Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 231, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1914 — WOMAN A REINDEER RANCHER [ARTICLE]

WOMAN A REINDEER RANCHER

Mis* Borthwick, an English Girl, I* Raising a Herd in the Spitsbergen Valley. London. —Reindeer ranching strikes one as being quite a new occupation for women, but a young Englishwoman hopes to make a very good thing out of a herd she keeps in a Spitzvergen valley, her idea being to export the meat to Norway. Her story, as she tells it, has all the elements of a schoolboy romance—the lonely valley, free to the reindeer and their owner, the bears and wolves as well as the valuable gray foxes, the salmon fishing, the cliffs whence the eiderdown is harvested, the harbor open practically the year round, so that meat can be exported winter as well as summer, the seals that haunt the waters, the hundreds of varieties of wild flowers that grow on Spitsbergen and the long, luminous twilight of winter. It all sounds very charming and one quite believes that Miss Jessica Borthwick enjoys her terms of supervision when she goes up to stay tn her log hut, the Boston Evening Transcript remarks. Reindeer, she says, are the tamest creatures, with none of the spasmodic ferocity that distinguishes some of their relations, and she tells a rather painful story about one mild creature whom fired at but missed, and who then came up to ask with gently inquiring friendly eyes, “What was all the trouble—eh, ‘what?” This sa.-.a Miss Jessica Borthwick spent an amazing year in the Balkans during the war, riding about the country and seeing many things which she believes were hidden from war correspondents.