Word: reindeers
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...could the mild-eyed creatures know, munching their hay in the ship's hold, that they were a token in a play of forces called history? History to a reindeer is the rising and the setting sun, begetting and dying, the north-and southward seasonal flight of birds. How could the two deer know that if a man named Hitler had never been born, if there had never occurred that crisis of European civilization one of whose phases is called Naziism, if the Germans had never invaded Norway, if the British had not come to help, they would still...
Everyone, even an art critic, has his own way of valuing pictures. Nils Nilsson Skum, a Laplander, values them according to one rule-of-thumb: how many reindeer do they show? His own crayon drawings sometimes have hundreds. He figures that must be why three Swedish museums own them. It was not the reason that Manhattan's Museum of Natural History put his pictures on exhibition last week. The Museum had found a primitive of the likes of upstate New York's octogenarian painter "Grandma" Moses (TIME...
Skum's preoccupation with reindeer is not surprising. Throughout most of his 74 years he followed the herds from their summer pastures among the ice-capped mountains of northernmost Sweden to their winter grounds in the coastal forests. He pitched his tent in the snow and slept with his head pillowed on the red pompon of his cap. In his time he killed 28 bears (and innumerable wolves), which was enough in itself to bring Skum honor in his own country...
...finally get his hands on one he knew just what to do with it; he had practiced drawing with a ski pole in the snow. Drawing came naturally to Skum: he had a photographic memory of the vast white landscapes he moved through and of the runty reindeer he moved after. And Skum always had an uncanny feeling for the one thing most artists have to learn from other people's pictures-perspective. But until he got too old and fat to camp comfortably, Skum found little time to draw. He was in his 60s before the Swedish inspector...
...hidden gold mine. The rest of the action takes place for the most part amid deep drifts of Hollywood snow (shaved ice and raw white corn flakes), as Hope and Crosby, assisted by a talking fish, a talking bear, a dynamite-carrying dog and Santa Claus and his reindeer, mush their Malemutes through a Klondike blizzard of paradox and punning...