The surprises one meets in Greenland might be out of the ordinary, but the responses one becomes accustomed to are perhaps even more surprising. Such was the case last week.
The scene unfolding in our bathroom stopped me in my tracks and the phrase, ‘Destroying the evidence,’ popped into my head momentarily. Then I registered what was going on. My husband, half dressed, and wearing shoulder-length industrial-duty protective gloves, was leaning over a bath filled with reddened water, in which he was washing a large blood-spattered plastic sheet. A half dozen other plastic bags and sheets, already washed, were hanging around the room.
‘Ah,’ I thought, realising what was going on. My husband and a friend had been on a reindeer hunt the previous days and had returned successfully with three deer. He was washing the plastic sheets and bags they’d used to lay the deer on while they butchered it in the field and to wrap the meat in when they carried it off the mountain.
The friend who’d helped him on the hunt is Greenlandic – a sophisticated, modern Greenlandic girl who would seem as much at home on the high street of any European capital as trekking across rainy mountains stalking reindeer. At the outset of the hunt, she turned up in what appeared to be designer outdoor clothes and with a rucksack that was more fashionable day bag than receptacle for carrying slabs of butchered meat. My husband wondered how she would fare but, as it turned out, he had nothing to be concerned about.
Despite having never shot a reindeer before, she proved particularly adept at spotting and stalking them. The first, she spotted late in the evening as the sun was setting, when they were not planning on starting the hunt. But taking the opportunity, my husband shot and killed it. The two stood over it in the fading light, aware they had now to race to butcher it before the light was gone.
“I’ll have to go back to the tent for the knives,” said my husband, upon which our friend produced something not much bigger than a paring knife.
“I can start on it,” she said, but having not butchered a deer before asked, “What should I do?”
He looked dubiously at the knife but replied, “OK, cut off its head and legs.”
She seemed to hesitate, looking wide-eyed at the beast lying before her, as my husband marched off to retrieve the butchering knives. On his return, he found her wrist-deep in bloody flesh, making considerable progress with decapitating the deer.
The last surprising episode related to this particular reindeer hunt was on the lead up to my husband’s birthday. I had arranged a surprise party at our house. But he had also arranged on the same day, with the same Greenlandic friend, to butcher the three deer on our kitchen table. A plastic sheet was draped over the table and on it lay slabs of meat. As they progressed with the butchering, each with a rib cage or a hind quarters, a pile of meat slowly accumulated between them. But as the afternoon wore on, and the impending arrival of guests approached, there remained a lot of meat yet to butcher. When the guests finally burst up the stairs singing ‘Happy Birthday‘, it was to a scene of dismembered meat and knife-wielding butchers. But a few short and surprised moments later, everyone pitched in to finish the job, cutting, mincing, and vacuum-sealing slabs of meat. In no time, the freezer was packed tight with meat and one of the guests was sweeping up bone fragments and removing errant bits of meat from the floor so the party could begin.
