Northern Husbandry

The fences are made of spruce poles laid on the slant and tied with spruce twigs.

Milk is kept in the cellar. The containers are made of alder and are long – thus there is more cream, as much as 1 or 2 fingers thick on the milk in the container. Later it is all poured together, heated and left to curdle. There is also buttermilk, to which is added 1/6 part of fresh milk that has been standing for only one day and had the cream removed. They heat this, leave it to curdle and like it better than the former, often eating it in preference to butter.

Between Midsummer and the Feast of St James, they take the whey after cheese has been made and boil it for a few hours. When it has cooled, it is put into a cask and kept for the winter. Poor old women beg or buy small bottles of this during the winter. A 1/4 measure of this is added to a full measure of sourmilk and, when they are mixed, it tastes like soured milk.

Unskimmed milk is often kept in casks for the winter as a sort of watery porridge. It becomes so sour that it cannot be eaten alone and it is therefore mixed together with fresh milk. If no milk is available, they add a 1/2 part of water and eat it with porridge. As a drink they prefer it to small beer.

Goat’s butter, which they produce from time to time, is strong but completely white like reindeer butter.

25th. I set off from Vasa at dawn.

The uppers of the shoes they use here are made of sealskin.

The whole district stands there bare-backed, so to speak, since they bark the pines in the forest to a height of 6 or 7 feet but, so that they do not wither, they leave a small strip of bark 4 fingers wide usually on the north side. The trees are then left standing for 6 or 7 years before being felled, at which time they are cut off a little above the bare patch and again down at the root. The upper part is eventually used as firewood but is often just left lying. They split it up very small.

20 miles below Vasa I came across ‘Solanum scandens’ [Bittersweet] again.

In the town of Vasa I saw ‘Cardiaca’ [Motherwort] and ‘Hyoscyamus’ [Henbane].

‘Salix oleaefolia’ [Sea Buckthorn] with berries was growing on the shore; they call it Finnberry, Sourberry. The berries sit below the leaves on the older shoots.

26th. Travelled past CHRISTINA. Before that, however, at NӒRPESI saw a fairly large field with good soil which used to be a very fine meadow but is now so covered in tussocks that it provides little or nothing for the cattle. These tussocks were present in their hundreds and they were overgrown with ‘Polytrichum’ [moss] which had withered by this time and was, for the most part, completely black. There was hardly enough space left between these tussocks for the cattle to squeeze through.

There were bear-nets hanging in the porches of all the houses; they were made of rope, thick as reins, made from fibres from lime-trees. Each mesh was so big that it measured 18 inches when stretched out i.e. each of the 4 contiguous sides was 9 inches. The nets were the height of a man and, when they hang them together on poles with the bottom edge trailing on the ground, they stretch for about 200 yards. The local people then drive the bear into them.

27th. Today I saw them brewing in a kneading-trough. The trough stood on the table with a grid and straw in the bottom and malt on top; the front part was not fixed so that it was possible to move one end with your fingers to let the liquid pour out.

South of Christina I saw for the first time ‘Lathyrus viciaeformis’ [Marsh Pea], ‘Sisymbrium’ [Iceland Yellow-cress], ‘Campanula persicifolia’ [Peach-leaved Bellflower] and ‘Telephium’ [Orpine].

28th. I put behind me the exceedingly difficult road (it cannot be called a highway since it is just like the road between the town of Umeå and Granön) which runs all the way from LAPPFJӒRD near Christina to HVISBOFJӒRD near BJÖRNEBORG.