Reindeer hunting season is upon us again. Hunting is an integral part of life in Greenland. Gun ownership is high, but gun violence is not. In Greenland, a gun is a tool, and one of its main uses is to kill reindeer.
This is a great book for those of us who didn’t grow up learning to hunt. Not only does it tell you how to cook reindeer, but first it tells you how to hunt it, butcher it, and carry it home. It comes with rather gruesome instructional photographs for every stage of the process. I won’t burden you with them.
Friends used the book for dealing with their first kill. I love to imagine the scene of the two of them on a mountain side, one sitting with a large knife over the dead animal and the other flicking to the appropriate page and reading the instructions aloud. Once they got the beast home, the guys were joined by their wives for the second phase of the butchering. The reindeer was flung lifeless onto a tarpaulin covering the dining table in the middle of the living room. The two enthusiastic hunters were poised with butchering knives, and now the wives – one of them vegetarian – read from the book.
Ah, Greenland, always so generous with these wonderful, weird images of life.
