The little Lap girl wanders around picking cloudberries while the bluethroat sings one of his hundred songs. There are tiny white flowers too:angelica, and the wild white ranunculus. The reindeer eat lichen and moss under the melting snow. Some of the lichen are a thousand years old and do not recognize the modern world. The geography lessons are young in comparison, though this one is older than most, since Lapland lies on no map and the little Lap girl must be at least eighty by the looks of the book. It is doubtful she remembers the day of this photograph. The pencil-stroke of a birch can be seen in the distance. Once in a while she must still hear the bluethroat and think of her childhood. Out of a hundred songs he has not forgotten the one he sang on an afternoon when the snow left and the wild white ranunculus took its place. But he is the peripheral sort and not at the center of anything.
