Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 6 (1902).djvu/312

262 comparison with what it was, as described by a friend a few years ago, at a more favourable time.

The particular ground we fixed on to explore was the valley of the Maskejok, a tributary of the Tana-elv, one of the great rivers, running north into the Arctic Ocean. As the object of this paper is to give a few notes on the birds we saw, we do not propose to go into the whole journey—the poling up the river, the shooting of the rapids, the heavy and fatiguing porterages, our life under canvas, and our struggles with the mosquitoes, "the demons of the place"—but to give a short description of the country from an ornithological point of view, and then to give short notes on each of the species of birds met with.

The Maskejok joins the Tana on its western side about four miles north of Seida, where the road from Tana mouth to Vadsö crosses the river and leaves the Tana Valley. The Maskejok Valley here widens out, and the river takes a very zigzag course, running into the main stream between high sand-banks, its mouth being guarded by a sand bar, which makes it very shallow, so much so, that when the river is low, canoes drawing only three or four inches have to be hauled across by hand. For the first few miles above its mouth the river runs almost due west, turning then south-west. For the whole of its course it runs in a well-defined valley, for the most part about a mile wide, the river ranging in width from forty to sixty yards. The banks are low on one side and high on the other, varying with the windings of the river; higher up, where there are fewer bends, both banks are for the most part uniformly low. For the first few miles, as has been said above, the course is zigzag, so much so, that after poling for half an hour the canoe is only fifty yards in a bee-line from where you started; here there are alternate stretches of deep, fairly still water, and short quick shallow runs, where the bottom changes from sand to gravel. Higher up the bottom gradually becomes more rocky, and some eight miles up the rapids begin. The first or long rapid is some five kilometres of rough, rushing water, with boulders of all sizes appearing above the surface, and for the most part only a foot or two deep; at the top of this the river makes a sharp bend round into the first pool; above this there are another two kilometres of rapids to the second pool, and then comes a succession of short rapids