The two boys had been playing all day and, with dinner approaching, I told my son’s friend it was time for him to head home.
“Dad can’t pick me up at the moment,” he said, disappointedly packing his bag to head down to the bus stop, “He’s butchering a reindeer.”
The first of August is the start of reindeer hunting season and already Facebook is full of photographs of dead animals, hanging, drying meat. For three months, the main activity that consumes people’s weekends is hunting in the fjords and dealing with the outcome. For residents of more than two years who pay a small price for a licence in the spring, it’s possible to hunt your own meat and stock up for the winter. Fresh, local produce.
Last year my husband and a friend were very fortunate (or skilled?) to kill a reindeer just a few hundred metres from the shore, thus avoiding the usual long trek from the kill site carrying a literal dead weight back to the boat. It was particularly fortunate in this case because this reindeer was huge – almost a hundred kilograms. Its liver alone weighed three kilograms.
Back home, we hung the meat for some days in our neighbour’s shed, built specifically for this purpose. Our neighbour is pretty serious about hunting. At any given time over the warmer months he usually has a selection of dead things hanging out there – reindeer, muskox, other smaller unfortunate animals. Over the next few days a steady stream of small children wandered around the back of our house to point and gape at the huge animal hanging there. And any visiting friends were also trapsed out there for a viewing, whether they wanted one or not. The hanging period gave us a little time to plan the next stage – the butchering. And that was also fortunate because none of us had ever done it before. When the assigned day arrived, we laid out the halved reindeer on our kitchen table. There were four of us. Between us we had a sum total of no experience, but we did have two copies of a book with pictures showing how to butcher a reindeer. How hard could it be?
First the guys set to it with a saw, dissecting it into individual limbs and torso. That nicely removed the two back legs from the equation, which we planned to smoke whole. Then there was the rest. So we just dived in, so to speak, slicing away meat from the bone, packing individual cuts into bags to vacuum pack, churning off-cuts endlessly through a mincer until it eventually died some hours later. Occassionally our son would wander past, looking in horror at the bloody scene.
Finally, after midnight, the dead animal that had draped our table in the early evening had been replaced with a massive pile of individual bags of meat.
The following day, my husband and I were proudly relating our first reindeer butchering experience to our neighbour’s wife, a tough little Faroese lady with, I suspect, an enormous amount of butchering experience, given her husband’s hunting exploits.
“It took us six hours,” I said, impressed with myself.
“Six hours?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “How many of you were there?”
“Four,” I replied, suddenly slightly less impressed with myself.
“Oh,” she said, unable to conceal the tiniest curl of her lip. I am quite sure she could have done it alone in less time.
