Great Journey 🇸🇪 Day 524
We no longer want to drive deep into the forest. The population density up here in Lapland is very low, cars are few and far between. And whether anyone will be able to shovel us out of the fresh snow that is expected to fall during the night and, if necessary, pull us out is not certain.
So we stand a little bit off the road, somewhat sheltered behind high snow mountains and chat with truck drivers who are taking a break here with the most beautiful view. When the men are gone, we are all alone in the vastness of Lapland. We cook something nice, play a round of cards (I can't help hoping!) and go to bed early.
In the morning we wrap up tightly and walk along the shore of a lake through the forest. Actually, there is a hiking trail here, but where exactly it is is left to our imagination. We take the cross-field-one-is-also-beautiful path.
This is where my Winnetou-and-Old-Shatterhand-track-reading skills, acquired in my younger years, come into play: we discover bear tracks (Gerd thinks this is nonsense, but photographs them to be on the safe side), hare tracks and snow-from-the-tree tracks.
Again and again we cross the bear track and ask ourselves what we should do if Master Petz suddenly appeared in front of us. What would Winnetou have done? He would have pulled his knife out of the fringed sheath, crept around the bear in silent moccasins and possibly even telepathised with it in Apache.
And us? We have a small Swiss army knife instead of tomahawks and tramp through the forest like elephants with our super winter boots, despite the deep snow. And hope that the bear is far away. Due to our absolute cluelessness, we now join the "hope" team. Because, as we all know, hope dies last.
By the way, days later, in the Sámi Museum in Jokkmokk we are standing in front of a display board with animal tracks and compare ours with the bear tracks on display there and now Gerd also knows that he is married to a little Nscho-Tschi, a gifted tracker.
