Thursday 26/7 – part two

View from the warden's cottage

After a quick check everything appeared to be OK inside, so I brought my stuff in. The weather was now clear, sunny and quite warm, so I prepared for a wash in the lake at once. As I walked down towards the water I noticed a man by the privy – so there were people present after all – and went to talk with him. What followed was not on my list of expected events.

The man in question turned out to be the father in a German family of four who had come along the trail from Pieskehaure earlier in the day, which is far from unusual. What was highly unusual, however, was that they had encountered a dead man (!) upon said trail in the forenoon, close to Vistekjávrre about 6 km west of Vaimok, after finding what was most likely his rucksack right on the path some distance further west. There was nothing to be done rescue-wise, so the family had proceeded to Vaimok and used the assistance phone to make the police aware of the situation, and had been told to stay put since they were in effect witnesses to a fatality (albeit after the fact) and therefore needed to be debriefed. This had been around lunchtime and they had not heard anything since, but the police had said that a helicopter would be sent during the day.

After I had had my wash – very cold, but refreshing – I went down to speak to the whole family outside the guest cottage, to ascertain that they were alright and to get a fuller picture of recent events. Their state of mind – combined and individual – was, as far as I could judge, quite good after the circumstances, probably helped in no small part by the simple fact that the experience had not been a traumatic one, since the dead man simply lay peacefully beside the trail with no obvious sign of injury, and that the two children were in the late teens.

As I walked up to my cottage to use the backup satellite phone to call up my own chain of command and bring them into the loop, a group of five foreigners arrived from the east, but they had their aims set on camping somewhere in the western end of Vájmokvágge and so did not remain long. Having managed to place a couple of calls, with some difficulty as the satphone turned out not to be the most reliable of gadgets, I started rummaging through the boxes that I had sent up during the winter, looking for something to have for dinner. As I was preparing that which I found the police finally called back on the assistance phone, saying that a helicopter was inbound and would arrive within the hour.

The police arrives

I had just finished the dishes when I heard the unmistakable flap-flap of a chopper in the distance, and went out to meet it as it touched down a short distance behind the guest cottage. It contained two police officers, one of which was the pilot, and I gave the other one a brief summary in Swedish before we all went through things together in more detail in English. As the non-pilot went indoors with the family to perform some more formal note-taking I remained outside with the pilot, discussing the warm and dry weather that was plaguing the country – the main topic of conversation anywhere this summer. Eventually the police entered the helicopter again, intending to retrieve both the deceased man and his pack and bring them back to civilization for further investigation.

Just as the flier alighted three Swedish women – two younger and one older – arrived from Pieskehaure, having been made aware of what to expect along the way by a couple of other hikers heading west whom the Germans had warned themselves earlier in the day, and another round of explanations and speculation followed between everyone present. They would all be staying inside for the night, which however put the Germans in something of a pickle since they had a reservation in Kvikkjokk which rested on their having made it considerably further east today. This I could rectify by way of the satphone, though, so if that was the extent of their worries I think they emerged fairly unscathed from their very unexpected experience.

It was a fair evening, but one thing I had neglected to account for – or simply did not remember from my last time in Vaimok – was that the close rise of Vájmokbákte cast a shadow over the cottage site already while it was still early. I spent some quiet time inside my cottage, looking through papers, and then went down to collect payment – once I had located the material I needed to do so. After the weather report (and an evening snack) Anna-Lena finally arrived, having camped in the slope up to Gurávágge the previous night, and I spoke some with her outside before she took a bed in the guest cottage. The air was now fairly chilly but the evening light was pretty to compensate, with neither clouds nor wind. My own room looked like an illustration of chaos theory owing to the haphazard way the start of my sojourn had panned out, so it took a bit of tidying up before I could finally go to bed at 23:15.