The Prefecture of Piteå

It rained from 11 o’clock today for half an hour, otherwise it was fine.

13th. An excellent day, clear and calm.

A greenshank was flying in the marsh.

The land was fairly flat though there were large outcrops here and there, not particularly high and steep but sloping down at an angle. The rocks in them had the appearance of curly-grained wood, often rusty and eroded and leaving behind a deposit of glittering sandy grains. On one hill on the highway itself I found a brown soil, purple-coloured earth, which looked as if it would be suitable for use as a dye. The hill was called HÖKSMARKSBERGET.

At the inns at GRIMSMARK and SELET I was told of a hill 14 miles away which is supposed to contain copper. Someone from the College of Mines was sent there to examine it 3 years ago but, since the farmers’ suspicions had been aroused by the townsfolk of Umeå, they gave him false directions to a different group of hills.

Hans Person, the farmer in VEBOMARK, had known nothing about this. It was his father who had first discovered the hill and set off for Stockholm with a sample but people got him drunk, took away his stones and replaced them with granite. This farmer would be glad to point out the right place if he were contacted. I had intended to travel there myself even though it was so far out of my way but, when I learned that he was away from home repairing roads, I did not consider it worthwhile.

At several places today I was given sweet milk, which some people call curdled milk. I was also shown curdle grass – ‘Pingvicula’ [Common Butterwort] – with its very strange flower. Once they have got hold of it, they use it all the year round, even drying it like yeast in winter in readiness for the spring.

Another method of treating milk was also mentioned here. After cheese has been made, the whey is boiled up and the scum is taken off. Then the whey is boiled until it settles on the bottom or all goes thick like porridge. This is then dried, put in casks and kept. They use it in baking bread and call it whey-butter.

Pot-holders were used by the fireplaces. The Lapps usually just take a pole, stick it diagonally into the ground and either hang a kettle or spit a fish on it. But here they have a quite different arrangement. There is a vertical, square-sectioned pole that can work as a pivot, and fixed to it with a peg is a transverse spar that can be raised and lowered. The latter has teeth cut in it so that the pot can be hung farther in or out.

The arable fields are splendid: big, smooth and composed of soil, clay or sandy soil. They give a fine yield when the com is not frozen off as happened last year. This is why so many people are eating bark-bread. They rarely use the roots of bog arum as they are too bitter. Flax is seldom or never seen.

In the evening I went from the inn at BUREÅ down to the beach to see what nature had to offer there. I found numerous small, egg-shaped ‘Notonectae’ [backswimmers] the size of lentils in the small clwnnels of water by the seaL

Also a small ‘Hydrocantharus minimus’ [waterbeetle], egg-shaped, blue-grey, smoke-coloured; it may be identified by its stubby, forked, abdominal skeleton.

Numerous black ‘Orsodachnae’ [leaf beetles] were running around the shore.

Also ‘Ephemerae’ [Mayflies], which always have 2 feet at the front and splay out 3 bristly appendages at the back. I reduced the short lives of some of them even further.

On a hillock burnt clear of trees and not far from the sea, I found ‘Rubus folio fragariae’ [Arctic Bramble] with laciniated petals; very pretty and sweet.