-black material. I asked what they were and was told that they were reindeer stomachs turned inside out. They put milk in them during the summer and it then keeps in a dried state until winter when they soften it up with water. Some people use bladders instead. In the mountains they boil the milk together with ‘Acetosa’ [Common Sorrel] and conserve that.
I wondered, and I now wonder even more, how these poor people can live on fish alone. It is sometimes boiled fresh, sometimes dried and boiled, sometimes dried and roasted on a wooden spit placed by the fire. They roast it well and, when they boil fish, they do so better and longer than I have ever seen done. They have no soup foods at all apart from fish and even that is no more than just the water in which the fish was boiled. If the fishing fails, they have no way of getting anything to eat. Not until Midsummer do they begin to milk the reindeer and after that they have milk to sustain them. They slaughter reindeer in the autumn and this provides them with some small sustenance for the winter – a poor enough one, though.
They lay their children in oblong leather cradles without a thread of linen around them. Instead, they place dried ‘Sphagnum, molle. palustre’ [moss] around them and, inside that, reindeer hair.13 This protects them against the most extreme cold.
It is noteworthy that ‘Tormentilla’ [Tormentil] always grew in boggy ground here. The people chew its roots together with the inner bark of alder and then rub the spittle into hides; this makes the red dye with which their harness, straps, belts, gloves etc. are coloured.
Great forests of pine stand desolate and purposeless because, since no one needs the timber, it simply falls down and rots away. It is worth asking whether it would be worthwhile making tar and pitch from it. The answer is that the great distance involved would render the effort unprofitable, but this matter should be decided by an expert. More could be produced here than in the whole of the rest of Sweden. Would it not be possible to transport it the 130 miles in winter?
They have no idea how to take advantage of juiuper berries in the way Munday describes, though junipers only grow here in a small way and, interestingly, always in waterlogged ground.
They thought it incredible when I showed them how pine brushwood could be used to produce a schnaps they could wash their water down with. Nor do they produce any liquor from birch sap; water alone is sufficient for them.
Night was not the least bit darker than day as far as I could see; it was just that the sun was absent.
The unfortunate Lapps complained about the day of compulsory church attendance in the spring. They often had to cross the river at risk to their lives, even wading half-dead and up to their arms in water at a time of year when the ice was neither safe to cross nor broken up, otherwise they would be fined 10 silver daler and have to do 3 Sundays penance. This is far too harsh.
The Lapps only eat twice a day, often only once, and then niostly in the evening.
On the river banks, where traces are to be found of everything that exists up in the mountains, I found silver ore.
5th June. On the hills by the edge of the river I found a plant that has not been observed in Sweden before. The flowers were not yet in bloom but were ready to come out in a few days. I opened them and found that the flowers were butterfly-like, the tip of the standard was reddish, as was also the keel, which (it should be noted) was forked. Its whole appearance told me that it was an Astragalus and I was confirmed in this by last year’s pods that were very similar to that. I therefore called it ‘Liquiritis minor’ [Alpine Milk-vetch].
At last, after having starved so cruelly, I reached the parson’s house and got some food. I had been without bread and drink for 4 days, without cooked food, without liquid food, with nothing but a little salted reindeer, which my stomach could neither tolerate nor digest, and fish, which I could not eat to save my life as it was riddled with maggots.