My reindeer was called Girjebahta, which means ‘Spotty Bottom’ in the Sami language. She was a beautiful creature with pale fur, long, elegantly arching antlers – and an attitude that, had Santa been foolish enough to select her, would have put the kybosh on Christmas.

I was with a group of fellow reindeer novitiates in Swedish Lapland. Our Sami guide, Nils-Erik, had shown us how to lasso the reindeer’s antlers with bright orange, rubber rope. Then he’d harnessed one creature to each sleigh, instructed us to kneel one person to each, and to make a circuit of the track that ran between the snow-laden spruce trees. But I’d only covered a few metres before Spotty ran out of steam and, rather than running, pretended to nibble at a sparse little twig that lay on the path before her.

‘Woop woop,’ I shouted (woop woop is Sami language for ‘get a move on’) and I whacked her on the bottom with the rope. Spotty turned and pouted, and planted her pretty little hooves in the snow. But then my friend Caroline and her more sprightly reindeer appeared from behind that Spotty’s competitive spirit was spurred.

Neck-and-neck, the two animals galloped. Our wooden sleighs leapt from the peaks of ruts in the snow, and clattered into its divots. Antlers almost clashed, sleighs seemed certain to derail, and as the opposing team tried to squeeze by on the inside I had to duck low to avoid a disembowelment. And then, just when disaster seemed inevitable, Spotty stopped stock still and refused to move once more.

‘You have to show the reindeer who’s boss,’ Nils-Erik explained wearily, having trudged out around the track to lead us in. I quietly suspected that both my reindeer and I knew precisely which of us that was.

Later, we sat in a lavvo– the large, conical Sami tent – and ate reindeer meat, which Nils-Erik had fried in a gargantuan pan over a fire, and stewed loganberries. There are around 200,000 reindeer in Sweden, Nils-Erik told us, and almost all of them are domesticated by the country’s 20,000-strong Sami population. Their antlers grow in summer – as much as a centimetre each day – and then drop off in autumn and winter.

Nils-Erik had spent the previous four days herding reindeer. He and his companions had separated the animals into the smaller groups that belong to each family – his parents owned a thousand or so of them. It’s hard physical work; Nils-Erik revealed that he went to the gym to toughen up for the reindeer herding season. But the Sami people nowadays use snowmobiles to travel and, where feasible, they even truck their reindeer by road. As for the lavvo,nobody sleeps in one any more – which was just as well for Nils-Erik.

‘I’m allergic to the reindeer skins that cover the ground,’ he told us, ‘and the smoke from the fire sets off my asthma.’